From Pain To Power With Alec Kassin

8 Aug , 2025 podcasts

 

Alec Kassin’s cycling career was cut short by his ruptured spinal disc. Despite his struggle with chronic pain, he did not let his diagnosis define his life. He joins Katherine Twells to share how he reframed his thinking around pain through his powerful mind-body connection. Now a chronic pain coach, he explains how mindfulness, visualizations, and trauma-informed care can help you achieve your biggest comeback and enjoy a pain-free life. Alec also talks about the right way to handle our inner critic to boost self-esteem and treat ourselves with more compassion, joy, and gratefulness.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

From Pain To Power With Alec Kassin

How The Mind-Body Connection Is Changing Lives And Redefining Recovery

I don’t think there is any one of us who has not either personally experienced or known someone who has dealt with chronic pain. Our bodies are truly amazing and resilient. Yet, pain is a part of our experience. My guest has a life story that put him on the path of leading in this space. He is a very wise guide for so many who have lives impacted by chronic pain.

Alec Kassin was a semi-pro cyclist diagnosed with a ruptured spinal disc at the age of 18eighteen. Over the course of two years, severe back pain ended his cycling career, pulled him out of college, and left him partially bedridden on strong painkillers with a very uncertain future. From that, he became an injury comeback coach. He learned from his own experience how the mind-body connection is so much more powerful than we know.

He trained with renowned chronic pain specialists, sports medicine physicians, and psychologists from Cedars-Sinai Michigan State and Wayne State. He has worked with Kona triathletes, state champion cyclists, marathon runners, actors, American ninja warriors, and those who want to enjoy movement again and get back to their favorite activities in the face of severe injury and persistent pain. We are beginning to unlock the powers of the mind and how neuroplasticity can change the way we think and feel.

Seeing so many people who thought they’d never recover make amazing comebacks has revealed to Alec an unshakeable truth. Your biggest setback can become your greatest comeback. In all the conversations I’ve had, I see this over and over again. The challenges in our lives, whether they’re mental, emotional, or physical, can show us the way to a stronger self, to the power that we have within us. I met Alec while working on a book project, and I can share that the passion he has for his work is so inspiring and is making a meaningful impact in the lives of others. Without further delay, please enjoy the conversation with a remarkable coach and friend, Alec Kassin.

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Alec, thank you so much for taking the time. It is always such a joy to talk with you ever since we met. I love this topic so much, and I know it’s going to be of service to everyone who reads the conversation. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me on, Kathy. It’s a joy to be here. Thank you for the platform you’ve been able to provide me and for believing in my work. I’m excited to be here with you.

It’s a beautiful thing when we can get into a conversation about things that can be of service to people and help them because we all need a little help getting through this journey called life. We do that together. I know this is going to be one of those conversations. Let’s go ahead and dive in. I will have shared your bio before the conversation, so our readers know a little bit about who you are. You are doing such important work in the world around chronic pain. I don’t know anyone, including myself, and we’ll probably get into it, who hasn’t dealt with that in their life, so it’s a powerful, important conversation.

Alec Kassin’s Career Journey

Let’s go back all the way up to the beginning. I always kick these conversations off with a little bit of the origin story because I do believe our childhood and the things that happened to us when we were young tend to shape where we end up. For you, there was that, but also a plot twist that was a big part of you getting into this work. Let’s start with who Alec was in the early days.

 

Let’s wind the clock back all the way to the early ‘90s, 1992, when I was born. Outing myself with my age.

You’re making me feel a little old. I’m not going to do the math. It’s all good.

I was born in the Bay Area in California. I’m the son of a librarian and a musician, and I’m an only child. I also grew up not having many people my age around in my immediate vicinity. My only two first cousins are on the East Coast, and they’re ten years younger than I am. I found a way to amuse myself. I was one of those babies who was born in the fall, so I had a chance to either be held back a year or go in early and be the youngest kid in my grade. My parents were like, “We’ll throw him in the deep end. He’ll be the youngest kid in his grade.”

I share that because, for better or for worse, that was important in how I saw myself in the world. I was 1 of the youngest and 1 of the smallest boys in my class. I also had a ton of rambunctious energy. I was always getting in trouble with teachers. I was climbing on desks and doing things that kids “shouldn’t be doing”. I had all this energy.

Talking about the things in childhood that shaped us, I always felt that I had a chip on my shoulder because I was younger, because I was smaller, and because I was maybe a more sensitive male. That is something that I felt wasn’t something that I wanted to change, push away, and not have to deal with, but it ended up being a blessing later in life, those qualities and that experience.

I do think everything serves us. There are reasons behind it all. The experience you’re talking about was similar to mine. I was a fall baby and started earlier in school. My issue, more in middle school, was that I was too tall. The girls want to be small, and the boys want to be bigger. I don’t think that school is designed well for boys. Being a mom of two boys, there is fundamental energy and creativity. Boys were meant to explore, play, hunt, fish, and do. We have boys sit in a seat, be quiet, and listen. No wonder it’s such a tough dynamic.

I would’ve loved more playtime, and I got a lot of that. I amuse myself. It’s a difficult dynamic. I didn’t see the traits that I had as a male being very valuable until I started mountain biking when I was in high school. Being younger and smaller in cycling is an advantage. I grew up being a baseball player. I wanted to be like Barry Bonds. If you could see me, for context, I was under 5 feet and under 100 pounds when I went into high school. I wasn’t going to be Barry Bonds if I were going to play baseball.

In this work, we talk about emotions and authenticity versus attachment as a kid. As Gabor Maté says, we’re always optimizing between being authentic, sharing the emotions that are coming through, sharing our truth, and optimizing for survival or attachment. Being adventurous, loud, and boisterous, that wasn’t always respected or liked in the circles that I was in. Maybe you can relate as a mom of two boys. I learned a lot of things about what was safe to express and what wasn’t safe to express, or what I had to hold down through that experience.

We are always living between the tension of our true, authentic, wild selves and what society would have us be. Being a parent, when you watch little kids who are so free and to themselves, and I don’t even mean in the school environment, but out in the world on the playground and doing whatever, they’re building and laughing. They feel their emotions. They cry when they cry. They laugh. They are super authentic.

You watch as children get older and enter into, “Am I accepted? Do I belong?” All that internal dialogue starts to kick in, and you see them armor up. You see them morph into what society wants them to be. We’ve all gone through it. We have to spend the rest of our adult lives becoming our wild selves again, like getting all the conditioning out and learning who we truly are. It’s this crazy process of returning to the essence of who we were as little kids.

We think people will only love us if we achieve or hold certain emotions down. But a lot of those things we do not pick up do not represent who we are, but a loss of who we are. Share on X

Well said. There’s a quote from Mark Twain. “Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.” I think that’s so true. It’s like you said. We have all this conditioning that we think is ourselves. We think that’s our authentic self. We think we’re perfectionists. We think people only love us if we achieve, or we have to hold certain emotions down. Those traits and a lot of the things that we pick up don’t represent who we are, but a loss of who we are. Back in high school, when I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to succeed academically and especially athletically on the bike, the stuff that I was pushing down and that inauthenticity came back to bite me.

Becoming A Chronic Pain Coach

It does for all of us, because that is part of our journey. Much of what you’re talking about with our belief systems, what we decide and who we decide we are, is very connected to the work you do. We’re going to get more into that mind-body connection as it relates to pain. It is a conversation about the power of our mind and how we think. Let’s fast-forward in your life. You’re a cyclist. You’re finding your groove with that. What happens that launches you into the work that you do?

When I started out cycling, I was doing both baseball and mountain biking. My high school had a mountain bike team. In Northern California, you have those things. There’s a hill climb time trial that the team does at the beginning of every year. It’s maybe a 15 to 20-minute ride up a mountain. You time yourself at the beginning of the year and see how you do, and then you time yourself at the end of the year and see your improvement.

When I started my freshman year, I didn’t even make it to the top of the climb. You’re supposed to get a time. I didn’t even have a time. I didn’t even make it. From there, I steadily improved. I put the time in to the point where by my senior year, I was the highest point scorer on our state championship winning team. I had given up baseball. I had leaned into cycling, and cycling became my identity. I became somebody who was seen as, “He’s the guy on the mountain bike team. He does this weird sport that not many other people do.” It was my way to, on one hand, express my authenticity. I deeply enjoyed it. Also, it was a way for me to stand out right, be unique, and be seen in a certain light that I enjoyed.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college, and I am on a top US development team that ended up producing national and even world champions. I was going to college, but as I told my parents, my priorities were cycling, school, and everything else. It was in that order. I was out on a training ride one day. It was ten days before I was going to do a race that Lance Armstrong had won two years prior. It wasn’t a big race like the Tour de France. It was a local race, but he had won it nevertheless.

It was the first time that I was going to be tested against professionals. I had moved up into this new category of racing, semi-pro. Ten days before that race, I was out on this training ride, riding along out of the saddle. All of a sudden, I felt this lightning bolt of pain in my lower back. It was as if somebody was twisting my spine. It was completely locked up. I was like, “That’s weird. This has never happened to me before.” The pain was so bad that I couldn’t bend over. I couldn’t hinge at my hips in order to sit on my bike seat. I had to be straight up and down, pedaling home the rest of the ride.

I saw a chiropractor, and they said, “Don’t worry. In two weeks, you’re going to be back on top.” I followed the program for two weeks, and I wasn’t getting any better. Two weeks turned to three, four, five, and six. I was trying to suffer through races. Despite all the interventions, such as ice, heat, physical therapy, and chiropractic adjustments, I wasn’t getting better. Eventually, I had to end my season.

Going back to college, my focus started to shift from, “I can’t sit in a seat in a lecture, let alone ride my bike.” Pain was following me from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed. Eventually, it culminated in being diagnosed with a ruptured spinal disc L4-L5 and a herniated L5-S1. My spine doctor said, “This is probably what’s causing your pain. You might get better, or you might not. We’ll do conservative treatment. We’ll give it a shot.”

I was at my lowest point. I was out of college for over a year. I was depressed. I was mostly in bed or eating my meals standing up. I was on painkillers and even had suicidal thoughts. I was unsure how or if I was going to get better. It was a scary prospect for an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old at the time. You do a lot of soul searching and thinking when you’re in a place of pain or being debilitated. Those conditions, which at the time, I would’ve given anything to make go away, ended up being the fuel and the reason for where I am.

I can’t even imagine. It must have been a nightmare. You hear the saying, “You have nothing if you don’t have your health.” If you can’t get through the day without pain, you’re going to have thoughts like, “Is this the rest of my life, feeling this way?” For anyone tuning in, we’ve probably all been through bouts of being very sick or having an injury that took us out for a little while. It’s hard enough when it’s a period of time. When you don’t know if there’s going to be an end date, that is a scary proposition. I’m sure that for people tuning in, some of them are living something like that.

You do not have to be perfect to be pain-free. Share on X

I’m so glad you called that out, because if you are experiencing chronic pain or chronic symptoms, there is a very good chance that you faced that same uncertainty that I was talking about and that fear of, “Is this going to get any better?” When I was 18 and 19, I felt, “I’m much too young for this to be happening.” There are people that I see who are younger than I was who have debilitating symptoms. The thing that is so scary is that we don’t have a very good treatment model for this. It’s about management.

In the days when I was hating the world and I was laid up in bed, I was thinking, “I was always the guy who was foam rolling, who was stretching, who was eating well, and who was taking care of himself. Why did this happen to me? I have teammates who never take care of their bodies in the same way that I did, and yet here I am. I’ve done everything right, and yet here I am, laid up in bed. Why is that the case?” Sometimes, the people who work the hardest to take care of themselves end up in these situations for reasons that we’re going to go into later. It’s a tough place to be in at any age.

Isn’t it a crazy irony? You hear about these people in impeccable condition who are runners, and they have a heart attack. We probably all know people who eat terribly, don’t exercise, and do whatever, and they live to be 95. You’re like, “Wait a minute.” You’d like to think that cause and effect is perfectly scientific, like you do X, and you’re going to get Y, but there are too many variables in the world. We’re going to unpack this whole mind-body dynamic. This whole experience, I know, pushed you into learning about how to have a different relationship with pain over the long-term. Is there a stat on how many people out there have chronic pain?

Yeah. That’s a great question. The figure is anywhere from 1 billion to 1.5 billion people worldwide. Chronic pain in the United States affects roughly half of all adults, about 45%. It’s a more common issue than cancer, diabetes, and heart disease combined. It’s pretty incredible. High-impact chronic pain, which is severe to the point where you’re not able to work or your life is very limited, affects about 7% to 8% of American adults. It’s a huge issue. It’s one that we, by and large, haven’t had a good answer for. It’s this paradox of why medical science is getting better, and yet chronic pain and chronic symptoms are getting worse. They’re getting more prevalent and costing more, which we’ll get into.

Connection Between Lifestyle And Chronic Pain

You already referenced Gabor Maté. For anyone tuning in who isn’t familiar with him, is he a psychotherapist? I don’t know his full resume, but I know he deals a lot in addiction and childhood trauma. I know he said at one point, “Tell me your childhood and I’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with you.” He believes the link between whatever has happened to us in our lives and the pain or whatever disease is manifesting in the body is unbelievably strong.

This is not a black and white situation. As we get into all the dynamics of chronic pain, sometimes, there’s a physical cause, and there are no symptoms. Other times, there isn’t a physical cause that they can find. Yet, you’re having symptoms. There are all these dynamics going on. Can you share a little bit more about even some of the dynamics of how chronic pain is not one single equation but many different scenarios?

Absolutely. I’ll relate this back to my story, but a common thing that you will hear when it comes to pain is the biopsychosocial model. Bio, meaning the structure of the body. Psycho, your psychology, which is your mind. For social, what is your environment like? Often, when it comes to pain, the psycho and the social are discarded, and we just look at the bio. We look at the body when it’s a much more complex picture.

When I had my back pain, being the perfectionist that I was, I would do everything that I could in order to follow the doctor’s recommendations to the T. If they said to ice, I would ice. If they said to do a heat pack, I would heat. If they told me to be horizontal, I would do that. If they said, “Do these exercises,” I’d be like, “Yes, sir.” It never made sense to me.

The days when I did all of that when I should have been feeling better were sometimes the days when I was feeling worse compared to when I would maybe do the things they said not to do, like to be sitting too long or to be too active. It made me feel better on those days, and I didn’t know why that was. I tried all sorts of physical treatments, all believing that I needed to fix my back in order to get better because I had been diagnosed with a ruptured spinal disc. That’s what’s causing my pain. An eighteen-year-old with this, it was no duh.

The weird thing is, if you took an MRI of twenty-somethings who had no back pain at all and looked to see if they had a spinal abnormality, you’d see a pretty high percentage of them. Something around 20% to 30% of them would have a structural abnormality like me and have no pain. That figure rises as you get older. Overall, about 2/3 or 64% of American adults who have no history of back pain have a bulging or a herniated disc. If you’re reading this, that’s not a cause for concern. It is a cause to start to understand that not all “abnormalities” are injuries and that every single MRI that we get is compared to what is a “perfect” body. You don’t have to be perfect to be pain-free.

 

My life completely changed when I read a book by an NYU doctor. His name is Dr. John Sarno. He talked about how these studies that show conventional treatments like medication, ultrasound, or physical therapy when it comes to chronic back pain don’t help. There’s not a lot of evidence that supports these treatments being used. The evidence that does exist is very scant. It’s not on firm ground.

He talked about the link between stress and emotions, the stuff that Gabor Maté talks about, trauma in childhood, and chronic pain. I remember my mom gave me that book. It took me a year to read it because I was like, “Mom, I have a ruptured spinal disc. Reading this book about my mind isn’t going to help that.” Sure enough, moms are right most of the time, if not all the time. It was a dramatic reconceptualization of pain. In reading that book, I started to understand how the pressure that I was putting on myself, all of the emotions that I had in my childhood history, and how I saw myself were all contributing to why my pain started and what was perpetuating it.

That is so amazing. Isn’t it interesting, too, how things come to us through different synchronicities and how your mom knew to give you that book? What a shift. Look at the work you’re doing. That’s so cool. I had a brush with a very difficult illness at 29, which is the genesis of much of my work. That’s when I started reading all about mind-body as well. It is fascinating when you start getting into how our brain works and the neuroplasticity of all of it. It is truly remarkable.

I’m a little bit older than you. People my age start to think, “I’m at that age. Therefore, I’m going to start feeling this way because that’s what happens.” We talk ourselves into certain conditions versus you see those occasional 95-year-old women on the dance floor on Instagram, and you’re like, “Wait a minute.” It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s so much about our belief system.

It’s interesting because as I’ve gotten older, too, I start to think, “Is my body going to break down on me?” When I started doing this work in my late twenties, if I was interacting with somebody who was older than me, it was like, “Have I not experienced life in the same way that they have? Am I wrong on all this stuff?” I’ve seen incredible recoveries from people in this work.

I saw a woman who was in her late 50s, early 60s. She had a hip replacement because she had chronic groin pain. It went on for over a year. She tried everything and got the hip replacement as a last-ditch effort, and then the pain came back a month later. She was doing her grocery shopping on an electric scooter and was unable to visit her family, who lived an international flight away. Within 3 weeks, she went from not being able to walk 30 steps to walking 13,000 steps pain-free and felt well enough that summer, a few months later, to fly to visit her family for the first time in two years. She’s somebody who is eligible for social security. It’s not somebody who’s in their twenties like I was.

I say that because there is that idea that you’re going to get older and your body is going to break down. Some of the most exciting people in the field, the doctors, the physical therapists, and the coaches, are folks who are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies and doing this work. It’s remarkable. It has to do so much with our belief system.

Reframing Perspectives Around Chronic Pain

You take people on. I know you work with people. You shared the story of the woman who had hip pain. There are probably people who are like, “No way. How did that happen?” Without going into detail, what type of journey is that? How do we start reframing? There probably isn’t anyone reading this who wouldn’t love to be like, “I’m going to think my way out of this.” We’ve all heard, “I’m going to think differently.” All of a sudden, it can backfire into feeling a sense of shame or, “Why can’t I overcome this mentally?” Can you give us a little bit of an idea of the journey you take people on?

Absolutely. What I’ll say about thinking differently is that it is such a key component. When people hear that or when I heard that the first time, it was like, “I need to believe in myself or try harder.” There’s a limit to that. What we’re talking about is reconceptualizing where your pain is actually coming from. In my case, I read this book by an NYU physician. Within a couple of weeks, I noticed my back pain was significantly better. This is after two years of physical therapy, injections, chiropractor, acupuncture, and all the things. I was thinking, “This is incredible.”

That came about because his message was that your brain can create pain. In fact, all pain is created in the brain, whether in response to a physical injury or because of a conditioning process. If you didn’t have a brain, you wouldn’t be able to generate pain. The opposite is also true. With phantom limb pain, if you have an amputation, there’s a chance that you will still feel pain in that amputated limb. That’s your brain.

For me, the breakthrough happened when I started to recognize or even be open to the idea that my pain was not due to this ruptured spinal disc that I had, but was due to my brain, for whatever reason. It sounds crazy, but it was 100% true because I’ve been pain-free and unrestricted for thirteen years, and yet, sitting here with you, I still have the same ruptured spinal disc. It is unchanged on my MRI, and yet I have had no pain, completely unrestricted.

 

The process first starts with ruling out serious structural issues. In my world, that’s infections, tumors, fractures, and things like that. There are a lot of assessments out there that you can do to understand whether or not your symptoms are generated by your brain, purely from that, or whether a structural abnormality is involved in it. Being able to make that shift and say, “Wait a minute. Let me see if my brain is involved in creating my pain,” is a huge light bulb moment. Once you recognize that your brain is contributing to your pain, it makes all of these physical activities a lot safer.

For example, with my back, I was afraid of sitting. I’m thinking, I’m doing damage to myself if I’m sitting too long because I have more pain. I got to the point where I recognized that my pain was generated by my brain, and that nothing was “wrong” with my back. Did it have a ruptured spinal disc? Yes. Was that causing my pain? No. It allowed me to push the envelope in terms of physical activity without fear of doing damage to my body. That is what helped decrease the level of fear and worry and start to get my life back.

How did you make the connection of, “I have this ruptured disc, but it’s not causing my pain.” It seems like you would still be like, “That’s causing it, but how do I block that or change it?” It sounds like you adopted a belief that it was not the cause of the pain. You talked about the fact that it comes from our brain.

It was adopting a belief, but it was also unlearning, going back to that Mark Twain quote that we were sharing that education consists mostly in what we have unlearned. It was unlearning these ideas that I had about my back and what I was capable of. If you think about the injuries that we have, there might be a match that lights something, whether a fall or you’re out on a ride or a run, or something happens and you have pain.

If you think about it, when it comes to chronic symptoms, symptoms that persist, that process has been building for a long time. Maybe when you were growing up, you had a parent who had a bad back or you would see people who would talk about how their backs hurt, wearing back braces, or using Bengay. You see Shaquille O’Neal on TV advertising Bengay, Icy Hot, or whatever it is. There’s this idea that permeates our society that our bodies are weak. That happens in so many different ways.

For example, I was at the grocery store. There was a sign that said, “Please take the items out of your own basket and put them on the conveyor belt because we want to reduce repetitive stress injuries for our checkout people.” We can debate whether or not that’s something that is necessary, but think of the fear that is inspired in somebody. If they start a job and they say, “If I’m doing the same motion day after day, I’m afraid of developing RSI or developing some pain.”

What we resist, persists, and what we fear, we attract. That can be the fuel of a nocebo cycle or a pain cycle. All that is to say, there is a way that doctors are able to differentiate between pain that is entirely brain-generated and when there is a structural issue that needs to be addressed or managed. I’m happy to go into that as well.

Personality Types Most Susceptible To Chronic Pain

I would love to go into that, but a couple of things on what you said. You come back again and again to what we believe. You had mentioned earlier in the conversation about how if you were to look at everybody’s body or spinal cord, and there’s a ton of people with structural issues who have no symptoms, then you have people who have issues and symptoms, and then there are probably another set of people that have no structural and they also have symptoms. Is there a certain quality or personality type that tends to be the one that creates chronic pain within their bodies?

I’ll answer that, but I want to touch on one thing beforehand. It’s not just me saying this. There is a whole lot of scientific evidence behind this. The Boulder back pain study, as it’s known, came out in 2021. They took a group of people who had an average duration of back pain of nine years. On average, they had been in pain for nine years. They had tried all the treatments. At the end of 4 weeks doing pain reprocessing therapy, retraining the brain out of pain, 2/3 of those people were pain-free or nearly pain-free. Those results were held at the end of the year. Two-thirds of people, average duration of nine years, were pain-free.

Your brain can create pain. If you did not have a brain, you would never generate pain. Share on X

Your question about whether there is a certain personality type that is more susceptible to this, absolutely. A lot of the qualities that I saw in myself when I was younger, like perfectionistic, people-pleasing, low self-esteem, warrior, catastrophizer, tending to hold in certain thoughts and feelings, needing to put a mask out into the world, all of these are traits that can create a lot of fear, pressure, and tension internally and are liable to create the conditions for chronic pain and other symptoms. It’s the same with Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACEs if you grew up in a childhood where you suffered abuse or you didn’t feel safe.

The brain is always trying to protect us. That’s its job. It’s using all the information that we have from the past in order to project the future. If you had a past in certain conditions that were fear-based, where you didn’t feel safe, your brain is going to remember that. Even when there is no actual threat currently, it will still give you that thought about, “Be careful about doing this thing because this might go wrong.”The same thing happens with pain as well. The brain uses pain as a protective mechanism. All that is to say, these are not foregone conclusions that these types of people end up with this pain. It can also be unlearned, but that’s generally what we’ve seen.

How The Brain Retaining Process Works

It’s so interesting. We talk about this a lot in the Compassion Lab. This well-intended biological mechanism of protection that we learn very young about how to adapt and how to keep us safe. As we get older in life, there are safety mechanisms working in our lives that are creating dysregulation. Much of it is for us to start to understand and create self-awareness of what we’re believing, what we’re storing in our bodies, and how to release that.

The personality type you described, I certainly see a lot of myself in that. I know a lot of people in my circle who are like that. You mentioned 45% in the US are dealing with this. There are probably a whole lot of people who fit that. We’re dancing around the edges without going into a full-on session in this conversation, but what would you tell someone like that who sees themselves in that description and is like, “I am dysregulated. I am storing all of this.” How does this brain retraining process work?

For a full session, we’ll save that for another episode. I had all of those personality traits as well. I was putting so much pressure on myself in order to win races, to feel like I was enough, to stand out, and to be the underdog who succeeds, and I wasn’t feeling very good about myself. I didn’t feel safe. The same way that the brain is trying to protect us from external thoughts, our brain is also trying to protect us from what’s happening internally, like the emotions that we’re stuffing down and those unthinkable thoughts that everybody thinks. These are universal.

Often, what I will do with people is I will help them come to a conclusion that their brain might be contributing to their chronic pain. They’ll start to see it. They’ll start to see things where they’re like, “I was angry and frustrated with this person, and my pain got worse.” When you tune into it, you see the pattern. The medical system has so many ways to tell us that something is wrong with us, that we are broken, either physically, mentally, or spiritually. The biggest thing that I try to hammer home with the clients that I work with is that there is nothing about you that you need to fix. The only thing you need to fix is your belief that you need to be fixed.

It can be so easy to fall into the trap of, “My nervous system is dysregulated. I need to regulate it. I need to do more.” It’s feeding this beast of not okayness and not enoughness. It is recognizing you’re safe as you are. Your brain is trying to protect you from things that were threatening when you were younger, when this was maybe necessary, so you didn’t get in trouble, so you didn’t get bullied, or so you made your way through the world. That situation is different now. You’re safe. There’s nothing wrong with you in any way, shape, or form. It’s a radical message, but it’s something that is the foundation of this work.

It’s a beautiful message and important to repeat. This is not about anything that you need to fix. It’s about changing the belief that you need to be fixed at all. We do grow up in environments of focus on lack, focus on the not enough, and focus on what you need to do differently and better. It’s one thing to want to grow and get better. There’s nothing wrong with that.

All of us are on a growth journey, for sure, but that doesn’t mean where we are isn’t exactly where we need to be. Sometimes, we take the joy out of the growth because we put this pressure on ourselves that we have to be something other than who we are or accelerate our learning to a different level based on the voices of other people in our lives, the voices in our head, and any of those things that might drive us forth.

Being honest and vulnerable for a moment, I worked for five years at LinkedIn. When I left in 2021, I was in this phase of personal development. I was trying all of these different things out. My philosophy was, “I’m going to try these things in order to help my clients.” I got into breathwork and cold exposure. I was going on meditation retreats. I tried psychedelics, somatic hands-on therapy, and all sorts of different things. They’ve all played a key role in my life, but at a certain point, I was recognizing, “I’m doing a lot of this stuff because there’s still something that I need to fix, like not being okay with where I am and not approving of myself where I am.”

There is nothing about you that you need to fix. The only thing you need to fix is your belief that you need to be fixed. Share on X

It was funny to see that old pattern that I had back when I was 18 and 19 and riding my bike. It’s like a new flavor of that pattern. It’s coming up to be healed. It is such a freeing idea when you recognize, “I don’t need to fix myself. I’m okay as I am. I don’t need to be perfect. I’m going to be safe, loved, and okay if things go “off the rails”.

It feels freeing even to hear you say it. There was an Instagram post one day where some guy came on and said, “How’s everyone doing out there?” He went on this whole list. He said, “Are you doing your breathwork, this therapy, your soul healing, and your 10,000 steps a day? Did you drink a liter of water?” It was 35 things. You’re like, “That is exactly how it feels sometimes. Can I get through the day and relax?”

It’s not that all those things in isolation aren’t good. We’re not trying to throw all of those modalities out. As a matter of fact, the good news is we’ve lived in, and we still do, a very pharmaceutical-based, like, “Take a pill. Fix what’s wrong.” We are seeing more and more, whether it’s acupuncture, chiropractic, red light therapies, and other modalities that are strengthening us, versus waiting until we’re ill. I love seeing some of that balance emerge more and more, which is cool. Let’s give everyone reading this conversation a minute to take a deep breath and say, “You are exactly where you need to be, and relax. It’s all going to be fine.”

Good addition. I have a little Post-It that I keep on my desk. It says two things. “I approve of myself. I believe in myself.”

We talk about self-compassion being the first step in the Compassion Lab. The choice of the word compassion was very mindful in that compassion is empathy for suffering and confusion. Being able to be compassionate with oneself is the first step. It’s very hard to do that with others if you can’t give yourself the grace to be uniquely human. That’s who we are. We’re very human.

It reminds me of a story. I remember in my early days at LinkedIn, I was in this cohort of fifteen incredible people. I still sometimes don’t know how I got selected for this. They were from all these top schools. We were not competing against each other, but we were measured against each other. I remember there was a meditation that was run at work. The instructor said, “Feel the compassion that you have for yourself.”

I remember that day sitting in this meditation hall at the LinkedIn office in San Francisco, feeling like generating self-compassion for myself was trying to scoop water out of a bone-dry well. There was no self-compassion there. It was this moment of reckoning, like, “I have not been treating myself the way that I want to be.”

I’m glad that you bring up self-compassion because it is a key part of the healing process for a lot of the clients that I work with and a lot of the people in this space. We’re so often conditioned to put pressure on ourselves, be hard on ourselves, or kick ourselves in the butt in order to get results. We’re not taught how to soothe ourselves and how to be okay with ourselves. For a lot of clients, it’s a breakthrough.

I had one triathlete that I worked with who had all this chronic pain. During the course of his recovery, he said one of the mantras that he had on his long runs that he would go on was, “I love you.” I remember him saying that to me in a session, and I was sitting and thinking, “I don’t know if I’ve ever said that to myself before. I love you.” It’s so cool that as we come home to ourselves, accept ourselves as we are, and provide love to ourselves, that is also often the recipe for resolving these symptoms. It’s treating ourselves with compassion. Self-compassion is such a key part of this recovery process. It’s all interrelated.

The reason that the work you do is so beautiful and important is that as we heal ourselves physically, mentally, spiritually, or any of that, that is how the world gets better. I get into so many conversations with people about the world and the stress that we feel. There’s a metric that they measure in uncertainty. It is almost double what it was during COVID. People are feeling a tremendous amount of uncertainty. What that does to the brain is it puts you in a state of dysregulation on an ongoing basis.

 

Get In Touch With Alec

What I would say to people who are feeling that sense of overwhelm and uncertainty in the world is to start up close. Start with each other. Start with compassion for self, care for self, and care for those around you. If everyone does that piece, then the whole world is going to get better. It is not any one of us trying to fix the world, but to do something close to home and make a difference there. How can people find you if they want to go deeper? Maybe they’ve got some chronic pain and they want to do some work with you. How do they find you?

If you are reading this and you have chronic pain, migraines, fibromyalgia, IBS, whiplash, long COVID, all sorts of things, the first thing that I want to share is that there is hope. People like you have recovered from all sorts of debilitating chronic conditions. On my website, PainFreeComeback.com, I have a free assessment that’s inspired by some of the best chronic pain physicians and doctors in this field. You can take it, and you can get a report that shows you how likely it is that you have neuroplastic symptoms. It will give you specific recommendations to start to explore this neuroplastic way of healing. Go to PainFreeComeback.com, and right on the homepage, there’s something there for you.

My website also has all sorts of different scientific studies, podcasts, books, films, and all sorts of healing resources that are available completely for free to help you. It’s hard to navigate this space as it is, and I try to make it as easy as possible. Go to PainFreeComeback.com. If you want to reach out to me directly, Alec@PainFreeComeback.com is my email address.

What I’ll finish saying is witnessing so many people with chronic symptoms who never believed that they would get their life back get their lives back and make amazing comebacks has left me with this deep belief that our biggest setbacks can turn into our greatest comebacks. That’s what I want to leave everybody who’s reading with.

That is so wonderfully said. I want to say thank you. You joined us in the lab. You’re coming back next month to talk about this. I am so grateful for what you’re bringing to us within the company and what you’re bringing to this conversation and to everybody that you work with. You are doing powerful things in the world, so thank you so much.

Thank you. I honestly cannot express how much gratitude I have for being invited, sharing this space, and having this platform. It’s new science. I’m still spreading my wings with this work, and I cannot underscore how grateful I am for your support. Thank you.

We’re going to have to continue this conversation. More to come.

Amen.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Alec Kassin
• Pain Free Comeback
• Alec@PainFreeComeback.com

 

About Alec Kassin

Alec Kassin is a certified breakthrough chronic pain coach, whose mission is to empower millions of people to be pain-free and live unrestricted lives. A former semi-professional cyclist, Alec suffered a ruptured spinal disc, which left him in constant pain, partially bedridden, on painkillers, and faced with the prospect of being in pain for the rest of his life. After trying every physical treatment he could find without success, he discovered a mind-body approach to pain elimination and became pain-free.

Now, as a coach, he helps chronic pain sufferers live a pain-free life. Alec’s teachings employ a mind-body approach that combines mindfulness, visualizations, trauma-informed care, and his own experience to empower individuals to take an active role in their healing. Alec draws on the experience of over a decade of mindfulness practice, numerous retreats, an apprenticeship from Scott Shute, LinkedIn’s Former Head of Mindfulness and Compassion Programs – and a brief flirtation with becoming a monk.

In addition to coaching, Alec is a Founding Partner of Changing Work, which advocates for conscious business principles in the world of work. Alec is a Certified Mindbody Syndrome Practitioner through the MindBodyFood Institute, and a certified OvidDx Neural Circuit Retraining Health Professional. Alec is a graduate of UC Berkeley, a former Mindfulness & Compassion Ambassador for LinkedIn, a graduate of Spirit Rock’s Living Dharma Program, and NYU’s Inner MBA Program.

 

 

Belief System, Conventional Treatments, Ruptured Disc, Safety Mechanisms, self-compassion, Structural Issues

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