Right Arm Pain Diagnosis (short)

LuLu follows a burning right-arm sensation during a bus departure and reads it as immediate feedback on leadership, attention, and her way of acting in the world.

The Body Is Communicating

LuLu: This one is about the different ways the body is communicating to us in every moment—starting to realise that it is intelligent communication, and how to respond to it.

Today, Max and I are leaving Italy and on a bus to Germany. I’ve been on and off experiencing pain in the right shoulder and arm of my body.

The right side is the masculine side, and the shoulder and arm are sort of how we act in the world. It’s also how we are leading and how we are executing in life.

The hand is literally the place that we act and how we interface with the physical world.

Missing What Was Already There

LuLu: We got to the bus station on time and were waiting for our bus. The company we were busing with is a specific colour, so I was looking for that specific colour of bus.

I checked two of the buses that were there that were that colour, and I was like, “Oh fuck, this isn’t it. Okay, so I guess the bus is late.”

We were just waiting, and my right arm and shoulder started fucking burning—this nerve that goes down from my neck to my back. It was burning and burning.

And I was like, “Fuck.” I was also kind of frustrated. There was a tendency in me to want to blame something outside of me for that pain.

Anyways, long story short, the bus we had been waiting for was there the whole time. It was just a different colour, and it had a sticker on it to indicate the company.

A Call to Lead

LuLu: That pain—what it was telling me—was: “You aren’t leading correctly.”

You aren’t in the proper state and mode that a leader is supposed to be in, where they’re hyper-conscious of everything around them, hyper-conscious of their goal, and making sure that everything is assembled and ready to be on mission.

I was just kind of being a follower in that moment. I was being subservient to what was happening—what seemed to be happening—around me, rather than doing everything I could to make sure that we got on the bus.

And we almost missed it. It just happened that the driver actually waited for us for ten extra minutes to give us a chance to find the bus.

That’s one of the ways the body is speaking to us moment by moment. It becomes so valuable to listen to the intelligence of the body and be like:

“Where is it in my body?”“What does that mean?”“What is it saying?”

And to be able to live more intelligently from that place.