Interview with Sharada Devi
In this episode, we will uncover 3 keys:
- The personal struggles of those facing chronic pain.
- How individuals transitioned from chronic pain to healing.
- Rediscovering control and resilience in the face of chronic pain.
A Podcast Transcription
Sharada Devi – Chronic pain relief coach and the founder of Tools That Transform
Intro
Odiva Vasell: (00:00)
Hello phenomenal fempreneurs at Fe,preneur International! We are all about creating initiatives that support multicultural and multilingual fempreneurs to build and maintain their businesses so that they can have an impact in their communities. Today we have a special guest with us, talking about chronic pain. She is special because she coaches people for the relief of chronic pain. First of all, by defining it, and then she works on the spirit, the mind, and the body aspects of chronic pain. So, you’re going to really want to tune in for this interview and listen to the fabulous Sharada Devi.
Hello, everyone! Today I have a special treat for you. Miss Sharada Devi is here from Tools That Transform, and she is a wonderful expert and pain relief coach, which is something most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. But she will also tell you more about how she built her business and what it’s about right now. So please join me, and let’s enjoy meeting Miss Sharada.
Sharada Devi: (01:42)
Thank you, beautiful Odiva. I am so excited and pleased to be here with your audience. My name is Sharada, and I am a pain relief coach. I come by that honestly because chronic pain is something that I have lived with in both the emotional and the physical variety. It has two flavors, like all pain, and I learned how to be happy and healthy in my own body. I am here to support as many women as possible to learn how to be happy and healthy in their own body too.
Odiva Vasell: (02:19)
Hmm, fantastic! Can you tell us a little bit of how this got started? I know you’re a woman of many talents, and you’re an entrepreneur in different industries. How did this particular industry of pain, which is very special, how did you start in this?
The personal struggles of those facing chronic pain.
Sharada Devi: (02:39)
Yes, I got into the chronic pain world, honestly, my friend. I had chronic emotional pain. I come from a long line of folks who struggle with depression and anxiety, and those are both forms of chronic emotional pain. Both of my parents were lovely people, but they were plagued by these two forms of chronic pain. Despite their best efforts to not pass on those habits of mind to me, we learn from our families, good things and bad things, even if they’re not trying to teach them to us. I was already struggling with anxiety when I went to grade school. I was an anxious kid, and some days I would burst into tears on the way to school. By the time I got into Middle School, depression had added to the mix. In high school, I learned that not everyone had suicidal thoughts, but I did. By the time I was in my early 20s, depression and anxiety were really running my life. I was in big trouble emotionally. I had gone to music school on a scholarship because I was a pretty talented kid in high school, but I went to music school completely surrounded and swimming in a soup of fear and failure and lack of self-worth and low self-esteem and all those things that years of chronic emotional pain will give you. Then, a few years later, I learned about chronic physical pain. I was warming up for a dance class, and I had one foot on the ballet bar and one on the earth, pushing to the limit of my stretch. My hands slipped, and there was a weird sound that came out of my body that I’m not even sure I can describe, and pain shot from my left hip to my left foot. The other thing that happened that day, after I peeled myself off that ballet bar and did not go to class, but that day, my very smart brain learned how to create chronic emotional and physical pain because the emotional pain that I already struggled with melded with the physical pain, and they became one colossal chronic painful trauma. I needed a way out of that, so I did the traditional medical model. And this was the ’80s; we didn’t really know a lot about soft tissue. Turns out I had a soft tissue tear, and they didn’t really have much to offer me other than a lot of anti-inflammatories, which were not so nice on my stomach. And then a few years later, I had a doctor who I had seen one time, I think this was the first and only time, tell me that at 24 years old, under no certain circumstances, I would have chronic osteoarthritis. And at 24, I was not willing to go there. So I started looking for different solutions. Fortunately, the modern Neuroscience movement was born in 1988, and I started studying the brain and how the brain and the body work together 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They are constantly talking to each other, and I was fascinated. And that started me down the road of understanding that my brain created all my experiences—pleasant experiences and unpleasant experiences. These unpleasant experiences of depression and anxiety and this unpleasant pain that I had—if I could figure out how to use my brain properly, I could figure out how to make those things be less of a problem in my life. And that’s where I started. I started working on my own body.
Odiva Vasell: (06:51)
All right, and did you start immediately to notice that other people around you were going through the same thing? I’m guessing once you tuned into that, yeah.
Sharada Devi: (07:02)
Yeah, you know, I started passing on everything that I was doing and learning to my family and friends, whether or not they asked. Yeah, I’m an eternal child. If I find something really new and shiny and beautiful and wonderful, I want everybody to have some. And, you know, it took a process because our understanding of pain wasn’t very well; it certainly wasn’t what it is today in the ’80s. So I was trying to unravel all of these problems with the best science we had at the time, experimenting on my own body. Things that worked, I kept doing, and things that didn’t work, I just left behind because I didn’t have time. And once I started to find relief for myself, that’s when I really started to notice how other people struggle. I could go sit in a place like a mall and just watch people, and I could point out who was struggling with depression or anxiety. They show up in the world a certain way. People’s chronic physical problems, they’re usually much easier to see; they limp down the mallway. So when I started teaching young children—I taught science to young children for a decade—when I started teaching young children, then I started seeing how much young parents were struggling with emotional things. I know that because they struggled with their children, and their children struggled. And what I really got loud and clear was our lives are hard, whether you have children or not, and people need support. I started supporting parents.
Odiva Vasell: (08:55)
Wow, wow, that’s a huge need, yeah.
Sharada Devi: (09:00)
Yeah, you know, I taught after-school yoga classes, and parents were invited. I’ve had many parents seek me out to talk about a particular problem because I kind of got a reputation: “Yeah, she’ll talk to you about your problems, and she might have a snappy trick for you.” Right before the pandemic started, it became really clear to me how much people were struggling. At that point, I was well past my chronic depression and anxiety, and my hip—well, if I could stand up and do some fancy tricks, you would see that in my sixth decade, I don’t have a shred of osteoarthritis. I can sit easily.
Odiva Vasell: (09:48)
So yeah, so the doctor diagnosed you with osteoarthritis at age 24.
Sharada Devi: (09:55)
Before I even had it.
Odiva Vasell: (09:57)
Oh.
Sharada Devi: (09:58)
Before I complained about anything that would have gotten me arthritis. I mean, who thinks a 24-year-old could have arthritis? It’s possible, but yeah, no, I didn’t even have osteoarthritis. Unfortunately, at that time, physicians weren’t so aware of the power that they had with every word they spoke. They get training in medical school for that now.
Odiva Vasell: (10:25)
Oh, good.
Sharada Devi: (10:27)
Yeah, well, in the good medical schools, we’ll say yes, and I love Health Care. Half my family works in healthcare. One of my nephews is a doctor. In the ’80s, we just didn’t know.
Odiva Vasell: (10:40)
Yeah, I understand. When I hear about pain clinics and pain treatments and centers that are specifically built for chronic pain, I’m like, “Wow, that’s new,” because people have suffered for ages, and there is always the Band-Aid for it. There is always the, “Okay, these are your symptoms; let’s take away your symptoms.” And sometimes, I’ve had the experience myself, “Let’s just write a prescription for something. It may not be actually what you need, but give you that prescription quickly so that you can go away.”
Sharada Devi: (11:26)
Sure.
Odiva Vasell: (11:27)
And a number of times that I don’t even take what people have been prescribing to me because actually, my mom is an RN, so I know how medicine works, and certain things you don’t want to stop putting in your body if you don’t even have the actual illness or sickness yet because then your body becomes attuned to it. What do you think about that in chronic pain?
Sharada Devi: (11:52)
Well, first, you know, it might be helpful for your audience to tease out what we’re talking about with chronic pain. There are two major kinds of pain. We have acute pain; it’s what I call regular pain. You cut your finger, and it hurts—injury happened to the body, an illness happens to the body, and you have pain that is specific to that. Now, the cut heals, and that pain goes away; the illness resolves, and that pain goes away. This is what I call regular pain; this is how we all kind of understand pain. Chronic pain plays by different rules. It may start with an illness or an injury—my chronic hip pain started with an actual injury. But all injuries will heal, and pain should go away, and my pain did not go away; that’s chronic pain. And there are many names for chronic pain. My favorite name for chronic pain—and this is challenging for people to hear, so I’m going to say this very clearly—so my favorite name for chronic pain is brain pain. It is pain that your brain is creating without talking to the body, and it plays by different rules, and we have to treat it in different ways. This is a really—it’s not a new particularly understanding of pain; this idea, this information has been out there for well over 20 years. There is now a really strong group of physicians who understand chronic pain. They are the group of physicians who did the research that finally put fibromyalgia on the map. You know, when fibromyalgia first started, all the doctors just said, “That’s people who are crazy. There ain’t nothing wrong with them; they’re just crazy.” And now we understand that’s not at all what’s going on. And so this particular group of physicians, among them, are anesthesiologists, and one of the anesthesiologists I follow says it this way: “We do not have good drugs to treat pain.” And I think if we were unclear about that, recent events have made us all very clear about that. Pain, you know, acute pain, you have an injury, we can give you some anti-inflammatories, maybe a little novocaine, whatever you need, and give you some relief, and that will resolve. Chronic pain, you can take drugs all day long; it will not resolve chronic pain. It’s a different game. Yes, you deal with it differently.
Odiva Vasell: (14:54)
All right.
Sharada Devi: (14:55)
And you’re a very wise woman.
Odiva Vasell: (14:57)
And then you added another latitude because you talked about emotional pain and how your emotional pain and chronic pain melded together. That’s huge to have that awareness at such a young age as well.
Sharada Devi: (15:13)
Well, I don’t think I knew that. I know that that’s what happened now. At the time, I really just thought I was a mess. I thought I was kind of a hopeless broken mess, and I was going to limp around all my life, and I was never going to be the dancer that I wanted to be. And now I am pain-free, and I have normal moments of anxiety. I have normal moments of getting down, but they’re moments. They’re not my life. They’re not my all day, every day.
Odiva Vasell: (15:51)
Oh, I think a lot of people are going to be so grateful to hear you say out loud. Can you repeat that for us again?
Sharada Devi: (15:58)
Yes, when I was young and had chronic emotional and physical pain, I did not know that was what was going on. I thought I was broken. I thought I was a hopeless mess. I thought I was going to limp through my whole entire life and never do the things that I really wanted to do. And that’s not true. The great thing is there’s so much good news. If you have chronic pain, and this is where I’ll try to maintain my composure because I get so excited, there’s so much good news. Chronic pain is optional. You can teach your brain to stop creating chronic pain. We don’t want to unlearn acute pain; we need acute pain. If you are born without any ability to experience pain, you don’t need very long. But chronic pain is an entirely different animal, and we don’t need it, and it always has an emotional element to it.
Odiva Vasell: (17:09)
Unwelding all the emotional.
Sharada Devi: (17:14)
And when you untangle that stuff, then you get pain-free moments that turn into pain-free days and pain-free weeks and a pain-free lifetime. Yeah, it doesn’t mean that you never experience pain; it means that pain doesn’t make you feel hopeless and helpless and like you’ll never do the things in your life that you really want to do.
Odiva Vasell: (17:48)
Um.
Sharada Devi: (17:50)
There’s such good news.
Odiva Vasell: (17:51)
It is great news, and I’m gonna invite people to put that on repeat. Just to get that first step is the awareness, and how do you bring some clients, a new client that comes to you, are they usually that aware, or are they resistant?
Sharada Devi: (18:14)
You know, this isn’t still a cutting-edge idea, although it’s old, and there’s a lot of re-education. To say people are resistant, I think that most people that have chronic pain are not resistant. They’ve tried a lot of things; they’ll get in there and go to the mat with you, but they haven’t gotten the results they needed. And they do need to understand how the brain does it, and it’s really a learning process. But once you understand how the brain does it, then most people aren’t resistant. It may take a few little visits to get there, to get all the knowledge we need. But the thing that’s hardest for people with chronic pain to hear, and I’m going to say this carefully because I love you and I know you all, pain is created in your brain. The good news on that is you can teach your brain not to do that. And my dear friends, this does not mean that your pain is all in your head or that you’re crazy.
Odiva Vasell: (19:34)
Okay, yes, that’s what we want to differentiate from.
Sharada Devi: (19:36)
Your pain is real. All pain is real because acute pain is created in the brain too, just different rules. The two play by different rules, and one of them, those kinds of pain, keeps us alive, and the other kind of pain can suck our energy, suck our enthusiasm, and make us feel hopeless and broken.
Odiva Vasell: (19:59)
And what I like about your program is you teach more than just pain management. You teach people how to revitalize themselves and how to feel good about themselves in their body and balance their nerves and anxiety. Tell us a little bit about that as well.
How individuals transitioned from chronic pain to healing.
Sharada Devi: (20:18)
You know, the first thing that I think that we need as chronic pain sufferers is an experience of being comfortable in our own body because pain is a body thing. We always talk about it in bodily terms. It’s a pain in my ankle; it’s a pain in my low back; it’s a pain in my neck; it’s a pain in my stomach. Even the feeling words that we use are often bodily. And what we first need to do is learn to relax and become comfortable in our own body. So, I begin with the most rapid-acting techniques that bring calm to the body. And when you learn these tricks, they become part of your toolbox, which is why my company is called Tools That Transform. I am not committed to just one perspective on how to address chronic pain. I bring in all the tools that I can find that I experience as effective for folks. After you get calm in your body, after you get a little comfort, that takes the anxiety down, and then we can start to look at the things that trigger your chronic pain.
Odiva Vasell: (21:28)
I love that word toolkit because now I know that if I’m coming to you, it’s going to be personalized to what I need. You’re going to assess me and then kind of personalize it. It’s not like going to the clinic where it’s one size fits all. You’ve got pain in your back; all pain in the back is the same. Pain in your leg; all pain in the leg is the same. It’s personalized. I got it.
Sharada Devi: (21:53)
Yeah, yeah, and I’m a big anatomy nerd. One of the things that, oh, good, what are the tools that I used, yeah, um, was I became an expert in how the hip worked and all the muscles that make up the hip and all of the soft tissues. I love fascia; it’s one of my favorite organs of the body. I was a founding member of the British fascia hub; it’s a bunch of anatomy nerds, let me tell you, right anatomists. It’s really amazing, yes, amazing anatomists. And I become so when I’m working with a client, whatever their list of challenges are, I’m gonna spend a lot of time becoming an expert at that, and I’m going to give all of that knowledge to the person who’s struggling with that problem because that’s part of what they can use in their toolbox. You know, if you understand how the hip works and that if when you’re walking, you are not injuring it over and over again by normal walking, the first thing the doctors told me to do was stop moving, and I was a dancer and a biker, and I was young and active, and six weeks of doing nothing, well, that’s…
Odiva Vasell: (23:14)
Oh, that’s tragic.
Sharada Devi: (23:15)
Yeah, it didn’t go well. I was not a nice person. My best friend said, “You know what? I’ll be glad when you go back to your dance class because you’re not a nice person,” issues, right? So, um, we’re gonna be, I’m gonna become the expert, and I’m going to teach that to you so that you are the expert on what’s going on with your body because I believe knowledge is power, and if we don’t understand how it works, then every little twinge, every weird sensation can cause our fear and anxiety to go up, and that is not what a chronic pain sufferer needs. And we’re also going to do not only mindset reset work because we all come with some beliefs that are probably keeping our situation going, but most importantly, it’s the biological reset work, and that gets into emotional things. Chronic pain has an emotional component to it always, and it can come before the pain or after the pain. I came to my chronic pain with emotional challenges, and my chronic pain gave me similar.
Odiva Vasell: (24:22)
Oh, yeah.
Sharada Devi: (24:24)
We undo that; there’s a reset of the biology and the emotions of the body. And you know, this is what’s challenging for a lot of folks. Doctors don’t have time; they understand that there are emotional things going on here, but they don’t have time to deal with those deeper issues, and most people would have dealt with their issues already if they could by themselves, and what they really need is a good co-partner to work on their challenges with them, and that’s really what I do for my clients. I go to the mat with my clients; I do the work with them because quite honestly, this is how I live my life, but this is how you live a life that’s pain-free; you do calming practices every day.
Odiva Vasell: (25:13)
I was gonna ask you about that little image you have in the back where there’s, I think, a person doing yoga. Tell me what does that represent.
Rediscovering control and resilience in the face of chronic pain.
Sharada Devi: (25:24)
I have been on the yoga mat for 30 years. The first relief that I got, that I found shortly after I was told that I was going to have osteoarthritis, I met a young woman who was a yoga teacher, who went on to become an internationally acclaimed yogini, and I got on the yoga mat, and there I learned to move my body safely, and I learned to breathe. So when I say I go to the mat with my clients.
Odiva Vasell: (25:55)
Yeah.
Sharada Devi: (25:56)
At one level, I am referencing that yoga mat, which was so foundational. It was the first relief that I felt in my 26 years or something on the planet. And from there, I had enough energy to begin to look for the other tools that I needed to resolve my challenges so…
Odiva Vasell: (26:23)
That’s wonderful.
Sharada Devi: (26:24)
That yoga mat is a life raft.
Odiva Vasell: (26:29)
That is how you started, and I can see, anyone listening knows how passionate you are about this business. But tell me, what is it like being an entrepreneur in this particular field?
Sharada Devi: (26:43)
When you see the first moment where someone recognizes that there is a way out of this situation that I have been in and that there is someone who has more than 15 minutes to spend with me and who is going to be my partner on this journey, the relief is worth it all. And you know, when you’re doing, I believe that we all have special gifts, and when you’re doing that special thing, when you’re giving that gift to the world, you know what? Life is fun. I am excited to go to work every day because I work with these fabulous, amazing people.
Odiva Vasell: (27:34)
Yes!
Sharada Devi: (27:35)
And I am, you know, if I want to go to the beach and work from the beach, I just take my laptop and go. I can make a fancy background; I can make a doable background out of anything. And it’s really watching people take their own lives back because I’m not doing this for you. I do all the research for you, but resolving it happens inside your own body. You do that for you. And to see people do this for themselves and to watch them go from “I hate my life, my beautiful life with my fabulous career and my two beautiful children” to go from “I hate my life” to “My life is good, I’ve got my challenges, but my life is good,” that’s worth everything, yeah.
Odiva Vasell: (28:30)
What a gift! You are a gift to the world!
Sharada Devi: (28:35)
You’re so kind.
Odiva Vasell: (28:38)
Go ahead.
Sharada Devi: (28:39)
I’m in my sixth decade, and I only want to spend the time I… I want to spend the time I have left doing things that are meaningful. And this is meaningful. I firmly believe, and I think this is why I was able to find a solution for myself because there were no solutions when I was… when I was working this out in my own body, I was just piecemealing it together. Now there are groups and physicians who do this work, and so I have partners in my own process. But when I started doing this, I had no idea how much chronic pain actually cost me. I was grumpy; I was impatient. I thought I was just an impatient person.
Odiva Vasell: (29:30)
Okay.
Sharada Devi: (29:31)
There’s another thing I gave myself a hard time about. Guess what? When the pain resolved, I became much more patient.
Odiva Vasell: (29:39)
Oh yes, I can understand exactly what you’re talking about. That’s, and so what you’re doing right now is you’re actually giving the people the gift. I want to say the gift of their life back, but actually, you’re giving them a new life. It’s a rebirth of being able to be the person that you want to be rather than being trapped in this kind of almost physical cage of pain and emotional distress, which is a vicious cycle because once you’re in that, as you said, your best friend said, you’re not a very nice person. And so people take you for that, and then they walk away and leave you in that cycle of pain, and you have nowhere to go. You’re right. It’s such a beautiful gift. Now you got me passionate about it.
Sharada Devi: (30:32)
Oh, good. I’m glad you’ve got the book. And you know, I had one saving grace, and I don’t know where I got this, but I just 100% believed that I was supposed to be happy and healthy in my own body. Okay, I think this body is engineered brilliantly, and now knowing what I know about the brain and how it works, I can say that in spades. But I really believe that I was supposed to be happy and healthy in my own body, and I believe that everyone is supposed to be happy and healthy in their own body. Doesn’t mean that we all look the same or do the same things or even want the same things from our body, but whatever we want, this body is designed for us.
Odiva Vasell: (31:16)
Well, I’m going to repeat what you just said. Everybody, we are designed to be happy and healthy in our own bodies. So we have Sharada here, which is a super, super inspiration. If you’re listening to this and you’ve suffered with chronic pain, now you know what we’re talking about when we say chronic pain or depression and a combination of both. This is where you can go for help and healing because she is not just going to tell you, “Do this, do this, do this, do that.” She is going to go to the mat with you, and she is able. I love the fact that she’s able to do this on the beach or at home or wherever she chooses because being a female entrepreneur and designing your own online business that gives you the freedom to do that while still creating income. So, we have her as an inspiration in that respect as well, and this is why I love talking to ladies who are powerful, and, you know, the minute you look at Sharada and you listen to this interview, you know how powerful she is. So that energy that she’s generating is probably healing you right now in the mind and body. You were meant to be a beautiful person with a beautiful life, so…
Sharada Devi: (32:53)
You have everything built into your marvelous nervous system to live happy and healthy in your own body. Just learn to drive it.
Odiva Vasell: (33:03)
So, I want to thank you again for coming today and giving us the tip of a phenomenal iceberg, and I can’t wait to hear more about how you change lives in this world. Miss Sharada, you are phenomenal.
Sharada Devi: (33:22)
Thank you, my beautiful friend. And back at you. I believe that we all are really, really important at this time, and I know that your work is changing lives too. I believe that you and I and a whole bunch of our friends are up to good in the world, and I am delighted to be counted in your circle of friends.
Odiva Vasell: (33:44)
Thank you. And so, that’s it for today, and I will be putting the links for you to reach out to this lady and pass them on to anyone that might need it. Fempreneurs, the time is now. We are the rising tide for change in this world. Be inspired… be inspired. Bye.
Thank you all for joining me in this very important discussion about chronic pain and just finding out that there is hope for all sufferers of chronic pain, and this Sharada Devi is so passionate about this. And she has left us with a freebie as well as her website to contact her. So, I will be putting those links in the description box, and please do not hesitate to pass the word on to anyone you know who may be suffering because there is hope for us all to be relieved in our body, mind, and spirit. Bye for now.
Conclusion
This insightful conversation unveils the transformative journey from chronic pain to healing, emphasizing the power of resilience and the tools available for a pain-free life. For those grappling with pain, let this be a reminder that empowerment and relief are within reach. By sharing these stories of triumph over adversity, we hope to inspire a community of support, fostering a future where chronic pain is not an insurmountable obstacle but a challenge met with hope, understanding, and the knowledge that a brighter, pain-free life awaits.