If I sit on a coach and put my feet up on a coffee table and each day I add an extra half pound of weight onto my knees — a book, a couple magazines, a newspaper — at some point my knees will buckle and collapse. It has nothing to do with genetics or biochemical imbalance. It has to do with that part of my anatomy is crutching something that over time becomes too heavy. That something is the collective materials that I have continually added on to my knees.

When that collapse happens, there is significant injury, and that is when a person’s biochemistry reacts and responds to that injury in the form of significant pain.

If you only treat the pain, i.e. with pain killers and suppressants, without dealing with the underlying injury, the chance that the knee will heal and recover and be able to regain full functionality is exceptionally low. And there is a very high chance that the person may limp for the rest of their life.

Yes. We all carry stress. We carry different amounts of stress and we carry it in very different ways. Some people become conditioned to carry significant weight and can do so quite well. Yet if that weight continues to grow without relief, it is much more likely that the continual strain will cause problems.

I have used this analogy of collapsed and broken knees since shortly after the breakdown / spiritual awakening I endured in 1998.  In my case, the sources of that weight were abstract and not visible to most people. My breakout was a result of a moral injury that woke me up to my toxic enabling of dysfunctional systems that I had become conditioned to. That is why a phrase like “spiritual awakening” is quite appropriate for my type of experience.

My soul “woke up” to the toxic conditioning that had been building in my life over several years. Other people couldn’t see the accumulation of weight because the sources of the weights burying my soul were not physical, concrete objects. The weights were abstract. The weights were a combination of past trauma and dysfunctional, even abusive, systems around me. My coping mechanisms and learned behavior from past experiences allowed me to tolerate a significant amount of stress, yet I didn’t realize I was walking straight into a stress breakdown.