Right now, I’m sitting in an upright position on the floor, with my legs at about a 60° angle, my knees straight, and I’m trying to lean my body forward as I speak into my phone and doing voice to text for this post. I’m not very flexible and to do this I actually have to arch my back to keep me from falling backwards. For me flexibility in my hips and hamstrings has always been a major issue resulting in at the very least daily discomfort, and often pain in my lower back. And even though I know that stretching is extremely important, in my mind the discomfort of stretching sits on the pain continuum rather than on the discomfort continuum. I hate it. But at my age it’s a choice of doing it or losing even more flexibility and suffering more pain in my later years. So here I am, stretching the very muscles I hate to stretch, after warming up with some cardio on the treadmill for 20 minutes.

I was thinking about my distaste for physical stretching and flexibility and it made me wonder, where else in my life am I inflexible? Where else do I need to stretch? I can think of a few patterns in my communication that are ineffective. But I also think I’m blind to the areas I probably need to stretch more. Unlike my back pain that tells me I must physically stretch, the pain points in other areas of my life aren’t big enough to make me see them.

I think human nature makes us more likely to get defensive about our more inflexible areas of our personality, rather than openly seeing them as areas to stretch and grow. It hurts to admit our non-physical flaws, flaws we can’t see. But these flaws that we hide from ourselves, and get defensive about, are the flaws where we probably need to stretch ourselves the most.

What are the pain points that you experience? Are you stretching yourself in those areas?