How I Healed My Right Hip

So much went into the journey to heal my right hip I’m not even sure where to start. I guess it’s okay to start how it even came about, right? Like how do we even start to feel pain, or bring on an injury to our body? A lot goes into that right? Or does it?

Your ability to feel pain or receive an injury, couldn’t that be about the same way you feel alive and healthy, and your body is in great shape and feels wonderful?

Could it not be that they are the same in the way that they are being created or manifested in our life? Except with pain or injury, it comes from a specific type of a feeling place, where as a healthy vibrant good feeling body comes from other specific types of a feeling place?

I bet you could guess what feelings would be associated with each.

Or, you could just be in the school of thought where this stuff just happens and life is just coming at us, and some are just more unlucky than others. You know, that school of thought where some people are just destined to a life of pain and injuries while others get to live happily ever after.

So go back a few paragraphs and read that all again. How did it feel when you read that you may be destined for a life of pain in your body?

Did that feel powerful, or powerless? Did it feel like you had some choice in the matter or you were a victim to whatever life beholds for you?

Okay, now go back even further and read the part about the feeling place. How perhaps a consistency of thinking and feeling a certain negative way, over and over in life, seems to make sense to then also bring on pain or injury in your body as well.

Doesn’t that seem logical, how consistent grinding and struggle and pessimism towards life, could then also bring a state to your body in which you don’t ever seem to feel that good?

And then on the other hand, when someone you know is just so good at thinking and feeling about things in their life in a way that seems to always be directed towards better feeling places, and then their body just seems to follow in that flow.

You ever hear of that dude (Dr. Masaru Emoto) who did that water crystal experiment centered around positive and negative feeling words or the dozens of research experiments that were done since, focused on the way we project our thoughts and feelings in either a positive or negative FEELING direction and what comes of that? How about Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenza, Esther Hicks, and on and on we go? Ever read about what they have been researching in life, about the power of our intentions and the emotions behind them?

Okay, so let’s see if I can put this all together with my right hip story.

This story is a good one. Not so long, but not so short. It has some reference to universal law. It has some reference to community. It has some reference to how amazing all of our lives truly are. Whether you are in a space to accept that or not, it’s okay, perhaps this story will help.

For me, the story of my right hip and how it was in pain or injured in the first place was quite simple. I had spent years trying to throw a faster fastball. I had a dream of playing in the big leagues. I wanted to be a big-league pitcher. I wanted the fame, the fortune, the ladies, the big house. All of what life in the big leagues had to offer. I wanted it.

Just one thing was missing, I wasn’t even close to good enough. I mean sure, I played some Junior College ball and then some independent baseball, but never inside of an affiliated organization like the Yankees or the Dodgers. Like I said, I just wasn’t good enough. But at the time I didn’t know any better. I never thought to just go check out a lower-level minor league game somewhere and watch the guys play and see how I stacked up. Even though that would have made a lot of sense at the time.

A couple of years after being done playing is when I came to the realization how I never would have made it. I was in my first year as a professional coach, I spent several years trying to play professional baseball, but it wasn’t until I was done playing that I would finally make it “IN” but as a coach. Six months after struggling for several years trying to play baseball I was in the Montreal Expos organization as a Gulf Coast League Pitching Coach.

It’s the bottom of the barrel, but I didn’t care. It meant the world to me. I had put my blood, sweat, and tears into trying to play all that time, that when it finally came as a coach, I couldn’t have been happier. I was making 24k for a six-month season coaching gig in Melbourne, Florida. In the hot, humid weather, with no fans and no fanfare, but I didn’t care. I was on cloud nine. I had finally made it to the big time. Fuck. When I think about it right now. How the hell did I ever get to the Major Leagues? Wow, life IS crazy.

Okay, let me get back on task here. So the realization came for me one night while I was in Melbourne, Florida. I was watching a game being played by our High A affiliate in the Florida State League. It was real baseball with fans and beer and everything.

I just remember sitting there, I think we were playing the Yankees affiliate at the time, and just thinking, man, these guys are good. I mean the speed of the game at just High A baseball was ridiculous. People have no idea how good these minor league ballplayers are. Let alone the actual big leaguers you watch on TV. I mean these pitchers are throwing, on average, 92 miles an hour with some dudes getting up to 105 miles an hour. Then the baseball is being hit off the bat, back at the defense at that same speed, and sometimes even faster. It is truly a “man’s game”, and that is not to be offensive towards anyone or anything.

So it was that night while I was sitting there watching that I had come to the realization that I had reached my “reality potential” as a pitcher, and I wasn’t ever going to be a Major League star. And at that moment, seeing the game, seeing my reality, I was good with that. It felt good to see that and feel the honesty, the ownership I could take with that. No regret, no blame, no sadness, just real-life clarity, and with that clarity a feeling of ownership and honesty that I could move on from anything I was thinking or feeling where I was still supposed to be playing.

Now this brings us back to where all this hip stuff even started.

This part is super simple and super straightforward. I’m 43 right now, I just healed my right hip, my hip feels great almost all the time. I’m completely active. I can surf, run, jump, roll, anything I need my hip to do, it can do. Would you believe that my hip started hurting when I was around 23, or 24 years of age? And now at 43, it feels great? No surgery, no X-rays, and no MRIs. Just some emotional awareness, and then a trail of cooperative components, and whallah, all better.

I wouldn’t have believed it myself, except for the fact that I lived it.

And I definitely wouldn’t have believed this story if someone else told it to me if I didn’t know what I know about our amazing Universe and how this all works.

Okay, so I swear I’m going to start the story now. Although I already did, didn’t I?

It was at the end road of my being a player, where this all started to set in. That is, the emotional stuff. The reason why my hip even started hurting in the first place. You see, my deal was I was always seeking a faster fastball. It was the main reason I never played higher than Indy ball.

Not much need for a six-foot-tall right-handed pitcher throwing 84 miles per hour. That just wasn’t of any interest to any teams and I understood why. I spent every single day from age 19 to 24 just wondering when my velocity was going to show up and where it was going to come from. Wasn’t there someone, somewhere, who knew how to get pitchers better?

Nowadays, there is a whole boatload of pitching gurus who can create a faster fastball for pitchers from all walks of life, young, old, short, tall, fat, skinny, doesn’t matter.

There’s so much good info out there these days and that’s why kids are throwing harder and harder each year.

Shoot, they are even discussing backing up the mound from the current distance of 60 feet six inches because of it. You wonder why players and teams cheat to be able to know what pitches are coming next? Nowadays you almost have to to have half a chance.

How do you think you would do as a guy six foot six inches stands on a mound 60 feet away, chucking a 95 mile per hour fastball at you, along with an 88 mile per hour slider, 80 mile per hour changeup, and an 84 mile an hour curveball?

And on top of that you never know what pitch he will choose unless you make a really good guess. I’m baffled at the fact hitters even do what they do. If you ever have an opportunity, just go to the local batting cage and ask them to turn it up to 90 miles per hour. Just 90 miles per hour. Then stand in the batter’s box so you can get an up-close idea of what’s going on in a real game.

You see the reason why I’m telling you all this stuff is that it’s the exact reason my hip was hurt in the first place. For five straight years, all I wanted to do was throw a faster fastball to no avail. The info, the assistance, wasn’t there, and my belief in myself that I was going to be able to do it wasn’t there. As the days, weeks and months went on and I wasn’t able to throw any harder, I started to tell myself a nice little story centered around embarrassment, insecurity, and low self-worth. By the time my playing career was over, I even had experiences with the yips on the mound in certain settings, mostly during tryouts and in the bullpen, as I was warming up to go in the game.

When I was warming up and knew I felt like doo-doo that day, knew I was throwing a worthless fastball, I got so worried about what others on the field were thinking that I got so embarrassed I didn’t even want to let the ball go from my hand. And that’s where this injury deal with my hip started.

This is an emotional story, a vibrational story, not a physical wear and tear story. My right hip wasn’t hurt because I threw a lot. It was hurt because I was ashamed of who I was as a pitcher and so my body mirrored that very thing with pain in my right hip. If I couldn’t use my right hip, I couldn’t pitch. If I didn’t pitch, I didn’t have to feel the emotional pain I was feeling at the time.

So by now, I’m sure you are wondering, “Well Doug, if this all happened by the age of 24 how the hell did it last until age 43? How the hell are you just healing it now?” Well, So glad you should ask!

That’s a pretty simple answer as well. Just because you stop doing something in life that caused you pain either emotionally or physically doesn’t mean now that the pain will go away. Especially if you have been practicing a specific thinking/feeling behavioral cycle for such a long period of time.

You see, now this cycle becomes a part of you that if you don’t choose to become aware of it, it will just keep playing for you over and over and over. It’s like that catchy pop song you just can’t remove from your head.

That brings us to my coaching experience. Remember what I just said about if you have practiced a thought or a feeling cycle enough in your life that it will just keep playing unless you choose to become aware of it, and then do something about it? Well, for the next 18 or so years I was aware of it and at sporadic times through my coaching career I was able to get some of the emotional stuff under control, but never like I can now. Never with the attention I can give it now. I’ll explain why later. Just hold on.

Okay, so let me quickly take you through the coaching carousel so we can get on with the healing portion of this whole experience. Well, somewhat quickly.

So remember how I stated before, about a thought and feeling cycle, and if you aren’t able to address it properly, or pay attention to it, then it will keep showing up for you? Well, that’s how the next 18 years worked for me. The combination of lack of awareness, lack of a process to truly assist me, and then of course life keeps happening so I created more experiences like the ones when I was almost finished playing with some embarrassment, shame, and insecurity.

When I first started coaching for the Expos I was as green as green could be as a coach in professional baseball. There was zero training process. It was almost as if you were assumed to know how to do everything, where everything was, what place everyone had in this baseball society. I mean it was utter ridiculousness the childlike behaviors taking place in all areas.

Well, for a kid like me, literally and figuratively, I was 25 years old, I had no clue of how I was supposed to act, or what I was supposed to do or say, I just figured I could coach how I saw fit, within the parameters of the system set up by our pitching coordinator.

This is another chapter or another book at another time, but I just wanted to set up the emotional layers, the vibration of the industry at the time. Interesting enough, it was those very experiences that led me to desire, and eventually create, a whole new type of development process inside of an organization. But like I said, that’s a separate chapter, or maybe another book.

So here I am, a first-time coach, first-time pro, in a vibrational wasteland trying to simply get my footing, and then came the Yips. We spoke about this briefly before where I had a bout with the Yips, right before I was done playing.

For all those out there who don’t know what the yips are, just look up Rick Ankiel and you will see exactly what it is. He even wrote a book about it.

Basically, it is the worst experience you could ever have while trying to throw a baseball. It’s like a monster, a very insecure and embarrassed monster that took over your mind, body, and soul, fed it all the most shameful stories you could ever imagine, sucked all your confidence from every ounce of your being, and then ordered you to throw a baseball. Dramatic, I know, but you can imagine what would come next from that type of setup. Needless to say, it wasn’t very good. And to be completely honest I had no clue at all that this was even a thing, especially for batting practice throwers. Supposedly it happened a lot in the industry that everyone knew about it but nobody would talk about it. Kinda like the plague or any disease. It’s one of those deals where people think if you talk about it, it may make you get it. And to be honest, that may not be too far off, especially in the case of the Yips. Everyone felt bad for you, but nobody truly knew how to help.

So there I was, Melbourne, Florida, in the morning hours of my first spring training. It was time for batting practice but the rains had visited right about that time. So we were all forced to head to the batting cages. What happens here usually is each affiliate will be assigned to a batting cage, so you will have a few batting practice pitchers per cage.

When it was time to start I didn’t think anything of it. So I jumped right in. “I’ll take the first group.” As I started to throw I didn’t even know what was happening. I had never thrown batting practice before. The screen, the distance, the surroundings, all felt very surreal. As I began to throw I just figured this would be super easy. I was a pitcher, this was batting practice, easy breezy. But as I started to throw I quickly realized I was quite unsettled and couldn’t control the baseball. My body felt more and more uncomfortable and awkward to me, and I basically couldn’t throw any strikes for the batter to hit. So I stopped, got out of the cage and another coach came in to take my place.

At the time I still didn’t realize what was going on because it wasn’t fear, it was more of an uncomfort, like just something I needed to get used to. But as I listened to the stories, and allowed the negativity of the surroundings to soak in, it soon turned to fear and I did have the Yips, a full-fledged case of them. Something I would battle with for the next 18 years.

Now I didn’t include all this to set up a poor me situation. As I’m writing this I am doing it with a wry smile, because it’s just utterly amazing how not only I lasted through all this shit, but how each one of these experiences, no matter how awful they were to go through at the time, set me up for everything that was coming my way in the future. More on that later…

But the real reason I’m writing all this and setting it up is #1, it’s a great setup, awesome writing :), and #2, it gives anyone who is reading this a chance to feel the vibration, the emotions that were surrounding this whole ordeal. No matter how emotionally sensitive or aware you are, you can feel this, you can relate to this, and I want you to make that vibrational/emotional connection with all this. So when we get to the end of the road in this story you see how much vibration and emotions play a part, not only in our bodies but our entire physical world. So if you ask me again, “Doug, How did your hip start hurting at about 24 years of age and you just now can heal it at 43?” I think you could realize why.

We are so close to the healing part of this deal. Just got to hold on for a little more setup time.

Okay, so it’s 2019, the end of the season, somewhere around the first week of October. At this point in my coaching career, I just completed my first season of a three-year contract with the Los Angeles Angels. I was their Major League Pitching Coach. This season was a long one littered with scandal, lies, broken promises, but at the same time, an opportunity for sustainable growth, for something real to be developed over time. At least that’s what I thought was going to happen. Then that phone call came in early October, the General Manager of the Angels called me to let me know I was not going to be returning to finish out the remainder of my contract, I would have the next two seasons, 2020 and 2021, paid out to me just like all the rest of the paychecks have come before then. I just didn’t have to show up anywhere to collect them, I could just stay at home. Let the healing begin people!

So here we are. It’s 2020, COVID is in full form and there isn’t even a baseball season in play. Nobody even knows if there will be. I had spent October of 2019 through December of 2019 fielding opportunities to return to baseball. Some I turned down, some which turned me down, but in the end, it just felt best to step away from the game. I didn’t know if it was forever, or just for now, but I knew I wasn’t emotionally ready to go back so soon. I had an income, baseball season was in flux, COVID terror was everywhere. I finally had a chance to take care of myself in every sense of the expression. So that’s just what I did.

It had been a long time coming to take care of my body, especially my hip, once and for all. There were two nights in a row there where the pain was pretty unbearable. I couldn’t sleep. Tried all different positions to lay in but the pain just kept shooting down my leg for two nights straight. So on the third night, I finally asked, I asked the universe. I said, “Hey universe, could you please give me some insight on why this pain in my hip is here so perhaps I could start to do something about it?” That’s all I said, then I drifted off to sleep. That morning when I woke up, it was like someone had taken a vacuum and sucked the thoughts right up out of my head. I swear to you, my head was so clear and so at peace. It was something I never experienced before, felt SO good!

Then one clear thought or statement came to me, it said “old baseball story”, and then it was gone, and shortly after my usual thoughts came right back to me. For 30 seconds I was without a thought except for that one statement, “old baseball story”. That experience was so cool!

I have been in this mindfulness, meditation, Law of Attraction game for a long time. I mean, 24 years long, since I was 19, but this was an experience all to its own. I never asked and been so clearly answered before, and that felt so cool. Like I was a 10-year-old kid on Christmas morning.

Okay, so now I knew, and so here I went down the awareness healing path. This is where the community part starts to step in. Where you have a desire, the universe answers that desire, and then as long as you allow yourself to be in a good enough receiving place to let it in, it will come.

My first co-cooperative component was with my friend Shama. She suggested to me that perhaps I should write to myself about where I was in my life, on the things that matter to me most. I started with three main topics, career, relationships, and body. Now I could take you on a huge tangent here with the whole career, relationship deal, but seeing how this is supposed to be a story about my right hip, let’s just go to the body part stuff.

So what I did, realizing I had an old baseball story that I was still carrying around with me, I simply wrote to my body in a comforting and soothing way. I was of course in full awareness of why I was feeling this pain, but knowing I wasn’t even in that physical experience anymore. It was so interesting how I still was in pain, physically. So I just started to write to my body that all was well, that my body didn’t have to protect me anymore in that way. I was no longer inside of that old baseball story, and we could all move on into what was going on in the here and now.

The morning I wrote that story I never felt the nerve pain I was experiencing the previous two nights of sleep, and it has never come back. My pain had subsided immensely!

That’s where co-cooperative component number two comes in. It was time for me to start taking care of myself with a little more self-love, self-care, and focus. Regarding my body, I never really focused on that, other than working out and meditation. I chose to do a few more things, one of which was to find a local physical therapist, so they could come over and tend to my body, more specifically, my right hip. So that’s just what I did. I had known of a PT who was introduced to me through a mutual friend. My new PT was Kate, balanced by Kate. We worked together for a few months and it was just what I needed to get jump-started, physically. I had already started the vibrational/emotional work with the writing exercise, and the awareness of how I wanted to now think and feel about my body. So now it was time for the physical work to begin.

At this point, my right hip was much improved. From experiencing pain for almost 20 years to have it all but gone in a few short months was nothing short of a miracle. However, that’s the awesome thing about all of this, and that I hope anyone reading this can take away from the story. It isn’t, It wasn’t, a miracle. It was simply a winning combination of emotional awareness, a touch of focus, some consistent tending to, and a desire to want to feel good. Everything just kept being presented to me so that I could continue down my healing path.

That brings me to co-cooperative component number three. A while back I had noticed this young lady on Instagram. She was a physical therapist from Duke University, and she had an amazing amount of awesome information on her page. It was clear she knew what she was doing when speaking about the body and I wanted someone to help me build the specific strength I needed to support my hip.

The thing was I had used her in the past to help me with a strength training regiment. But at that time my focus was in different places and so we never dialed in on the right hip.

It’s so interesting how these things come about. I wasn’t all in at that time, I wasn’t as present with it all as I am now. I had other things I was tending to at that time. So we started up again with each other and this time with a new passion, a new focus. I knew what I wanted more clearly, I knew what I wanted to ask for this time, and so off we went.

Now the range of motion in my hips is the best they have ever been. The strength ratio is as equal as it has ever been in my life. And as I said before, the pain has now dwindled to just about nothing. The coolest part about all this is now that I have created what I have in this healing portion of my life, in regards to my hip, I get the benefit of the expansion of it all.

That’s where co-cooperative component number four comes in. Not only do I get to reap the benefit of no pain in my right hip and the new focus of taking care of my body in a 360-degree type of way, but now I get to ask for more. You see, once you hit a certain vibrational level, and have created certain things in your life, it never stops there. You just keep wanting more. So I met a new bodyworker, my friend Dusti, and we have started on a nice little journey together. One that is going to bring more and more relief to my body, more than I could have imagined when I started this whole hip healing journey.

This brings us back to the present day where I was able to sit, reflect, contemplate and take the expansion that I created so many years ago. There are some takeaways I wanted to wrap into this before I go, but I did want to say this first. Writing this story brought up a lot of memories and a lot of awareness of lots of emotions that I experienced in the past 20 years. I was able to see from that broader view now not only looking back, but seeing from the view of who I am now, who I have become, and not just as a person, but the expansion I have chosen to take over the past 20 years.

So when I looked over those 20 years, I can see why my body felt the way it did then and how it feels now. I can see how I created the things I did then and what I am starting to create now.

I made my path tougher than I needed it to be, by not tending to all the things I could have. I had my focus on one thing, all that time, making it to the big leagues. And eventually, I got there and I can see how all those experiences of the last 20 years got me there.

But what I did want to point out is that the amounts of rocks put in the road were put there by me. I chose to leave certain experiences, and the emotions they brought about, in sort of a locked-up case, so I could keep my focus on my dream. But the funny thing is they never went anywhere. I am just now taking care of them after the 20-year ride I chose to take. Perhaps tending to them more diligently, with a little more emotional awareness, could have saved me some flat tires along the way, if you know what I mean.

In the end, it didn’t matter and doesn’t matter. If we have an end goal in mind, our inner being will always lead us there. It just depends on what type of trip you want it to be.

And so for me, on this next journey of my life, I choose love over hate. I choose appreciation over resentment. I choose self-love and self-worth over jealousy. I choose confidence over doubt or worry. And I’m so happy I took the time to write this story from my now human form, so I can see it now the way I do.

So the takeaways for me from this amazing healing process would be:

1. No matter how long a condition has been in place, your ability to focus on the change and move in the direction of that change, vibrationally/emotionally first, then physically, can make any condition a thing of the past.
2. Reflecting, or contemplating areas of your life consistently can allow you to stay up to speed with who you are now, with who you really want to be now, without getting lost in the forest too often.
3. Things are truly always working out for us, even when we don’t think they are. Give it some time and some space, it will show itself to you.