Arbilla Exercise Physiology

📍Gadigal/Wangal land

- Antifascist defence 🥊
- Growing food 🥕
- Strength training 💪
- Radical education 🧠

DM for Signal chats 📩

What have you tried, how have these worked for you, and what have these cost you?

Creative hopelessness invite us to realise that the pursuit of a pain “fix” is a pursuit that’s failing us.

Grieving this pursuit makes different approaches possible.

Giving up this pursuit is a refusal of false hope sold by our colonial-capitalist health system.

Some treatments can reduce pain in the short-term.

But in the long-term, they often shrink life, isolate us, increase fear/anxiety and surveillance of the body.

Creative hopelessness is not “no pain no gain” or “pain is all in your head”.

It’s refusing to accept that pain is a personal failure, that you haven’t tried hard enough or done the “right” things.

Feeling hopeless about the pursuit of a pain fix can give us the space to organise life so pain doesn’t = exclusion or isolation, and accomodations can be asked for without shame.

It’s a shift away from false promises, self-blame and isolated suffering.

And a shift towards refusing bu****it, changing oppressive conditions, collective access, asking for help, and living well with pain.

It’s when we decide to stop trying to fix ourselves to survive broken systems, and start organising our lives and structures around the bodies we have now.

What if sessions with your EP, physio, massage therapist, osteo, chiro are keeping you in a loop? 🔁

This isn’t about any individual being a “bad” person

It’s about how the system is set up

Some appointments:
- Provide temporary relief (hands-on treatment, modalities, reassurance)
- Don’t teach skills for responding to pain when it shows up
- Avoid honest conversations about how pain works, uncertainty and natural healing
- Keep people coming back indefinitely

Over time, this can:
- Increase dependence on appointments
- Undermine trust in your own capacity
- Reinforce the idea that pain must be removed before life can resume

This functions like a well-intentioned business model, especially for people who are scared, exhausted, isolated and gaslit elsewhere

Has the pursuit of eliminating pain taken you closer or further from the life you want to live?

Creative hopelessness (see previous post), invites us to stop putting all of our hope on the next treatment, scan, clinician etc

It shifts us away from “fixing”, self-blame, internalised ableism, and medical dependency as the only option

It shifts us towards learning how to respond to pain, understanding pain instead of fearing it, building skills for flare-ups, and asking for help without being trapped in professionalised care within capitalism

Chasing pain relief unfortunately doesn’t work in the long-run, and makes our lives smaller

There’s another choice, where we can practice and build skills to better manage pain. So we can live, organise and resist with the body we have

A key moment for a lot of people with chronic pain (myself included), is “creative hopelessness”

Creative hopelessness is the moment someone realises that everything they’ve been doing to get rid of pain isn’t actually helping them live the life they want

It’s the hard realisation that despite all the manipulations, massages, injections, rehab exercises and dry needling treatments… nothing has gotten rid of pain

Trying to reduce pain has cost time, money, energy, relationships and wellbeing

That realisation hurts. A lot. All the people I work with who have chronic pain have put in a massive effort to fix it, they try everything they can

In the short-term, some of these “treatments” work. But unfortunately in the long-term, they don’t. And this pursuit of getting rid of pain makes life worse

This isn’t a failure. It’s because our colonial capitalist health system keeps offering the same false hope. Endless appointments, and a fake promise that the next fix will work

Do you know a close friend who’s stuck in a pain treatment loop? Seeing the same clinician for passive treatments done to them for months on end?

Questions to offer:

Are you open to trying a completely different approach?

To build a better life, and practice skills to better manage pain, so you can do things that are important to you?

Liberalism is a political philosophy that values individual liberty, rights, the rule of law and formal equality under a neutral state.

With a liberal lens:
- Individuals are the basic units of society, not relationships, communities or collectives
- Rights are viewed as legal protections on paper, rather than embedded in social relationships or lived realities
- “Social justice” is pursued via policies, reforms, markets and institutions instead of addressing power structures

Why tf am I sharing a post about liberalism?

Liberalism teaches us:
- Individuals are responsible for their health outcomes, even when structural barriers make that unrealistic
- Rights matter, but in practice they’re meaningless without support and safety
- Harm is thought of as a problem of markets, law or policy rather than being rooted in power relations

So in healthcare, we’re taught:
- Health is an individual’s responsibility, even when we know that social determinants shape outcomes
- Shared decision making, informed consent and patient-led goals are viewed as genuine, despite unequal power dynamics
- There’s language of “equity” and cultural competence, but without meaningful redistribution of resources or power

How liberalism fails care:
- Individualises structural problems
Leads well-meaning health workers to blame patients instead of seeking to address underlying issues and structures causing and perpetuating the problem

- Hides power e.g. state, economic, racial
Liberal frameworks try to manage harm instead of transforming the conditions that cause harm

📍Gadigal/Wangal

Know someone who’d be interested in free outdoor group strength training?

Message me 📩

In case you missed it -

Garden Day at Jura this Saturday from 1pm 💚

👉 https://www.instagram.com/p/DSiLiRkEhSG

Free veggies and produce, 1pm Saturday 27th @jurabooks You are also welcome join us if you like gardening @cooperation.seedpod #reelsinstagram #gardening #ecofriendly #ecology

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

It’s been a pleasure facilitating fortnightly sessions at .sydney 💪

I reached out to local charities and non-profits offering pro-bono work over a year ago, and I’m grateful SECC responded 💙

It’s been a privilege connecting with their senior group, seeing their creativity and sharing laughs and banter

My hope with this act is not charity, but solidarity

Creating a world where care for elders (“aged care”) is outside of capitalism, and within healthier collectivised communal systems

A world where older people are treated as knowledge-holders with autonomy, not bodies to be “fixed”

Spaces that meet our health, movement and social needs outside of coercive institutions and insurance logics

Practicing direct democracy, collective decision-making and reclaiming joy in moving our bodies 💜