The Aching Neck
- Astra Soulfeather
- Sep 10
- 16 min read
In a recent email series from a business coach, and in a video post from another, I noticed one particular phrase: the exhortation to discover a customer's "bleeding neck problem".
Something about this gory metaphor has lingered in my mind, troubling me. This is my exploration of that trouble.
The Anatomy of a Bleeding Neck Problem
The ‘bleeding neck problem’ in a business context seems to be around a decade old, and the earliest digital reference is from the blog of Perry Marshall in 2016. Marshall is best known for reinventing the Pareto Principle for the world of sales and marketing.
Marshall assigns the genesis of the ‘bleeding neck problem’ to salesman and former professional gambler John Paul Mendocha, explaining it as "a dire sense of urgency, an immediate problem that demands to be solved." The intensity and time-sensitivity of the issue makes it profitable, with Marshall noting that "if they [the customer] are not in a hurry, they're not writing the check today."
Nearly 10 years later, a LinkedIn article identified ‘bleeding neck problems’ as having three categories: crisis, disruption, or damage – all applied to something crucial, such as reputation, finances or health. Another post in 2025 on the same platform defined the 'bleeding neck' as problems that were “too big to ignore”, that created stress and fear, and made the customer “second-guess every decision”. The same writer crystallised the ultimate benefit of 'solving' a ‘bleeding neck problem’ in a later post:
“If they [the customer] don’t fix it, they don’t survive. That’s how your offer needs to feel.”
Why the Metaphor Matters
There are three groups of arteries in the human body critical for our correct functioning: the aorta, which distributes blood from the heart; the coronary arteries, which feed the heart; and the carotid arteries, which supplies the brain, head, neck, and face.
Every minute, many litres of blood are pumped through these arteries, the heart working continuously to ensure our vital organs receive the oxygenated blood we need to survive.
The quantity of blood carried by the carotid arteries along your neck to your brain is so significant that if this essential tributary is severed, you will bleed out and die. Without medical intervention, this type of injury is almost always likely to result in death – sometimes in as little as two minutes.
Two minutes.
This is what business coaches are referring to when they encourage their clients to spot a profitable ‘bleeding neck’ problem in their industry.
It is unsurprising that this distressing phrase caught my attention when I saw it in the email series, and when I heard it on video. It is distinctly horrific and violent – yet it is also just one in a litany of violent, horrific phrases that form the foundation of business literature obsessed with productivity and domination. After we have ‘smashed it’, ‘crushed it’, and ‘killed it’ in the name of success, searching our communities for ‘bleeding neck’ problems is only the next logical step. It is language and metaphor unaware of trauma and distinctly lacking in compassion.
And the truth is that no-one has a problem like a ‘bleeding neck’ unless they actually have a bleeding neck. It is a sensationalist phrase that masks the reality of most human suffering, whether in the realm of business or in another arena of existence.
A Hidden Invitation
As a child on a family holiday, I was caught under the currents on a water slide. With the thudding bodies landing on top of me, keeping me pinned under the rapids, and my lack of confidence in the water, I believed that this was the moment I would die. I was beyond frightened, unable to scramble out from under the falling weight and feeling as though my lungs would burst.
At 14, struck down with glandular fever, my throat swelled so much I could barely breathe. It seemed as though my airways had left only a straw-like space for me to suck tiny breaths in and out, as I lay awake all night with tears streaming down my face, convinced that my throat would eventually seal up and I would be left gasping for oxygen.
I have tossed and turned, rancid with sweat, from colds and flu and Covid. I have screamed in pain as my appendix fermented and rotted within me. I have been wracked with grief that felt like the end of the world, and with shame that drove me to suicidal thoughts. I have experienced the cusp of what I truly believed was death, the worst possible loss, over and over – and undoubtedly, so have you.
Abraham Hicks often uses a metaphor about this sort of intense suffering in their meetings with people who beg for their help. If a problem is so vast, and the pain so excruciating, they say, it’s like jumping out of a plane and realising you have no parachute: just close your eyes and it’ll all be over soon. There is an inevitability in that intense, urgent suffering, just as there is an inevitability in your carotid arteries being severed; yes, this is going to hurt – but it’ll be finished quicker than you think.
Most of us are not in the habit of falling out of planes without a parachute or receiving extreme neck injuries, but that does not stop us from experiencing life-threatening suffering in other ways. In times of physical or emotional pain which wound us to the core, we truly believe on some level that perhaps this is the moment it all ends – this is the moment when we can't take it any longer, we are not as strong as we thought, and death is fast approaching. Our rational mind has taken a backseat for a little while and we are filled with the animal fear – and animal intelligence – that this might be it.
In those moments of urgent, intense suffering, we are given a unique invitation – an invitation that occurs only with a sense of encroaching death, and a invitation that those who flippantly discuss the ‘bleeding neck’ problem seem to be strikingly unaware of. This invitation is to surrender to the inevitability of whatever is next, and to allow the pain to take its natural course, whether that is through salvation or termination.
This surrender is not the stress response, the fight/flight/freeze/fawn which either jumpstarts us into action or prods us to go limp and play dead. That reaction is a survival mechanism, one which dovetails neatly into the description of the 'bleeding neck' problem: “if they don’t fix it, they don’t survive”. This surrender goes beyond that conception of pain, into a reality where we accept that this ‘problem’ may not be fixable. We entertain the possibility that this just might be it: either living with this pain, even living in the pain, or not living at all. We move from trying to fix and change and improve into release, and into a deeper knowledge of the extent of our own suffering. Accepting the invitation to surrender brings with it the request of patience, rather than urgency, and fragile hope, rather than control. In a nano-second that feels like a lifetime, we learn to wait and trust that someone or something will step in to care for us – perhaps even to save us.
Saying 'yes' to this invitation – to surrender, patience, and hope – is necessary to excavate in ourselves the qualities that are needed for an evolving spiritual relationship, whether or not the pain is in the realm of the soul, the body, or somewhere else. Often, the surrender is the doorway to direct spiritual experience; in the moment when all seems lost, the truth of the connection to your soul, God, the Universe or whatever you call it is made known to you – not because it wasn’t there beforehand, but because the extreme pain has caused you to stop fiddling and fixing and start crying out for help, truly surrendering to the knowledge that you can not do this alone.
The lifeguard pulled me out from under the rapids on the water slide. My father sat watching over me all night to ensure I did not suffocate. My university tutor walked me to the counselling centre when I broke down in front of her. These people saved my life. And in later years, when I have come to understand suffering more deeply, it is my faith and relationship with what I call God that continues to save my life when I do not know where to turn, or who to turn to. When Krishna Das stopped begging his guru to remove the frustrating desires of his ego, and instead surrendered to the reality of the pain, that's when everything changed for him. That's when his life was saved.
The hidden invitation in moments of 'bleeding neck' suffering is to surrender, and in doing so open the door to deeper spiritual relationship. But despite the necessity of this invitation, and the spectacular phenomena it may incur, most human suffering does not exist in this space of the ‘bleeding neck’. We are suffering, but we are not facing rapid, inevitable decline. Instead, our suffering exists in the arena of the chronic. We are living with the aching, rather than bleeding, neck.
Slow Erosion and the Work of a Lifetime
The aching neck begins as a twinge; a small pang of discomfort, perhaps only for a microscopic moment, that soon passes. It occurs again, and so you adjust to compensate, leaning to the other side of your body, or raising your shoulder to relieve the pressure. The pang happens again, and again, and again, but it is so small and so apparently infrequent that your home brew remedy of distorting your posture to prevent the pain seems like a perfectly reasonable solution.
Except now it is a decade later, and you cannot turn to the side. You slump, and hunch over, and cannot sit or stand comfortably. The pangs have turned into throbs, waves of nauseous pain which are triggered by any slight change in routine and seem only to disappear with medication – self-administered or prescribed. Your movement is limited, your mobility extinguished, and your sense of self diminished.
Our most common existential suffering is not the ‘bleeding neck’ problem, but the aching neck: the creeping psychological pain which begins as something manageable and easy to ignore, and ends with the near-annihilation of the self. It is the bullying, the mockery, the small jibes and cutting words; the disappointment, the sadness, the disorganisation of how you thought the world was; it is the lack of empathy, of affection, the lack of presence and attention. It is trauma with a little t. It is that which has ground you down for so long, you didn’t even realise there was a time when you were not dust. This pain is not a technicolour shock, but a slow, insidious erosion, tectonic in its accumulation and therefore unnoticeable – until it tears a rift in the very matter of your being.
At some point, maybe even before this rift occurs, you might recognise that this pain isn’t right; that you don’t need to feel like this, that maybe you can stop the suffering from crawling any further into your heart. And so, you decide to look for a solution. In your search, you find many people playing the role of paramedic, eager to diagnose you with a severed artery, to save you and staunch the flow of non-existent blood and tell you it’ll all be over soon. They are so certain, and so confident, that it is hard to deny them.
You find fewer people who tell you the truth: that this will be a long road back to health. That this will not be a two-minute solution, but rather a comprehensive remodelling of your relationship to life itself, to the way that you are in the world. To recover from this aching neck problem will be the work of a lifetime.
Just as the pain has taken decades to develop, so too will the healing of this pain need significant time; it will not happen overnight. The existential suffering of spiritual separation, the chronic trauma of living as a human being, are not ‘fixed’ with the ethereal equivalent of a sticking plaster and a couple of aspirin. They are not even ‘fixed’ by the cosmic version of open-heart surgery, that “life-altering” ayahuasca trip in Guatemala or your “transformative” breathwork ceremony in Hackney. Chronic spiritual pain cannot be ‘fixed’, but managed, and through the management we come to a deeper relationship with our own spirituality and our own existence.
Gathering Wisdom
For the last few years, I have struggled with digestive issues. At first, I believed these to be purely physical, the result of some strong antibiotics I was prescribed and a previously unrecognised intolerance to gluten. But as my relationship to these digestive issues has progressed – as my relationship to the suffering has progressed – I have come to a richer understanding of why this problem manifests. What I consume and the composition of my stomach affects my ability to comfortably digest food, but so too does stress and emotional turmoil, whether that is my own or whether it belongs to someone close to me. The more I allow stress to eat away at me, the more my own eating becomes stressed.
On some days I am frustrated at the perceived inadequacies of my body, my apparent weakness in being unable to do something as simple as digest food if I feel anything other than peaceful and calm. Yet on many days my perception of this ‘problem’ is reversed; I have an extraordinary warning system in place that insists I take as much time and space as I need to feel peaceful and calm. My body depends on peacefulness to be nourished, physically and metaphysically. And as someone who lived many years surrounded by emotional instability, ‘eating’ the emotions of others to retain an even keel and ensure my own psychological survival, it is something of a strange but beautiful permission slip that I no longer will tolerate – in fact, no longer can tolerate – doing what I always knew was no good for me.
Sure, it would be preferable if this ‘aching neck’ problem had never occurred, and therefore I would not need to manage it. It is pleasant to imagine an alternative world in which I was never required to eat the feelings of others to survive, nor to develop such a negative bodily response to a behaviour which protects others but damages myself. But this is where I am, and to wish away my suffering would be to wish away the wisdom I have gleaned, and the compassion I have cultivated. Instead, I can examine within myself all I have gained through this chronic suffering: what sort of life it requires me to lead, what sort of person it asks me to be. I can fight it, and in doing so fight myself – or I can surrender, and come to a place of peace.
We do not need suffering to come into deep spiritual relationship with ourselves and with God, or whatever you choose to call it. It is uncritical to glamorise any sort of pain for the purpose of spiritual development, and especially lacking in trauma-awareness to assign spiritual blame to those who experience suffering. But surviving pain and managing discomfort can bring meaning when we choose to see the meaning in it. It can encourage us to question what is necessary and important, to discover what is of real value to us, and to discard what is no longer needed because it has become an irrelevant obstacle on the path to our future contentment.
The Profitable Art of Manufacturing Crisis
The term ‘bleeding neck problem’ is violent and distressing. It sensationalises the process of spotting and solving the most urgent problems a person faces, and in that exaggeration creates a mania within them. In his 2016 blog post, Marshall details the ‘bleeding neck’ problem as “pain and great inconvenience … threat of loss … some craving for pleasure that borders on the irrational” [emphasis added], while the LinkedIn writer from 2025 notes it is a problem that makes you “second guess every decision”, mistrusting your own sanity.
Yet most of us are not suffering from these intense, urgent problems most of the time; we are instead suffering with slow-burn chronic pains that wear away at our soul, which go unnoticed until they loom monstrous in our lives. When that looming occurs, we want to believe there is a paramedic with a two-minute fix, because that’s easier than the truth: that to manage our deepest pain we must change our life wholesale.
Therefore, we only need a little nudging to be deluded into believing that we are indeed suffering from a bleeding neck, not an aching one. In our delusion, those who are sensationalising our problems and their own problem-solving abilities can continue to profit. It is in their interests to amplify or even fabricate the life-or-death nature of the problem they think we have, to create the belief that we must ‘fix it or die’, and to stoke the fires of our irrational madness that this, this is the problem we must solve and, in solving it, all our woes will be over.
As these fires are stoked, so too is our conviction that what we are experiencing is a suffering that can be fixed once, and quickly, and will require no further work. It will not require rest, or soothing, or caring. It will not need you to be in community, to be vulnerable, to open your heart to others who can support you as you transition into a new way of being. It is not a solution that requires the effort of widespread systemic change or political engagement. It will only take two minutes, they promise, and then you can carry on as normal.
It is a profitable business model. It finds you when you are most desperate – and if you are not yet near-desperation it rapidly leads you there through persuasive sales material – and it asks little of you other than to pay. It makes mountains out of molehills and then charges you to remove the mountain.
In the best cases, I believe that the services offered and the benefits gleaned from these ‘bleeding neck’ solutions are real; that people do alleviate their suffering, and they do see change in their lives. However, from my own experience and from listening carefully to the experiences of my clients and those participating in my courses and workshops, after the checkout has been completed, these ‘bleeding neck’ solutions more often than not only expose the truth of the suffering: that it is not acute but chronic; that it is not so easily solved; that this ‘aching neck’ problem requires a lot more work than expected. This realisation can lead to disappointment, disengagement and distrust of the service provider. They promised something which turned out to be false, and now you are lighter in the pocket and heavier with awareness. You see now that you did not need a paramedic; you needed a physiotherapist. They told you it would be over soon – but it has only just begun.
Diamonds in the Mud
I used to believe that what I offered – my gifts and service to others – was hard to ‘sell’. This was a comfortable belief, because it kept me separate and special from others who gained customers and followers easily; I was complex, and exclusive, and difficult. It meant I never needed to bother learning about how to communicate my gifts in ways other people understood, because it would be pointless to do so. And it was satisfying to believe that receiving money, opportunity or honours for my gifts was hard, because then when I did receive them, it felt 'worth it'. But now I see that what I offer as a spiritual author and creator helping others grow closer to God is not hard to sell; it is simply a gradual sell.
It took me 30 years to be ready enough to have a direct spiritual experience, and another seven to develop a meaningful relationship with faith. It takes time to realise you are suffering, and to recognise you do not have to. It is a slow and deep fundamental truth, which cannot be rushed – just as you cannot rush the seasons or the tides or the movement of the earth. Awakening has a rhythm unique to each soul, and so too does the interplay between what we offer the world and what the world is ready for.
Our richest, most heartfelt gifts which are of greatest service to the world are truly valuable. We do not need to hurry to give them away or fabricate the extent of others’ suffering so they beg us to bestow these gifts upon them, and throw money at us in the process. Instead, we can develop patience in waiting for the imminent reception of these gifts, continuing to offer them, learning the best ways to do so, and trusting that they will indeed be received at the right time by those who need them. This gives us time to become witness to the acute and chronic suffering that exists in the people we serve, so we are better able to offer the right medicine, at the right moment. In doing this we will become healers that others turn to not just once but many times over their lives. The business founded on soothing the ‘aching neck’ problem is, in this way, just as profitable as the one frantically staunching the ‘bleeding neck’ – because those you serve will return to you over and over, sustaining your enterprise as you sustain them.
Whether or not you run a business, this is an endeavour to which we can all offer our hands and hearts. To be of most meaningful service to the world our energy would be well-used aiding those with ‘aching neck’ problems, ideally before that initial discomfort becomes chronic, lifelong suffering. Rather than rush to be heroes, fixing emergencies and receiving honours, we might offer ourselves in small, sustainable ways that alleviate the quiet suffering which goes unnoticed by most, but which – if left unhealed – leads to the erosion of the soul in those who are carrying its burden.
We have all experienced an act of unexpected compassion from a stranger that sparkles in our memory like a diamond among mud. We all have the opportunity, every day, to be that stranger for someone else drowning in invisible pain. The pain may never leave us, but with glittering acts of unconditional love to and through and with each other, it can be managed. It can even be transformed into wisdom: what is most important, our gifts, and our purpose here on the planet. But to do this, we must pay attention to that which, in others and in ourselves, can be dismissed as ‘nothing’. We must sensitively feel out the twinges, the pangs, the ache in our heart, rather than ignoring every signal we are being sent until we only have two minutes left in which to survive. We must care for the aching neck, rather than recognising only the bleeding one. We must stop waiting for our suffering to become a life-threatening emergency, and start recognising that now is the perfect moment in which we can offer healing. Now is the moment in which our suffering can be transformed.
“Step past the sick and the lame early in the game, and only deal with the healthy ones left standing. You will save yourself so much time.”
Perry Marshall
“Then He also said to him who invited Him, “When you give a dinner or a supper, do not ask your friends, your brothers, your relatives, nor rich neighbours, lest they also invite you back, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you; for you shall be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”
(Luke 14: 12-14)
This piece of original writing was created by Astra Soulfeather. No AI was used to ideate, write or edit this work, except for the use of Claude.AI to develop subheadings for the piece. The featured image is a digital artwork created by Astra Soulfeather in open-source software GIMP using images generated by Chat GPT and botanical illustrations from Heritage Type available under a Creative Commons license. © 2025 Astra Soulfeather & Higher Love Co. All rights reserved.
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