mindfulness and more

Mindfulness

I found help in being relieved of back pain by improving my ability to achieve mindfulness, which is another way to live in the present. It’s really simple: take deep yoga breaths, breathing air into the stomach, holding the breath for a few counts, then releasing the breath. I then say “Peace.”
While deep breathing, concentrate on your breathing.
If worries or troubling memories surface, get your mind back
to concentrating on deep breathing. It’s good to do this anytime,
anywhere, even while walking. We find calmness and peace
in deep breathing.
While practicing mindfulness with deep breathing,
keep reminding yourself that any pain you feel is not caused
by anything structural. It is all psychological. The sooner you
firmly believe this, the faster you will be pain free.
If you do feel pain while walking or sitting, think of
something pleasant… lying on a sun-filled beach, being with
someone you love. Think happy. Think being loved.
I knew my back pain was psychological when I walked
and felt no pain. My back could not hurt from anything
structural or from aging (I’m 83 now) if it had stopped
hurting when I walked. And it did. I just didn’t think about
pain and there was none.
If we believe that walking or sitting causes our pain,
we are sending the wrong messages to our subconscious
mind and delaying our recovery. Those messages of where
our pain is coming from are what is causing our pain.
We fear the pain, so it doesn’t go away. We tell ourselves
it is psychological, not structural, and the pain goes away.

Latest Helps to Heal

In recent weeks I have found great help by following
the TMS Recovery Program of Dr. Alan Gordon, director
of the PainPsychologyCenter, which he offers free on TMSWiki.org.
It is a two-part program consisting of suggestions and
video clips that demonstrate them, created especially to help
those (like me) who have or had difficulty lowering or eliminating our physical pain. The program offers a deep
understanding of why we are in pain, how it keeps coming, and what steps can be taken to reduce or end it.
The video clips are from parts of Dr. Gordon’s pain
psychology therapy sessions.
The program starts with accepting the TMS diagnosis
of Dr. Sarno and others that the pain we feel is not from any
structural abnormality but it is psychologically caused.
This has been said often in this book, but it cannot be said
too often because some people cannot accept it, at least not
100 percent. A video clip shows how we can overcome that remaining one percent, without which we may not be pain free.
I was one of those doubters. I kept a small part of my mind believing my back pain was age-related. I finally got the
truth of it… my pain was psychologically induced, from
past emotional repressions which dealt with my boyhood and
present anxiety and stress from financial difficulties. When
I began to convince myself, and my subconscious mind,
that those were the causes of my pain, it went away. When
those psychological causes come back, I again convince
myself they are causing my back pain and that is has nothing
to do with aging or structural damage. If it did, I would always
be in pain, and I am not, when I mentally condition myself
as to why I feel pain, from my repressed emotions.
One reason we may keep feeling pain is that we associate
it with doing something such as walking or sitting. When we
walk we may not feel pain, but we do when sitting, or vice
versa. Dr. Gordon says we have developed a conditioned
response to our pain, feeling it when we walk or sit or do
something else. But our pain is not really caused by sitting
or standing. We are merely associating it with those or
other activities and thereby perpetuating the pain.
To end the cycle of pain because of a conditioned
response, we need to reframe what pain means to us. Some
people do not feel back or other pain until they think about
it. Others may not be in pain but fear it will come back.
I strongly recommend spending some time with
Dr. Gordon and his pain recovery program. You will
see yourself in it in many ways and it will help you,
as it helped me, and him, to be relieved of your TMS pain symptoms.

 

This is Good Walt, it is real good

 

Jan and Eric,
Thanks. I'm glad my thoughts resonated with you.

I like to cut and paste posts that seem the most helpful to me,
keep them in a folder.

 

I think I really needed to see this today, Walt. I just had a conversation or two with my subC, informing it that my pain is not structural. I KNOW what works...and I'm trying to do it!

 

Hi, Gigi. Glad my post helps. Believing 100 percent that our pain is TMS psychological and not physical was
the hardest part of my healing process. I just tenaciously hung on to part of me not accepting that.
Then after about a week of believing 100 percent, the back pain went away. That made me realize it was
ALL from TMS repressed emotions, guilt from not being able to help my elderly mom longer, and financial stress, as well as lots of boyhood traumas. I forgave everyone including myself and told my subconscious it was all psychologically-induced pain and it has gone away. Wonderful thing is, as Dr. Sarno says, you just have to recognize the repressed emotions, you don't have to solve them.