The Presence Process - Share Experiences & Ask Questions

I recently finished my 3rd time through TPP. I didn't have any earth-shattering insights, but I do find as I have gone along that I am more and more willing to face my fears and issues as I see them more as opportunities to integrate the emotions around them. Not to mention the daily breathing sessions have been an outstanding stress management tool. Much of what MB writes in the book resonates with me as being true, and I thoroughly enjoy the readings.

A year ago today I was going through TMS treatment as the insane stress of pharmacy school had caused me intense back pain that I was told was due to my herniated disk. Thanks to Dr. Sarno my pain is gone and I have a whole different understanding of how my emotions get expressed in my body. It truly was/is a miracle. This past semester was our hardest one yet, but thanks to the daily breathing practice and also the knowledge of TMS (and a weekly session through my list of pressures), I had very little TMS symptoms. I had a little back pain, ankle pain, stuffed nasal passages, heartburn, anxiety, and the beginnings of headaches that would try to get my attention periodically, but as I knew they were TMS I paid them no attention and they never went anywhere and were usually gone within hours or the next morning. What an empowering feeling!

One funny thing during this TPP had to do with the water sessions. I only have a shower at my apartment, so in the past I would make a weekend visit to my parents' house 70 miles away so that I could get a water session in a tub. (I didn't explain to them my reasoning for taking a bath at their house; they aren't really open to TPP-type things.) Their tub is just barely deep enough for the water to remain covering my chest while keeping my head out at the same time; it takes some effort to keep the water covering my chest area. But this time around when week 7 arrived I got to my parents' house only to find that my dad had just gotten their hot tub up and running after 7 years of it being unused and idle. It was perfect. I could sit in there with the pump off and comfortably keep my entire body submerged and my head above the water. The sessions in there were certainly more intense than the other tub.

I never thought they would use that hot tub again, but to me it was no coincidence that it was all ready for me to use the day I arrived for a water session.

I plan on repeating TPP until I feel it is no longer helping me. How many times through will this take? There's only one way to find out!

 

Hang in there Renate,
You found the right place to get information and support and you will soon be writing your own success story.
Merry Christmas!

 

Hmm, i am quite new over here. It has been 1 year I realized TMS and I have posted detail about my experience on support sub forum.
However,I was shocked to find presence thread in TMSwiki, i somehow thought they are different. I read TMS books and realized its repression of emotion causing it. I found humongous amount of emotion repressed in me since my childhood. Then i wanted to heal and read TPP. I just did it for around 2-3 weeks and I felt more of TMS. I have tight neck ( tightness in neck muscle and dark patch in skin due to it). It is TMS. And, when I did TPP, the neck was more stiff, more tighter. I followed other meditation technique and neck was more tighter. I do not know what to do. I have understanding of TMS and TPP. I have realized its TMS and I have also had that shaking of body while doing TPP. Any guidance would be helpful.

 

The fact that your TMS symptoms are getting worse is actually a good sign. The PP says that this can happen too. It should get better eventually. The PP allows repressed emotions to surface and that is a good thing. I remember when I first found out about TMS and was reading the books, my neck pain got worse too, then got better. Be patient and don't fear. There is also something called Extension Burst where your brain can send stronger signals when we step in with our conscious brain and work to make things better.

There can be many up's and down's with recovery, so it helps to remember this.

 

My story in short :
Upper back muscle spasm. went to hospital , muscle relaxants, physio,exercise, yoga....bla bla
read all books on back pain. started fixing my posture. felt robot. left it.
read sarno. couldn't trust. reverted back and forth between sarno and muscle relxation pills.
realized all emotions under my skin. threw away all medical papers and pills.
spasm shifted to neck.
realized emotion and thoughts are causing them.
Tpp did for few weeks. felt shaky more painful left it.
read whole lot of spirituality to manage thoughts. things for more confusing.

now, i have neck spasm. i keep on rotating my head and jaw to stretch muscle. i have other variant issues all are just tms.
i am thinking, what should i do?
continue tpp? or other meditation i learned? or just work on with tms as suggested by andy b (reply to my post)

 

Any meditations are always good for you. They calm the busy mind and get us out of the fight/flight.

I can't say what you should do moving forward. I had increased symptoms in the past when starting different things and it always, always got better.
The SEP program here on the Wiki is supposed to be very helpful. hopefully someone else will chime in that has done TPP.

 

Hi everyone,

has anybody made the experience that the TMS-pain gets worse an worse? I just finished week 4.
I know that in week 7 we should take a bath. I cannot do it because of my desease. Is there another possibility?

 

Hi Renate,

I'm not sure of your mobility or circumstance. But if you are in the locality of a sauna you could try that. It will have the same effect.

I've seen some people meditate in saunas and cold temperatures. Both are supposed to be good for breath work, acclimatisation and strengthening the immune system.

I hope this helps.

 

Thank you mike24! Unfortunately my foot does not tolerate any kind of heat, not even when I am in the tub with the foot outside.

No one else here has experienced an encrease of pain during TPP?

Since I started TPP I have problems to fall asleep. Every evening when I go to bed I am awake 1-2 hours and can't sleep.
A common reaction to TPP?

 

Hi wonderful folks, after reading and hearing some great feedback on TPP I've just started The Presence Process today. I had read the book some time ago, but never committed to it, but I feel the time is right.

 

Silentflute,

Great to have you here!

As others have stated, it's a good thing if your pain gets worse while doing TPP. TPP is designed to bring out your pain so you can deal with the underlying emotions causing the pain, and also so you can learn to be with the pain without trying to change it. In other words, you stop resisting the pain, stop being scared of it, and start learning from it.

I can't tell you what to do, but I would keep doing TPP, because your increasing pain means it's working well. The pain will eventually lessen and even go away once you integrate the dysfunctioning emotions causing it.

Good luck, and I can't wait to hear your experiences with TPP.

 

Renate,

Yes, actually everyone who does TPP should have an increase in pain for a while. At least, that's what often happens. I didn't experience that, but I didn't really have pain when I started. I did it to integrate emotional problems and the health issues they cause.

The sleep issue sounds like something TPP would possibly cause. The body is on a rhythm called the cyrcadian rhythm. That's your body clock. Each hour, your body is checking a different organ. If that organ is having issues, you won't sleep well during that hour. It sounds like you have one or two organs that are being affected by emotions surfacing as a result of your TPP. Once you integrate those emotions, your organs will function correctly again and you'll sleep just fine.

The Ancient Hebrews and most ancient cultures believed that emotions originated in the organs, and each organ originated certain emotions. I tend to believe that's actually correct. The Body Code is an interesting method that also believes that's true, and it has amazing success. I think they still believe this in the East.

I don't sleep well after 4:30 am, and it's due to my lungs (fear) and something else, too, I think. I forget. I'll have to look it up again. I used to fear not getting enough sleep, and at times, I would kind of freak out about it. Now, I've learned to be content with it. I lie there and doze or just breathe (meditate, like TPP). So I'm always rested and sometimes I get some good processing or integrations done at that time. Sometimes I'll get up early and start doing my breathing for TPP and I'll do it for a few hours. That's always nice. I enjoy the breathing. And I do some direct work to integrate specific things using my method, too. I've learned to make good use of my time and work around any issues that pop up. It's pretty cool. Very liberating.

Hope this helps, and I can't wait to hear your experiences with TPP! Have a great day.

 

Hi Sath,

Thanks for posting! Can't wait to hear your experiences with TPP. Glad to have you in the thread.

 

Renate,

Sorry it has taken me so long to reply to your posts. The TMS forum hasn't been emailing me to let me know people are posting in here. It does that sometimes.

Let me know if you have questions and I'll do my best to answer them.

The emotions from childhood come up in different ways for each person, and at different times. So stock with it and let it happen as it happens. Take it one day at a time. Feeling pain is good. If you've done TMS work before, I've noticed a trend: some people do TMS correctly and integrate the emotions causing their pain, while other do it incorrectly and the pain gets repressed instead. TPP shows a person how to feel and integrate those emotions properly so they don't get repressed. So some people think TMS is working for them, but it's merely repressing their emotional dysfunctions. On that case, TPP will bring out everything TMS has repressed, which means you'll feel lots of pain. If you haven't done TMS work, that's no problem, of course. You'll still feel pain, and that's good. It means you're making progress.

 

Hi everyone,

thank you for your replies!

Brian, it's good to hear from you! I read nearly all of your posts and found them very helpfull!!

I have done very much TMS work, I read many books and worked with TMS therapists.
I am 100% convinced that my pain is TMS, because when I started to tell my foot that there is nothing wrong and it is all in my mind, the pain got a little better for 2-3 months.
Since then I am stuck.

My pain started 5 years ago and I am still lying on my couch 90% of the time because I can't sit longer than five minutes. I live alone and sometimes it's very hard not to be able to participate at social life.

Yesterday I started week 7 of TPP. Until now I never felt as if emotions were integrated. Am I doing something wrong?

Sometimes I wonder why there are not more emotions coming up. Could it be because of the psychotherapy I've done for some years?
Or maybe there are only few triggers because I don't see many people?

Thanks

Renate

 

Hi all,
I just started week 1 of my first PP. I'm having trouble doing the morning session because there's a lot of noise in my house because of the schedule of other members of the household. I don't come home till about 5 in the evening so is it okay to do the morning one after I get home from work and the evening one around 10pm? Does it have to be morning and evening?

Thanks

 

Hi, Renate.

Good to hear from you. Your TMS issue with your foot sounds frustrating.

I take a different philosophy than TMS's idea that you just tell the pain it's all in your mind. The pain isn't wanting to be ignored. It really is pain and it really is there. The question is always, "Why is my mind causing pain in my body? What's the purpose? What imbalance is it trying to alert me to so that I can deal with it?" The answer is always some emotion that's dysfunctioning (fear, anger, or grief). Technically, the base emotion is always fear. The secondary emotion is usually anger (anger wants to control the situation) and the final emotion is grief (sadness due to loss of something or not getting something, etc). The anger is to try to control the fear of not getting something and feeling the loss/grief of it. And the other fear we feel is the fear of what we'll do if we let our anger be expressed in us. It's scary to think what we'd do if we went on a rampage, you know? We could hurt someone or our self or get put in jail. So fear of anger is a big one. But with TPP, we're learning what to do when we feel our anger, and that helps us understand that we can be angry without doing something harmful to our self or others. That's when we finally start to let our self feel our emotions properly, because we see we aren't going to get in trouble feeling our fear--we have faith in ourselves to do the healthy thing, which is to contain the fear rather than outwardly expressing it in a dysfunctional way. Beyond that, the fear is just that fear of loss I mentioned earlier. And that's pretty much how our fear, anger, and grief work. And those are the emotions we're setting our intent to integrate throughout TPP. I set that as my intention the rest of my life, actually, so whether or not I'm doing a 10-week PP or not, my intention stays the same and I'm always primed for integrations to occur.

Week 7
My first integration was in Week 7, actually. I didn't have any before that point.

Anger
When I was a baby, I learned very quickly that anger wasn't allowed in my family. I saw my 3-yr-old sister get mad at my dad, throw a fit, and then he would get mad at her and spank her. So getting angry equaled getting spanked (a mild form of physical abuse [spanking] starting with a mild form of emotional abuse [no acceptance of anger]). So I repressed my anger from my earliest days. That's why my mother says I was an angel child who never cried and was always calm and happy. In other words, I didn't think I was allowed to be loud or ask for things in order to keep myself nurtured. My mom simply kept me on a schedule for feeding and that was it. My mom was under major stress, so I also probably understood that if I were loud or asked for things, I would stress her out. In other words, I learned that if I asked for my needs to be met, it would cause my mom and dad not to love me as much. That's not true, of course, but that's basically what a baby thinks. And that means that I thought my needs weren't important enough to be supplied by others and I shouldn't ask for them to be supplied by others. It also means that I thought I wasn't very important, and definitely not as important as my mother and father's needs. Anger equaled no love from my parents, basically. Just ask your mother if you were a loud, difficult baby who cried a lot or if you were a quiet, angel baby if you want to know if you experienced this as a child.

So, fast forward to my first Week 7. Someone cut me off while I was driving. I saw myself get a tiny bit angry for a split second, then I said to myself, "Oh, that guy must just be in a hurry or need to use the bathroom really bad or something." It's a technique I developed a while back (then later found out that it's a method psychology uses to prevent anger). But I stopped myself this time. I said, "Wait! I'm not gonna let my mind steal away my anger. I wanna feel it!" The second I had that thought, the anger came back and I felt it in my head. This anger I'd been so afraid of all of my life was right there, radiating out from the center of my head. So I sat with it without trying to rationalize it away. I just felt it and accepted it 100%. And after a minute or so, I realized that it felt good. It wasn't scary at all. I suddenly began laughing, because I realized that I'd been afraid of a good feeling all of these years. That's when the integration happened. I felt the odd feeling of anger in my head integrate. It moved from my head down into my chest and felt really good. I laughed and cried (happy tears) for about 15 minutes. That completely changed my outlook on everything. I became excited to deal with emotions after that, because it was such a cool experience. That's when I started feeling things in my body very strongly. When I'd go watch good movies, I'd feel my emotions all throughout my body while watching the movie, where as before, I barely felt anything in my body at all. Music is cool too, because I have integrations while I listen to it--not all songs, but good songs that really heighten my positive emotions. It's very cool. I'm not sure how much I've integrated while listening to music, but it's quite a bit.

I'm not saying that you'll for sure have integrations in Week 7--it's different for everyone. All I'm saying is that if you hang in there and you pay attention to yourself and trust that you can feel your emotions without worry that you'll do something awful or feel something unbearable, you'll eventually start to feel them and start having integrations. Just hang in there. You'll make it there eventually, and it's totally worth it once you get there.

A month or two before I did TPP, I noticed that I had an intellectual wall keeping me from experiencing emotions. When I would get into a situation that should cause emotions to rise up in me, I would think about it and rationalize it in some way so that I wouldn't have a reason to get angry or sad or scared or whatever. That was a huge coping mechanism that I thought was healthy, but finally realized was dysfunctional. So I sat down and had a talk with that part of me. I said, "Alright, you've done a great job of keeping me safe up to this point. But as an adult, it's not working anymore. It's causing health problems and emotional problems. So what began as a means for protecting us is now something that hurts us. Thank you so much for helping me all of these years, but it's time for you to rest and no longer block, because we need to feel our emotions in order to heal." That was a good first step for me, because it removed a coping mechanism, allowing me to get one step closer to feeling my emotions.

Before TPP, I developed a way to work with emotions. I'd use muscle testing to figure out the emotional problem and the belief that caused that problem. Then I'd talk to that part of myself in an unconditionally loving way and have it stop harming my body. I would correct it's harmful belief, too, which was keeping it dysfunctional. Once the belief was corrected, it would integrate. So I had one or two integrations before TPP. When I learned TPP, I learned how to fully integrate stuff more readily. It taught me how to feel my emotions again. It was really awesome. I highly recommend picturing your pain as a little kid (as you at age 6) and then let yourself express that anger in your mind as if you're that 6 year old. Just imagine beating up on someone whom the anger is directed toward. Figure out who that kid is angry with and beat them up in your mind as if you're that kid with those emotions. Feel the emotions and express them there. I do this because anger can't be reasoned with and just needs to be expressed in some healthy, safe way. Once it gets expressed sufficiently, then that part of me will move into sadness/grief/loss and start crying. That's the point at which I can love on it more effectively and correct it's dysfunctional belief that keeps it from integrating. So while it's angry, I empathize with it, letting it know that I accept it completely and I understand why it's angry and I don't blame it one bit for being angry. When I execute that anger in my mind through my imagination, I'm completely accepting of that part of me as it does that (as I do it through that part of me). It's like there are two of me--the more mature, adult part of me, and this angry, immature younger part of me. When the anger is spent, I just get to the root of what's causing the anger and grief, and I rationalize with that part of me to correct it's belief. Once it's corrected, that part of me sees that it wants to drop its old belief and integrate. So I clean that part of me up in a waterfall and take it to God and have it give it's heart to Him so He can clean off the bad programming and much. God hands it back to him, and he feels better. I do the same thing with myself, as if he and I are doing all of that together. Once we're done, we hug and integrate. By integrate, I mean he absorbs into me in my imagination, so we're becoming one person instead of two. It's like adding a hard part of my heart back to the soft part. It moves from dysfunctional emotion to functional emotion--from feeling angry or sad or scared to feeling happy, peaceful, and unconditional love. I don't always have to go through that process to integrate emotions, but I use it sometimes because I see emotions not integrating when they should've already integrated.

Look at it like this--this dysfunctional child inside wasn't allowed to be immature when she was a kid. Her parents didn't allow it in some way. So now, you're her parent--her new authority figure--and you have to show her the unconditional love she needed back then. And when you do, she'll mature into love. That's the key. Life is about maturity, not "right and wrong" or "good and bad." It's about maturing into our natural unconditional love despite our difficulties we experience. The difficulties are what make it possible for us to move through from immaturity to maturity. The more difficulties we have, the more progress we can make maturing. Difficulties are positive and for our growth, and we have to start seeing them that way instead of judging them as bad if we want to integrate them. They're all required, and they were planned ahead of time. Personally, I believe they were planned ahead of time by us and God. I think we asked God to set up our life so we could go through those things in order to learn and mature our hearts. I get that from all of the research I've done on near-death experiences where people die, go to heaven, then get resuscitated (come back to life because a doctor revived them through something like CPR). They all say very similar things about their experience with God. And their experiences show them that they made agreements with people in heaven before they came to earth--agreements to do things on earth for that person. For instance, people will meet their future children in heaven. Their children will say, "You have to go back, because you made a contract with me to have me as your child before you were born. If you don't go back, I'll never be born." That convinces the person to go back to her body, and then she gets revived by a medic and ends up back in her body. That tells me that we set all of this up before we came here, and we did so of our own free will. God's all about free will, because that's what unconditional love is all about. It doesn't force anything. It lets everything be and it manages in kindness. Hell is even kind--it's to break our resistance to God's help without forcing our free will. It causes us to use our free will to finally accept God instead of the painful things that caused us to resist Him in the first place. It allows us to embrace Love, and which is God's primary trait.

So I correct the beliefs of those different dysfunctional parts of me with beliefs like what I just explained. And it allows them to integrate/heal.

If I had to guess, I'd say you probably repressed your emotions with TPP and your psychotherapy accidentally. So your new goal in TPP would be to bring those emotions out of repression so you can experience them.

Hope this helps! I look forward to hearing more of your experiences with TPP. Have a great day.

 

Hi, PPSo! Great to have you!

It's best to do one in the morning and one in the evening, but the book also says that if you need to change that schedule, that's fine. So if two times in the evening are what work best for you, that should be fine. Whatever works best.

The morning is good, because it starts the day off with a healthy dose of peace and/or emotional processing. But again, it's not an absolute requirement.

Can't wait to hear your experiences with TPP! Have a great day!

 

Thanks, Brian for the answer! I'm looking forward to the rest of the process.

Another inquiry I have is: It's been a few days since I started and I've cried 3 times already. It's not about unconscious memories surfacing though. It's recent memories and current struggles that make me tearful. I'm enjoying the crying. Does it take a while for unconscious memories to surface?

 

PPSo,

It's different for everyone, really. I don't really have any memories that I don't remember, so I'm not a good one to ask about that. I don't remember anything before age 5, pretty much. And that's pretty normal, but I've heard some people remember things all the way back to age 2. Who knows what we're supposed to remember, but I generally accept age 5 as the time where our memory really starts storing long-term. My wife's a neuroscientist and says that's the norm. Are you sure you have repressed memories? If you remember your childhood, then you might not have any old repressed memories that pop up.

Shoot me an email when you get a chance and I'll ask you a few quick questions to get an idea for whether you'll have old memories popping up or not. I won't be able to say for sure, but I can probably give you a pretty good indication.

cephyr13@yahoo.com