Day 1 Acceptance and doubts

Hi James, and welcome to our forum. You're asking all the right questions, that's for sure! Everyone has doubts - not just at first, but probably the rest of our lives. And you know, not everything is TMS - but even those things that aren't TMS can still be helped with TMS awareness!

I was just telling someone how I experienced very little pain from a broken hip (bike crash) and subsequent "pinning" surgery - because I was so relieved to find out that I wouldn't be bedridden for six weeks, but that I'd be up and around on crutches the following day. The nurses were obsessed with my pain level, but I rejected the opioids and got by with minimal amounts of ibuprofen and tylenol, which I only took for about a week. This was three years before discovering TMS, so I didn't realize it at the time, but my brain was clearly totally in charge of my pain. I was convinced that the surgery would stabilize my hip, I visualized my hip being stable, and I had no anxiety about the fracture or about the surgery or the incision. I was essentially telling my brain not to worry, that I didn't need a bunch of pain, because my hip was safe and stable and I was being taken care of.

Early this year, I consciously used the same technique to get through a dental crown procedure without the third shot that my dentist has, in the past, always had to stop and administer, because at the slightest twinge I used to freak out and ask for another shot, although he would always hope that two would do it. This time, when I felt the twinge, I just told my brain to relax and back off, that there was no need to send a pain signal, because I was in the safe and capable hands of my dentist who I totally trust. The drilling went on, but the pain went away. Yeah!

Remember - your brain is in charge of every single physiological process in your body - and you have a lot more control over what your brain does to your body than you think you do. The ancient yogis have know this for centuries, but the average human doesn't believe it.

Along with the writing and journaling recommended by the program, many of our members have found a lot of success by seriously taking up meditation - in one form or another, and there are many different ways to meditate. You can use our new search engine at search.tmswiki.org, entering meditat (so you get both meditate and meditation) and start seeing what other people recommend. My favorite resource for learning "how" to meditate is an audio program called Meditations to Change Your Brain presented by a psychologist and a neuroscientist. What I love is that they make it clear how there is no one way to meditate. And their explanation of the power of meditation is compelling.

Keep us posted!

Jan