Call in Book Discussion: May 13th

BruceMC

BruceMC

Beloved Grand Eagle
This Tuesday (May 13th) the call-in discussion group will be discussing “Eric's Journey – Chapter 5” and “Walt's Journey – Chapter 5 ” in God Does Not Want You to Be in Pain by forum members Eric "Herbie" Watson and Walt Oleksy. The recorded discussion will start at 9:00pm Eastern Time. Phone lines will open about half an hour early for folks to talk beforehand, off the recording. Connection details are as follows (for more detailed instructions, visit www.tmswiki.org/ppd/connect ):

• If you're connecting by phone, dial 1 201-479-4595 and when prompted enter the pin code 18311499 followed by the pound symbol.

• If you're connecting via your computer (Fuze Meeting), go to http://fuze.me/18311499 and follow the instructions from there.

For more information about the discussion group, and to listen to all past recorded discussions, visit www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Call-In_Peer_Discussion_Group.

God Does Not Want You to be in Pain: Proven Techniques and Faith Can Heal You (2014)

Eric’s Journey - Chapter 5: “The Glow of the Faithful” and “The Visit” – About Perceptions, Knowledge Therapy, How to Know It’s TMS, pp. 118-130

Walt’s Journey - Chapter 5: Journaling 3: “Of Love and Sauerkraut”, pp. 131-142

Summaries

Eric’s Journey - Chapter 5: “The Glow of the Faithful” and “The Visit” – About Perceptions, Knowledge Therapy, How to Know It’s TMS, pp. 118-130.

In this chapter, Eric chronicles his transformation from alcoholic to Sunday school teacher to reborn Christian healer while demonstrating, in the process, a direct connection between Dr Sarno’s injunction that you must believe 100% that “there is nothing physically wrong or broken in your body” and the principles underlying Christian religious belief. Eric notes that despite being “lost” in the wilderness while using wine as a way to dull his TMS pain, finally through “prayer and faith and acceptance of pain” his “new-found knowledge” made him stronger and helped him to find his spiritual avocation at last.

14 thoughts to ponder and how to know it’s TMS

Eric ends this chapter with a list of thoughts to ponder and a very useful check sheet for determining whether your pain is structural or due to TMS. He admits that this is very hard to do if you’ve been told by MDs and PTs based on an MRI that a structural problem such as a bulging disk or something abnormal in you leg, neck, or shoulder is causing your pain.

1. Can you remember when you took some “me time” to go out and appreciate your life?

2. Have you taken time in the last month to relax and meditate on purpose?

3. Always strive to draw connections between your pain and certain situational and emotional patterns, asking whether you were under unusual stress of any kind at the onset of your pain symptoms? Does it only occur when your driving, or when you’re angry or upset?

4. Be especially aware that, very often, thought precedes the pain, instead of the other way around. Does the pain develop in the morning after being absent all night? As Eric notes, you’ll find that you’ll be thinking about your back only a moment before the pain starts there.

5. If your pain went away previously using TMS self-treatment therapy “you can be close to positive it’s TMS again”. As Eric emphasizes, you have to “remember TMS is there to trick you and make you think each new pain is something physical.”

6. Does the quality of the pain (sharp, dull, ongoing, intermittent etc) match up with certain preconceived ideas you might have about how a particular symptoms might feel? If you recognize the connection, it probably is conditioned pain thinks Eric.

7. Does the pain have tendency to go away when you’re busy or preoccupied with something else? That is, does the pain disappear when you stop focusing on it?

8. Are you habitually TMSing? Do you tend to get upset when things don’t work out right? Do you always try to do your best but feel no matter how hard you try it’s never good enough? Such habits of mind lead to further anxiety, stress, tension, strain and pain.

9. When you help others in distress do you feel like you could or should have done more?

10. Unconscious psychological conditioning that you were not even aware of is the problem, not the way you move, lie or sit.

11. Practice thinking you’re not going to hurt each time before and after you do your conditioned activities like running, typing, exercising etc.

12. Start to be aware of your thoughts.

13. Start to expect that you won’t hurt each time you move in a conditioned way or else meditate on feeling and seeing yourself pain-free.


Walt’s Journey - Chapter 5: Journaling 3: “Of Love and Sauerkraut”, pp. 131-142

Again, Walt’s Chapter 5 is based largely on a series of personal vignettes he has taken from his TMS journaling assignments. Thematically, it weaves together a series of incidents involving personal betrayal by tenants, friends and family members that lead his forgiving those who have gone out of their way to take advantage of his good nature. There’s Jake and Fran that Walt describes as the “Couple from Hell” who deliberately trashed the apartment Walt rented them in order to avoid paying rent. There’s Ed, the future do-nothing politician, who took Walt for a $2 grand advance while performing no work in return. And there’s even his dictatorial mother who arbitrarily threw out all of his high school momentos but who he felt guilty about being unable to take care of during his last years. Through this spiritual progression from anger to compassion, Walt also works his way back to an admittedly flawed Catholic Church. Incidentally, this isn’t very far from the same position many divines, like John Donne or Jonathan Swift, have come to by separating the ideal Church from the visible Church. Walt ends this chapter with a parable worthy of Aesop about Lawrence Anthony, the “Elephant Whisperer” and the extremely intelligent and compassionate animals he champion for so long that illustrates the little understood intuitive, empathetic connection between the minds of men and animals.
 
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Bruce, thanks for the posting about the next meeting.

I think call-ins will really be interested in Herbie's two spiritual stories in his chapters.

I think mine about caregiving for my mother should only take a few minutes.
 
No, I think your Chapter 5 is an interesting tale of personal betrayal leading to redemption and forgiveness followed by a parable worthy of Aesop about the little understood intuitive connection between the minds of man and animal. There! I've got a lead in for my summary and you gave me the nudge I needed to invent it, Walt. Thanks!
 
How in the world do I edit my entry in this string? I have a bunch more to add and the edit menu doesn't appear at the bottom of my post? Does the thread lock when there are so many replies to the OP?
 
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Here's the final version of the summary of Eric and Walter's Chapters in God Does Not Want You To Be In Pain:

This Tuesday (May 13th) the call-in discussion group will be discussing “Eric's Journey – Chapter 5” and “Walt's Journey – Chapter 5 ” in God Does Not Want You to Be in Pain by forum members Eric "Herbie" Watson and Walt Oleksy. The recorded discussion will start at 9:00pm Eastern Time. Phone lines will open about half an hour early for folks to talk beforehand, off the recording. Connection details are as follows (for more detailed instructions, visit www.tmswiki.org/ppd/connect ):

• If you're connecting by phone, dial 1 201-479-4595 and when prompted enter the pin code 18311499 followed by the pound symbol.

• If you're connecting via your computer (Fuze Meeting), go to http://fuze.me/18311499 and follow the instructions from there.

For more information about the discussion group, and to listen to all past recorded discussions, visit www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Call-In_Peer_Discussion_Group.

God Does Not Want You to be in Pain: Proven Techniques and Faith Can Heal You (2014)


Eric’s Journey - Chapter 5: “The Glow of the Faithful” and “The Visit” – About Perceptions, Knowledge Therapy, How to Know It’s TMS, pp. 118-130.


Walt’s Journey - Chapter 5: Journaling 3: “Of Love and Sauerkraut”, pp. 131-142.


Summaries

Eric’s Journey - Chapter 5: “The Glow of the Faithful” and “The Visit” – About Perceptions, Knowledge Therapy, How to Know It’s TMS, pp. 118-130.

In this chapter, Eric chronicles his miraculous transformation from alcoholic back pain sufferer to Sunday school teacher to reborn Christian healer. Eric connects Dr Sarno’s injunction that you must believe 100% “there is nothing physically wrong or broken in your body” with Christian religious belief. Despite being “lost” in a spiritual wildness for over ten years, “prayer and faith and acceptance of pain” have finally given him a “new-found knowledge” that has strengthened his faith in Jesus at the same time it helped him heal his back pain.

Eric’s conversion began one Sunday morning “with a bottle of wine in my hand and feeling hopeless” as he watched parishioners emerging from “the little white church on hill” which he decided to begin attending in order to learn “the finer points in life.” He wondered to himself outloud why the “true believers” he encountered there looked so happy and peaceful when he was so depressed? But that morning as he processed his thoughts, Eric started “feeling the emotion of hope”. He eventually felt what he had to do was to stop “fearing things I had to do to make a change in my life”. He made a promise to himself to “never listen to those self-defeating thoughts again” because knew he had to reprogram his mind and get his thoughts and emotions under control. This all happened when Eric realized being the “the coolest guy at the party” was turning him into a “person that no one wanted to be around” because the pain was beating him up and the relief from alcohol was no longer working that way it had 10 years earlier.

Teaching Baptist Sunday School to Kids

As he learned to be a Baptist, which Eric found was a skill that required “the endurance of four men and the thinking ability of Solomon”, he began doing more and more volunteer work for the church, “fixing the roof, cutting grass, and selling stuff at rummage sales”. After about a year as a probationer, a veteran Sunday school teacher asked him to teach a “Sunday Bible class for a few weeks, to see how I liked it.” The Church elders voted 7 to 0 that Eric should start teaching Sunday school the very next week. He wanted to amaze them with “the 14 years of knowledge the Lord had bestowed upon me in the form of psychology”. That is to say, he wanted to combine Bible studies with his own hard-earned knowledge of modern psychology. Whenever his new duties made Eric nervous he used the techniques of awareness and acceptance to calm himself down. He says here that acceptance involves “letting go of the problem, and being aware that you’re okay with it”. One day after studying the text in Jeremiah about “the valley of dry bones”, Eric told the kids to close their Bibles because now the was going to tell them “about the power you really have living inside of you” by comparing something they were all familiar with from contemporary culture, the Harry Potter movies, with the miraculous healing powers Jesus used to raise the dead and cure paralysis.

Eric ends this section of the chapter by stating that there is nothing magical about belief. “In TMS healing, it all comes down to believing 100% that there is nothing physically wrong or broken in your body. It’s all pain from repressed emotions, most likely going back to when you were the age of the boys and girls” in the Sunday school that day. He thinks its all about “clean thinking and getting back into connection with nature”.

About Perceptions

In this section, Eric says that one day while watching the motivational speaker Joel Osteen on television he got a “feeling of love all around me”. This took place outside of what he calls “my aura” two feet out in front of him in his “energy space”. This is what Eric had heard was called “liquid love” that isn’t the result of drugs or alcohol. This was also when he was healed after 25 years of back pain at the moment he accepted “the belief that all my pain could be controlled by my Mindbody”. In other words, Eric finally realized that he “was bringing pain to myself through thinking, and that I could think that I don’t have to have to accept the pain anymore, and that it will not rule me.” This seemed to confirm what Dr. Sarno had said in Healing Back Pain about reaching that “Aha Moment” at that point where we accept that our pain is caused solely by repressed emotions, 100 percent.

Knowledge Therapy

Incompletely healed at 30 from what had happened in his front yard when he was 15, Eric’s back pain returned with a vengeance when he was 39 for what he says was “a solid year”. Back when he was 30 working out against the pain worked, only now that kind of aggressive strategy only intensified his suffering more. What worked when he was 25 or 30 didn't seem to do the trick when he was 40. But today Eric is as he says, “pain free” because of studies of TMS, both by posting on the TMSwiki Forum and studying Dr Sarno’s Healing Back Pain book “front to back”. He also studied Sarno’s first book, Mind Over Back Pain (which he wants to study a lot more) and his last book, The Divided Mind.

He thought that finally understanding TMS healing made him feel like he “was ready to go on vacation”. It got rid of his pain, but didn’t change who he was. Instead, it changed the way he was thinking about certain things. He now knows that he can “change anything by believing in my mind that it’s real or not real”. Awareness, acceptance and meditation will eventually lead you to a point where you will suddenly understand the TMS process and know how to reverse it. Eric thinks that writing about your repressed emotions is more important than identifying the specific emotion you are trying to repress. But he believes that if you can hit around it or hit at it, the TMS pain will start to ease up in your body.

Eric also thinks you need to stop what he calls triggers – the anxieties and bad thoughts that prompt you to think back on past emotions that give you your TMS pain. Instead, you should Eric insists “make yourself happy right now by thinking and believing you are content with what you have”. Stress will simply disappear because you won’t have anything to stress about. Eric also recommends getting a trusted friend who can truthfully evaluate you and tell you things about yourself you can’t see in the mirror. This should help you identify personality traits that you might not know exist. He likewise recommends believing 110% in the work of TMS healing and Dr. Sarno’s 12 daily reminders.

The Visit

In a waking dream, Eric says he had a visit from Jesus who was “gold and shining, standing in an aura of bright yellow light”. As this figure floated toward him he felt “healing” going through his body that was “ten times stronger than this flowing healing that I just wrote about” and he felt “100 percent that my back was totally healed”. This figure now changed into an angel that was like the Lord was saying that he was there with him and healing him. Eric says that all of the knowledge in the healing books and on the TMSWiki forums is derived from Jesus’s teachings from over 2000 years ago.

14 thoughts to ponder and how to know it’s TMS

Eric ends this chapter with a list of thoughts to ponder mixed in with a very useful check sheet for determining whether your pain is structural or due to TMS. He admits that this is very hard to do if you’ve been told by MDs and PTs based on an MRI that a structural problem such as a bulging disk or something abnormal in you leg, neck, or shoulder is causing your pain.

1. Can you remember when you took some “me time” to go out and appreciate your life?

2. Have you taken time in the last month to relax and meditate on purpose?

3. Always strive to draw connections between your pain and certain situational and emotional patterns, asking whether you were under unusual stress of any kind at the onset of your pain symptoms? Does it only occur when you’re driving, or when you’re angry or upset?

4. Be especially aware that, very often, thought precedes TMS pain, instead of the other way around. Does the pain develop in the morning after being absent all night? As Eric notes, you’ll find that you’ll be thinking about your back only a moment before the pain starts there.

5. If your pain went away previously using TMS self-treatment therapy “you can be close to positive it’s TMS again”. Eric points out that you have to “remember TMS is there to trick you and make you think each new pain is something physical.”

6. Does the quality of the pain (sharp, dull, ongoing, intermittent etc) match up with certain preconceived ideas you might have about how a particular symptoms might feel? If you recognize the connection, it probably is conditioned pain Eric thinks.

7. Does the pain have tendency to go away when you’re busy or preoccupied with something else? That is, does the pain disappear when you stop focusing on it?

8. Are you habitually TMSing? Do you tend to get upset when things don’t work out right? Do you always try to do your best but feel no matter how hard you try it’s never good enough? Such perfectionist habits of mind lead to further anxiety, stress, tension, strain and pain.

9. When you help others in distress do you feel like you could or should have done more? This is characteristic of a goodist personality.

10. Unconscious psychological conditioning that you were not even aware of is the problem, not the way you move, lie or sit.

11. Practice thinking you’re not going to hurt each time before and after you do your conditioned activities like running, typing, exercising etc.

12. Start to be aware of your thoughts.

13. Start to expect that you won’t hurt each time you move in a conditioned way or else meditate on feeling and seeing yourself pain-free.


Walt’s Journey - Chapter 5: Journaling 3: “Of Love and Sauerkraut”, pp. 131-142

Again, Walt’s Chapter 5 is based largely on a series of personal vignettes he has borrowed from his TMS journaling assignments. Thematically, it weaves together a series of incidents involving personal betrayal by tenants, friends and family members that lead him forgiving those who have gone out of their way to take advantage of his good nature. There’s Jake and Fran that Walt describes as the “Couple from Hell” who deliberately trashed the apartment Walt rented them in order to avoid paying rent. There’s Ed, the future do-nothing politician, who took Walt for a $2 grand advance while performing no research work in return. And there’s even his dictatorial mother who arbitrarily threw out all of his high school mementos but who he felt guilty about being unable to take care of during his last years. Through this spiritual progression from anger to compassion, Walt also works his way back to an admittedly flawed worldly Catholic Church. Incidentally, this isn’t very far from the same position many divines, like John Donne or Jonathan Swift, have come to by separating the ideal Church from the visible Church. Walt ends this chapter with a parable worthy of Aesop about Lawrence Anthony, the “Elephant Whisperer,” and the extremely intelligent and compassionate animals he champion for so long that illustrates the little understood intuitive, empathetic connection between the minds of men and animals.
Even if you discontent anthropocentrism, the spectacle of the African elephant making a pilgrimage to Anthony’s home after his death is still quite emotionally moving because it illustrates that point where all minds flow into one another like Thomas Moore’s Anima Mundi, the Renaissance precursor to what C.G. Jung called the collective unconscious.
 
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This is an awesome rundown summary BruceMC. Thank You so much. I really like number 11. Practice thinking you’re not going to hurt each time before and after you do your conditioned activities like running, typing, exercising etc... Because this is where I got to visualize myself getting better and better and then reaping the rewards.
Number 9. When you help others in distress do you feel like you could or should have done more?
This one was an awesome lesson to know cause I didn't know how hard I was really being on myself till I became aware ya know.
Awesome BruceMC.
 
Well, Herbie, you wrote it, I only paraphrased your words in my summary. Sounds like you could separate the items that apply to how to know it's TMS from things to keep in mind. Make 'em into two lists in the book. More impact.
 
Yes out of the 13 steps I knew they we're a bit in two directions. I was trying all parts of the readers conscious.
Thanks for your wisdom for sure. Very , very good idea.
 
You're right, the chapters touch them all.

I just made changes in the book so the chapters are all okay now on the contents pages and in the book.
I also added a little about the Presence Process from Herbie.

The book is now FINALLY finished and ready to buy in paperback and Kindle.
I'll be sending you a copy.
 
I think I already have a copy from Herbie. Will this final version be different then? With a revised TOC with colophon and publication date?
 
Walt's Journey - 2 on page 77 is Walt's Journey - 3 in the TOC. Little stuff like that throughout. Can't find Michael Brown or the Presence Process in the Index, so I don't know if they're in my copy.
 
Hey all,

Here's the audio from this past Tuesday's discussion of the two "Journey - 5" chapters. As per usual you can listen to it using the audio player below, or you can download the recording as an mp3 file by right-clicking on this link (or the link below the player) and choosing to save it to your computer. Happy listening :headphone:!


Click here to download the mp3 audio​

Next week: “Eric's Journey – 6” and “Walt's Journey – 6” in God Does Not Want You to Be in Pain. Keep your eyes open for another masterful summary of these two chapters by the one and only @BruceMC !
 
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