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What else would I need to do?
Yesterday I watched the 2hr video of Dr Sarno that I found on another thread. I appreciate that he has dared to go beyond conventional medicine to explain what looks really puzzling to a physician, he has not gone far enough. He has looked around and said to himself "what else do we have to try and explain these seeming inexplicable situations, because I can see my patient has no physical reason for the pain and yet they feel pain". Thus he has found Freud, which is part of conventional medicine and has used the Freudian theories that ideas that are bothersome come from the past. I would have agreed with him in the past but I have seen some startling evidence that leads me in a different direction.
My first reaction to his theory was that ideas of themselves have no volition. They cannot rise up from or act in the subconscious and have an effect. You only need to sit in meditation and watch the activities of mind to see this reality. Ideas arise out of nowhere and then disappear again. Rather it is ideas that are in the present that are troublesome but those ideas are also accompanied by volition. I found that toxic people use ideas that are general to describe some real event and then utilize those ideas with a changed meaning to convey an intention of harm.
I think the most important thing that Dr Sarno has offered through his work is that physical illnesses
can be the result of what we think or more correctly ideas we uphold with confidence. But he has tried to explain it using what he has been taught at university and that is the medical paradigm, that the body is a machine and that physical illnesses have physical causes. I have a science degree and only studied human anatomy and physiology and microbiology as part of that degree and I had firmly believed this paradigm. He has a lot more training than me and I think if the teaching at university can affect me with much less learning in biology then how much more it has affected him. So I can understand how he has looked to explain that the mind is the brain or the brains activities and that the self is some computer program in the machine. With this thinking he has gone on to reason that the brain is making decisions for you. Thus he has tried to explain the muscle tensions that causes pain as the brain doing this to cause distraction. But for a lot of people this is a stumbling block because you have to take it on blind faith. And furthermore it is dis-empowering. One cannot help but ask "if the self I feel is a computer program or some how generated by the brain then what control do I have to make changes.
A very bad experience in 2000, in which I experienced breathing difficulties and serious chest pain, liberated me. I had had these health problems many times before and had been diagnosed by different physicians as being associated with my heart. However their opinions varied greatly and their solutions were scary so I had gone to Chinese medicine and saw some relief but nothing permanent. On this occasion, out of desperation to stop me from leaving him, my late husband revealed to me what he had done to adversely influence me. I saw indisputable evidence that ideas had caused me to react and with this realization the pain and the breathing difficulties vanished in the space of a few minutes. This experience seriously challenged the medical paradigm that I had learnt at university and which I had accepted for the previous 20 years without question.
The shift I made in belief, which has made the most unbelievable difference to my health, is that
the body is purpose-driven and not a machine. Ideas cause reactions in the body. Furthermore I have realized that the mind and consciousness are not physical. I also have realized that the self is an identification with the activities of mind, i.e., ideas and belief, thus those ideas cause a reaction and that reaction is in the body.
For instance an idea of some type of work is "back breaking work" will give rise to muscle tension in the back /lower back. Muscle do tense up sometime but they also need to relax. If the idea is believed then there is ongoing muscle tension. This then creates many different problems, eg tension in tendons and pulling bones over a long time, over-activity in the nerves feeding the muscles and inflammation etc. All of these actions contribute to pain. Once you see that the idea is just some hateful suggestion, then you discharge it and laugh. You relax, so your muscles relax and your body returns to resting metabolism. In resting states any jobs the body needs to do to restore health are done but most of all the pain vanishes.
I also realized that owing to the foul games that my late husband had played, and which he had admitted to in the end, I could see that the fear was due to a threat he had made to me mentally by exploiting a close and trusted relationship. So I realized that in the pasts I was using the fear as evidence for the idea. And this fear was often subliminal and I was only aware of feeling hot or even as having "lots energy". Now I am able to dismiss a troublesome ideas easily so I am able to avoid health problems and have good health.
