Just want to share

Hi everyone,
I am on day 27 and am so grateful for this site and the people I wanted to share something. I have a long story which I will post soon in my personal profile. But for right now I wanted to say somethings about my experience up until this day. I found out about Dr. Sarno listening to a TMS success story while searching YouTube looking for back problem solutions. Before finding Dr. Sarno I has developed a sharp grabbing pain in one glute that radiated down the side of my leg and up with another sharp grabbing pain right above my ankle that was worse than the pain in my glute and was so bad I could not walk 100 meters without having to sit down. Just reading Dr. Sarno's book brought me instant relief because I identified with it so much. I didn't become pain free right away but the pain lessened quite a bit. What I would do with the pain was just work through it and force myself to walk and just concentrate on the idea that the pain was not coming from my back but was coming from my unconscious feeling of rage and fear. Things got better and things got worse but no matter what I am still doing the program because now that I know what the root cause is I refuse to be incapacitated. I have returned to the gym and I am slowly building up my workouts.When I have pain I stop and think what might be the unconscious emotional cause that is creating the pain. At first I was not very good at identifying what it might be but I am getting better. And it is surprising sometimes how obvious it is. The other day I began to have sharp pain in my glute and I stopped to think what it might be and realized that I had just gotten off of the phone with my business partner and we are having a rough go of it at the moment with a lot money problems and when I was able to see that my anxiety and fear and anger over my current business situation was probably the cause of the pain it started to subside. Also something that I have had to admit to is that I am probably just physically tensed up all over my body so anytime the pain flares up and I look for an unconscious emotion I also try to relax my physical body. My recovery has not been perfect but all in all it is working and I couldn't be more grateful to Dr. Sarno and this group.

 

Hi Kevin,
I enjoyed reading your report. It seems to me you are doing great work. Just having a few of these interesting moments where you connect to a psychological "source" of the pain (and see its reduction) can have very deep effects! They really help to build confidence in your understanding of TMS, and how it works in you. You're "seeing behind the curtain," and this is the most basic, fundamental, powerful practice to manifest in your TMS work. These breakthroughs are part hard work, and probably part grace (or luck), and they lead to an inner support/understanding which in time becomes indestructible.
Andy B

 

Hi Andy, thanks for your feedback. What you said is very helpful and reinforces what I believe. It also gives me some extra added strength to do the work believing that the more I do, the stronger I will become. Today was an interesting day where my pain walking to the gym was not as bad as when I first started the program but was worse than it had been in the last couple of days. So right away the mind jumped in and wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I just kept trying to focus that the pain was not because my back was bad but was all psychological and unconscious so although the pain hurt it was not going to kill me and although it is real it is not really real, if you get my drift. Today was my day to swim at the gym and when I first started to swim my pains got really funky doing a lot of weird things. So I started thinking about what it could be and sure enough I had problem earlier that day with someone who did some work for me and I was angry with them and there was no doubt it was a part of my pain. But as I was swimming I was looking at the bottom of the pool and thinking that the water below me that I was swimming in was like my unconscious. It's all the stuff that I can't see but now that I am swimming with goggles on and looking down I can envision what my unconscious might look like. So while swimming I focused that what I was looking at was my unconscious and sure enough it popped into my mind how I have totally irrational fears. Just earlier that morning I read about a young healthy teen dying from the flu. And from there I went into panic mode worrying about someone I love dying from the flu which when you think about is something that could happen but to think about it is totally irrational. You can't go through life like that. So that was a mini enlightenment that I will now put in my bag of tricks that I have to be aware of how easily I can grab on to an irrational fear and to make sure I keep that stuff conscious. Thanks again for your support.

 

This is very easy to do, based on our history of pain, fear it won't go away, fear that we have not found the right way to deal with it, and above all, a deep belief that something that feels so physical must be physical.

Just contemplating "what might be happening in the subconscious" is a powerful go-to!