For @Adam Coloretti (coach) 
... and, of course, anyone else who may be interested...
The following are some quotations mainly from mind-body books that have helped me on my 'journey' out of pain (and other symptoms)...
From "The Pain Reprocessing Workbook" by Vanessa Blackstone:
From "The Psychology of Pain" by Dr James Alexander:
From "50 Sentences That Make Life Easier" by Karin Kuschik:
From "Beyond Anxiety" by Martha Beck:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From "The Tao of Healing: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Mind" by Pete Cossaboon:
From "Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within" by Chade-Meng Tan
From "One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way" by Robert Maurer Ph.D.:
(Kaizen = doing things in "baby steps")
... and, of course, anyone else who may be interested...The following are some quotations mainly from mind-body books that have helped me on my 'journey' out of pain (and other symptoms)...
From "The Pain Reprocessing Workbook" by Vanessa Blackstone:
- If making pain go away is the outcome you’re set on, paradoxically, it’ll make it that much harder to actually achieve. Understandably, you want out of pain..... But the tighter you hold onto that goal, the further away it will be.
- The goal is not to make the pain go away and never come back but to change the way in which you respond to pain when it arises. The sneaky truth? Learning to respond to pain in an outcome independent manner is what ultimately causes the pain to go away.
- If you can learn to view pain as simply a sensation—rather than a problem that needs to go away—you’ll be operating from a place of safety, which, in turn, will make the pain and its consequences easier to deal with. Operating from a place of threat, on the other hand, can entrench the pain further and make it an even bigger problem to surmount than it would otherwise be.
- Remember that your job is not to control fear or make it go away. Your only job is to notice it when it arises.
- If a pervasive sense of danger lies at the root of neuroplastic pain, what is the corresponding remedy? Perhaps not surprisingly, the remedy lies in safety, or the opposite of danger. The more familiar the nervous system becomes with safety, the less it will err on the side of caution, and as it begins to relax its better-safe-than-sorry approach, the less prone it will be to mistaking safe sensations for dangerous ones.
- Safety doesn’t always mean everything is pristine and perfect. What it does mean is that, even amid stress and worry, your body is no longer sabotaging you. You’re providing your brain with a new set of glasses, ones that see neutral sensations for what they truly are: harmless.
From "The Psychology of Pain" by Dr James Alexander:
- Chronic pain also may be a ‘stance’ which the mind/body takes, a statement of ‘no’, where the person is unable to verbalise such a position.
- Being highly responsible appears to be a personality trait related to chronic pain. Sufferers are often people who will repeatedly put other’s needs first and their own needs second out of a sense of responsibility. This goes along with a desire to be viewed as “good” by authority figures.
- It is not necessary to eliminate every stressful situation or upset emotion in your life, although it does make sense to address the situations that you can. It is more important to become aware of the deeply held emotional causes of the pain, and how these interact with misinformation to protect us in some way - this is the hidden purpose of chronic pain, and it can continue until “the jig is up”, and you realize what psychological harm the pain is protecting you from.
- The unconscious is terrified of these deep emotional pains and conflicts, and believes that they must be avoided at all costs. Most people, however, can cope, and the fears of the unconscious are usually found to be unwarranted.
- The very act of acknowledging the negative can be healing in itself, even if we choose to do nothing about them.
- Awareness of the psychosomatic process, knowledge that this condition is generally reversible, and a willingness to look into the negative is all that is required for most people to overcome chronic pain.
- You can subvert the brain’s strategy of using pain as a distraction by instead choosing to focus on areas of distress in your life, and consciously thinking about them in relation to the pain.
- The suggestion here is that you would benefit from listening less to what your mind or ego or story has to say, and simply focus on what is actually happening in the present moment. Alan Watts was fond of suggesting “lose your mind as many times as possible each day in order to retain your sanity!”
From "50 Sentences That Make Life Easier" by Karin Kuschik:
- The absence of an apology drives some people mad. So, then what? Here’s my idea. Let the following sentence really sink in. Its power lies in its capacity to pacify that nagging sense of injustice: ‘Life becomes easier when we accept an apology we never received.’
- The atmosphere in the Berlin recording studio is frantic. The manager of a well-known folk singer is shouting at the producer and he’s barking back at him. The singer herself appears completely relaxed, sipping her latte. I’m there as the lyricist, and when I ask her how she manages to stay so calm in the midst of all the chaos, she just shrugs and says: ‘I decide who pushes my buttons.’ Wow, what a great line! It’s me who decides?! I immediately resolve to add this sentence to my list of magic mantras. And since then, it’s made my life easier – and those of hundreds of my clients – in wondrous ways.
From "Beyond Anxiety" by Martha Beck:
- This is the self-defeating logic of anxiety; it makes us truly believe that the only way to feel safe is to never feel safe.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From "The Tao of Healing: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Mind" by Pete Cossaboon:
- There is a strange paradox at the heart of all true healing: the harder you chase it, the further away it seems to drift. The more desperately you try to force wholeness, the more fragmented you feel. We live in a culture that worships effort, that believes anything worthwhile must be wrestled into existence through discipline, intervention, and sheer force of will. But the Tao speaks a different language, one so soft, so profoundly counter to our conditioning, that at first it sounds like heresy: Stop trying so hard. Step back. Allow.
- To master the art of allowing is to enter into partnership with mystery. It is to accept that you are not the architect of your own salvation, but the steward of the soil in which it blooms. You cultivate conditions: rest, kindness, presence, breath. You remove the obvious impediments: judgment, resistance, denial. You sit with yourself in the long evenings of uncertainty, tending the small, tender shoots of change as they emerge, without yanking them toward the sun. You become, not the sculptor, but the field. Not the soldier, but the stream. And yet this allowing requires a courage fiercer than striving ever did. It demands the courage to trust life’s currents when they do not immediately please or reassure you. It demands the humility to surrender to timelines you cannot predict. It demands the patience to endure discomfort without rushing to eradicate it, the faith to believe that even the barren seasons are doing sacred work below the surface.
From "Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within" by Chade-Meng Tan
- ... every time you have to wait, take a mindful breath. I spend a lot of my time waiting, and I imagine you do too. I wait at traffic stops and at lunch queues. I wait at the airport, at the train station, and at the taxi stand. I wait for meetings to begin, for VIPs to arrive, for my computer to start up, for webpages to load up. So much waiting. Every time I need to wait, I take one or more mindful breaths. This is a wonderful practice with many benefits. First, I never waste any time anymore, because every moment I wait is a moment I get to spend productively, practicing mindfulness meditation. Second, if the waiting causes me any agitation, I get to use the breath to calm down. And perhaps best of all, once you do this practice often enough that it becomes a habit, you will never be bored anymore because boredom itself becomes a cue. At the first sign of boredom, the mind goes like, “Yay! I get to meditate.” And then the mind just spontaneously engages in meditation. No more boredom.
From "One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way" by Robert Maurer Ph.D.:
(Kaizen = doing things in "baby steps")
- Your brain is programmed to resist change. But, by taking small steps, you effectively rewire your nervous system so that it does the following: “unsticks” you from a creative block, bypasses the fight-or-flight response, creates new connections between neurons so that the brain enthusiastically takes over the process of change.
- Just as it happened with our ancestors on the savanna, the brain restricts the cortex in order to get us moving away from the lion—but now the lion is a piece of paper called a test or a goal of losing weight, finding a mate, or creating a sales result. Creativity and purposeful action are suppressed exactly when we need them the most! The little steps of kaizen are a kind of stealth solution to this quality of the brain.
- Instead of spending years in counseling to understand why you’re afraid of looking great or achieving your professional goals, you can use kaizen to go around or under these fears. Small, easily achievable goals—such as picking up and storing just one paper clip on a chronically messy desk—let you tiptoe right past the amygdala, keeping it asleep and unable to set off alarm bells. As your small steps continue and your cortex starts working, the brain begins to create “software” for your desired change, actually laying down new nerve pathways and building new habits. Soon, your resistance to change begins to weaken. Where once you might have been daunted by change, your new mental software will have you moving toward your ultimate goal at a pace that may well exceed your expectations.
- Kaizen helps you defeat the fear of change in another way. When you are afraid, the brain is programmed either to run or attack—not always the most practical options. If you’ve always wanted to be a songwriter, for example, you will not achieve your goal if you get up from the piano keyboard out of fear or creative blockage and spend the night watching television instead. Small actions (say, writing just three notes) satisfy your brain’s need to do something and soothe its distress. As the alarms die down, you’ll renew access to the cortex and get some of your creative juices flowing again.
- "I got better when I became more interested in my life than in my symptoms." - Anon
Last edited:
So much wisdom. And worth reading regularly.
