When the cheeks hit the chair, there's nothing but(t) despair.
Several people have emailed me about their pain when sitting.
When you decide to take your life back you’ll no longer fear your pain, and vice versa: when you no longer fear your pain, you’ve decided to take your life back. Pain will appear, you’ll notice it, and then you’ll go ahead and do whatever you were going to do: never fearing that your pain will go anywhere. “The decision to heal” is the first step of courage; the action is the second step of courage. Taking action means that you are ready to heal. Healing takes courage, it involves a decision to heal, and then an action.
Your deeper brain wants you to fear, to hold back, to procrastinate, to be afraid of your pain. That's how TMS works. The more you fear your pain the better that your brain's strategy is working to keep you obsessed and worried, and therefore emotionally un-aware, afraid to move, even sit. Perhaps the most meaningful thing Dr. Sarno taught me was, “One has to confront TMS, fight it, or the symptoms will continue. Losing one’s fear, and resuming normal physical activity is possibly the most important part of the therapeutic process.” That statement by the good doctor began my action of courage. It said to me, “get back to living again….you’ll be ok.” And he was right, of course.
If you have TMS, then there's nothing wrong with your body. And--sitting is such a harmless act that it could never produce pain. So here you are. You have a body that's healthy and fine, and sitting isn't hurting anything. So what do you want to do? There's comes a point when you get tired of your brain using you, and you decide to take control instead of being controlled.
However, we know about the conditioned response of the brain. The more you fear the conditioned reaction the more power your deeper brain has over you, as a weapon of doubt. I reigned in my domineering brain by teaching it that there would not be any dire consequences of sitting, by proving to it that all was ok. I sat down one night and refused to get up until my pain was gone. I hyperventilated, swooned, and panicked…but my sitting pain left forever, in one night’s sitting. I took a leap of faith. This is unusual, but it can and does happen. It wasn’t the best action to heal, it was more like letting a bull loose around the good China. But it worked! I was ready to heal, I took an action.
However, I've learned through experience to never directly attack pain because that can be considered TMSing, since it's close to physical therapy. But there comes the rubicon-point where you need to decide if you want to sink or swim. In order to cross any threshold you have to leave one point behind and enter the next point; something has to be 'let go'…and that thing is fear.
I'm talking about fine lines between physical therapy and living again. You make the distinction by how your deeper brain sees the act. Is it challenging pain by attacking it? Or is it returning to normalcy by the benign act of just sitting? There's nothing wrong with your body, so just go sit. Don't build up a mountain of fear and tension, and then attack your body with sitting. Just live today how you want to.
Several folks have told me they tried what I did on the "bucking night" and they healed, like I did. Others have said they tried it and nothing changed, but this is good! They didn’t get worse. This is proof that it’s TMS, and that healing will come.
It's more efficient to do it right, and that's within the fine line of not attacking, but by calming yourself with relaxation and soothing; that all will be well. It's much like drowning in a pool of water that's only a foot deep. If you convince yourself that the water is deep, you begin to panic and struggle. But if you know ahead of time that it's only a foot deep, then you're calm as you go in; your brain doesn’t fear and create wild scenarios, increasing tension. So what's the difference between the two? It's the initial knowledge that there's no danger ahead.
So if you've convinced yourself that you're damaging your back, or that you are going to feel great pain, then the pain comes, through the Law of Attraction ("I attract to my life whatever I give my energy, focus, and attention to, whether wanted or unwanted"). The difference is in the degree of confidence that you actually have TMS, just like the degree that you're sure the water is only a foot deep. It's in the degree of belief.
Through the Law of Attraction you bring on your pain. You prepare for pain, you brace for it, you tense-up, you shorten your breathing, you excite every cell beforehand through fear and anticipation. You send signals to your cells to send you pain. You build the stage for your pain, and your play runs, successfully (to a sitting ovation).
When you do decide to sit again, you will not brace, you will relax your body, you will breathe and smile, and think of something other than your body. You will begin the transformation of your brain by creating new molecules of emotion for that particular event. Each thought (internal word) creates a neurotransmitter sending it to the matching receptor cell to create that particular experience. Create a new sitting experience by shifting your awareness to life, and away from body. Build new neurotransmitters of calm and relaxation, knowing ahead that all is ok, and will be ok. Send signals of light.
I can tell you that this works, just like Dr. Sarno discovered. You can sit any way you like for as long as you like, just like me. TMS is harmless.
But--remember to also keep working on the psychological. Breathe more deeply throughout the day from the belly. Soothe your being. See joy in things. Talk to people about how you feel, express yourself. Walk or run to burn tension, to regulate the ANS and release endorphins into the system. Perform an SMT. Laugh from your belly. Let go of fear.
Fear does not save you in most instances, it usually destroys you.
Your personality has gotten you here to TMS. “The key word in tension is personality.” Become more aware of how you see your daily life. This is a transformational process, it doesn't always happen in one night of sitting, unless your brain is finally ready to give up its strategy. When it is ready, your day will come. But you will never know the hour that you actually heal--because you will have stopped paying attention to what your body is doing each day. Some days you will have pain but you won't fear it, worry about it, assign meaning to it, or pay attention to it. This will render it useless as a distraction, and it will eventually stop trying to fool you.
The good days will become more and more, and the bad days less and less. We will always have an occasional bad day; we are emotional beings, but the good days are so worth it. We are only high because we already understand low. Each emotional state is incumbent upon another.
You will have transformed when you can see the value in the bad days, when you want to learn from those bad days.
No harm will come to you by sitting, nothing bad will occur. Take action and just do it. Your pain cannot hurt you as ironic as that sounds. All you have to do is believe in yourself. How deep is your water?
Steve
