How I Healed My Chronic Pain
So there I was again crying on the toilet..
This had become a familiar place for me over the years, as I struggled with the changing patterns of irritable bowel syndrome. Whenever I thought I’d gotten a handle on it, something would set it off. To the point that I felt hopeless, lost and alone.
At one point improving my diet drastically helped the symptoms, but every now and then I would have unexplainable painful flare ups.
Something had to change
My back pain was just as bad
I was going through a similar story with back pain, I seemed to injure it while lifting weights in my early 20s and it never recovered. Doctors blamed the continuing pain on a slight form of scoliosis (which I later found out doesn’t explain pain at all), and told me at best I’d be able to manage, but never fully heal.
Just as I found relief with IBS through diet, yoga drastically helped me with my back pain. As long as I regularly did yoga and watched what I ate, it seemed that I could handle the pain around my body.
Yoga and diet seemed to stop working
At some point no matter how much yoga I did, or how careful I was with what I ate, pain persisted. As yoga and diet had worked so well in the past, I thought the solution was to become more regimented with both.
All this did was create obsessive tendencies, as I forced myself to do yoga when I didn’t feel like it and developed a healthy eating disorder known as orthorexia.
My pain lasted on and off for 15 years
Meditation And John Sarno’s Books Started Me On A Journey
I’d been meditating consistently for years to feel more relaxed, after one particularly long meditation I noticed that the back pain I had at the beginning of the meditation had significantly reduced.
I’d always used meditation as a way to relax, I never thought it would help with my pain in the way that it did. Curious to find out more, I started to research the link between meditation and chronic pain recovery.
My research started to teach me how stress affects the body, mainly how unresolved stress in the present day and from the past can create pain. Contrary to what I’d thought, 100% of pain was being created in my brain, and it had more to do with how personality traits of mine dealt with stress, rather than any yoga or diet that I was obsessed with.
The more I looked into how the mind and body were connected, the more I was being directed to a man named John Sarno and his theory of tension myositis syndrome (TMS). I bought his books and instantly resonated with what he was talking about.
Now I just had to start doing the work.
Dr John Sarno
Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) taught me how to identify my traits and learn to express my emotions better
I honestly thought I was a relaxed guy, until I realised my pain was being created by my personality traits. Keen to find out which personality traits were creating pain, I started working with an IFS therapist.
Not only did IFS therapy help me to identify my personality traits, it also taught me how to feel safer expressing emotions which my brain had decided were unacceptable. Unbeknownst to me before therapy, I had been unconsciously burying emotions such as anger, shame, sadness, fear, disappointment, envy etc all because certain inherited traits had told me that these emotions were dangerous to feel.
Once I had a safe space to express these emotions, my brain no longer needed to create pain.
Meditation and journaling gave me space to feel and be with stress in the ordinary moments of my life
As much as I may have wanted to, I couldn’t see my therapist all of the time. So I had to find a way to allow my emotions to be there outside of sessions. Fortunately meditation and journaling gave me the space to do just that.
Both of these tools taught me how merely acknowledging an emotion is enough to help it to settle down. I previously thought that I had to purposely force myself to relax in meditation, and I had to have something important to say in journaling.
Neither of these things are true.
Meditation is just about practising how to be comfortable with discomfort. Even if the body is filled with pain, the breath is irregular, there is drilling outside and you’re extremely angry, your only objective in meditation is to acknowledge the presence of these things, not to try and change it.
Similarly with journaling, just me talking nonsense on a page (something I call a ‘brain dump’), was enough to help whichever emotions were arising to feel heard and to settle down. Equally, I learnt that writing unsent letters to anyone who I resented, helped my body settle as well.
I made much more time to enjoy my life
Anyone in pain knows how much it takes over your life. I became obsessed with finding out ways to heal, to the point where I was no longer enjoying my life. As soon as I realised that the key to healing was going to come from within, I made a point of enjoying my life more.
The four things I made time for, in no particular order, were:
Creative outlets: making music and dancing
Nature walks: in the city and weekend breaks
Grounded space at home: candles, clean room, music, baths, downtime, Netflix
Community: spending time with friends and family, laughing and feeling supported
You may have different creative outlets that you’re putting off, but as long as you’re enjoying life the way you want to you’ll find that your body feels more relaxed.
I knew it would take time, so I enjoyed learning what I needed to along the way and lent on supportive communities when I needed to
We’ve all been conditioned to believe in quick fix solutions to our problems, so I had to work on allowing the process to take time. Of course the practice of learning to get comfortable with my anger, fear, sadness and any other emotions I’d previously resisted, was not free from bumps along the way.
Chronic pain develops in the body as a way to warn you of issues that you’re failing to resolve. So the process of learning how to resolve what was coming up for me took time, support and an understanding that there were always lessons along the way.
Leaning on a supportive community and mentors was vital for my progress, had I not had that support I certainly wouldn’t have persevered when it felt difficult. I personally chose a meditation community, a trained mentor, to regularly go to salsa classes and to spend time laughing and crying with friends and family. It’s up to you what you choose to do.
I can now happily say that I’m completely free from pain! However the mind and body still continue to interact when they need to
The biggest lesson I learnt during this process was that my body is working for me. It only ever created some sort of pain or emotional dysregulation to get my attention. As soon as I learnt what I needed to, and did the work, the pain went away.
From time to time I may still feel the onset of symptoms, however I now know the reason why they’re arising and so no longer panic. When we’re nervous our palms sweat, so we deal with our nerves rather than worry about the sweaty palms. Likewise, if I ever feel the onset of symptoms (I rarely do) I just identify what’s been coming up for me and attend to it.
Simple
You can also fully heal, not just manage, your chronic pain
If you’re reading this and you also feel tired, lost and hopeless, I can completely empathise with you. But there is hope, and it’s being proven by the 1000s of people healing from this work.
I now help people heal their chronic pain using the same tools, techniques and processes I used to heal my pain. I fully trained as an IFS therapist, meditation teacher and mindbody specialist. If you would like to find out more about me click the link below.
If you haven’t had a chance to read or watch any testimonials from real life clients of mine, follow the two links below.
Success Stories - Real Life Video Testimonials From People Have Gotten Over Chronic Pain
I’m also happy to offer you a complimentary call to chat to you about pain, how it has affected your life and the steps we would take to get you pain free. The call is your time to tell me your story. Follow the link below for more information.
