Summary:

In this video series we’ve been learning about how chronic pain and associated suffering develop.  The idea is to understand the chronic processes, so that you can make choices about how to reverse them and reclaim your sense of well-being and ability to function and live your life. The previous videos in this series shared how the body-mind “learns” chronic pain.  You can also “unlearn” chronic pain.  This video continues to explain how that process works. I spoke in previous videos about the biological processes that are involved in the development of chronic pain.  Have a look at those if you haven’t seen them yet.  You can see those posts HERE. We discussed how protective responses are built into the pain processing and movement control systems of your body-mind.  These processes get knocked “off the rails” by certain factors.  And persistent pain leads to gradual changes in those systems that can unfortunately make pain worse.  It’s like vicious cycles, where the pain system gets sensitized, and the movement control system stops working as well.  So movement hurts, and pain spreads. It’s richer than that, as persistent pain and the resulting stress-response lead to measurable changes in gene expression, hormonal regulation, cellular energy production, emotional regulation, immune balance, and gastrointestinal function.  And these all feed back into one another and can increase pain. So there is this snowball effect, where vicious cycles of biological relationships propagate forward and create the disease of chronic pain. The good news is that many of those changes can be reversed.  In my experience, your own mind/body connection is a crucial place to start the changes.  One great place to start is by developing the quality of ‘mindfulness”, which starts to shift the reactivity of the protective responses.  Just like your brain-body learns chronic pain, mindfulness can start the process of unlearning.

Did You Know:

• Dr Shiller is available for telemedicine consultation in CT, NJ, and Florida, as well as worldwide regarding chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, fatigue, and stress-related illness.  His US-based consultations are offered in conjunction with Rose Wellness to enhance the quality of care and ease of your experience as a patient.   Contact the office or schedule a consultation at Rose Wellness. For international consultations contact www.drshiller.com.

• Movement Toward Health is an affordable and effective training program to teach you to heal and feel better and improve your functioning.  It will teach you to integrate breathing techniques, mindfulness, and mindful movement techniques that are drawn from Dr Shiller’s 30+ years learning, practicing, and teaching these approaches to people suffering chronic pain and chronic illness.    To get more info and be notified of the next start date CLICK HERE.
• Dr Shiller gives regular free mind-body training sessions on zoom. You can get the schedule and register at www.mindbodygroove.com

Related Posts:

• https://www.drshiller.com/why-does-chronic-pain-happen-these-scientific-principles-can-empower-your-healing-part-1/
• https://www.drshiller.com/why-does-chronic-pain-happen-these-scientific-principles-can-empower-your-healing-part-2/

Full Transcript:

As mindfulness develops, you start to notice stuff, you become more aware, because you start to develop your ability to pay attention and receive what is there.   You start to notice, “Gosh, I’m spending most of my life filtering through my thoughts and beliefs about what’s going to happen instead of actually seeing what’s going to happen” and almost everybody that goes down this path is like struck by that, “Oh my gosh, I was living in fantasy and I’m starting to touch living in reality” and part of that is you start to touch the sweetness and goodness of life, you start to smell and touch and taste things that are beautiful.  We will talk about that in the next part, because that is really important, but for now, we are talking about kind of inhibiting the negative patterns, because that is the other aspect of what we do, it is kind of like I said, stopping these unproductive reactive habits about your mind and your thinking, your nutritional habits, your posture, your bodily habits, what you do in the world, and it is not like you are being forced by some sort of blaming conscious and shitting yourself, like what is wrong with you, do not you know you should not do that, that is not the game, because what happens is you just start to pay attention and you just forgive everything and you just choose to be grateful and you let go and you practice letting go and being present, and what arises naturally is just a clear choice, like, “I don’t want to eat that stuff or gosh this person in my life is toxic.  I want to do something different because I’m, so much negativity there or gosh look at all my own toxic thoughts, how can I be with that and let go of them” S Mindfulness practice develops this observer, that starts to notice the negativity and you naturally start to just say, “No, thank you” and you naturally become more forgiving with yourself and forgiving with other people.  You naturally start to like accept your life as it is and that does not mean it is never going to change, but you are less reactive to the things that are difficult, that used to grab you and pull you into severe suffering, and it is remarkable the changes that just happen naturally that I have been privileged to witness with other people.  You know it is kind of like there is concrete and then suddenly the grass grows through the crack somehow, like there is life in there that wants to come out.  One example, there is a fellow that I worked with, his name is Bill, and he was a recovered alcoholic, but really struggling with cravings, a lot of difficult emotional stuff in his life, and every day was like a war to not drink, and you know we were practicing one day and Bill basically says, “I really have the urge to drink” and I said, well, okay, so what else are you experiencing?  He said, well, I feel tight in my chest and I feel irritable, my back hurts.  Okay, and what about the emotions?  I feel irritated, I feel angry with you for asking me all these stupid questions.  So, I said okay, so how about just sit with what you are experiencing, sit with the difficult emotions, just observe them and be with them, notice what they feel like, do not try to change them, just agree because that is what is happening.  He sits there for like a minute and a half and then like a smile comes on his face, like why are you smiling?  He’s like, well those emotions were really hard and then they just kind of went away, and I do not feel like I need to drink anymore.  That was a discovery, it was something that just came to him through observing his own life, and I could give you so many examples of things like that in my own life, in the life of so many patients, where it just comes from paying attention with compassion, dropping the judgment, forgiving, being present and cultivating this part of you that actually kind of hovers above your emotional self and your bodily self and is with you all the time, and it is an expression of a deep inner intelligence, and it is your healing intelligence and that is the power of doing that kind of training to unwind these pathways of mind, emotion, and physiologic reactivity that perpetuate and develop this process of chronic pain and chronic illness, and so, as you practice and train yourself to be aware with compassion and with discernment, things start to change spontaneously, you start to just, you know, you may have lived your whole life in patterns of reactivity that are mental, emotional, and physical, and you start to notice them and they start to kind of get lighter and get less heavy and you start to have more freedom of choice, and it is from practice, it is relearning, it is rewiring, nerves that fire together wire together.  When I have that experience of tasting the irritation that once created reactivity, and I choose to just be with it and let it be there and say yes, it is happening, I agree this is what is up, letting go the judgment, then I am turning off the reactivity, it is like, I am uncoupling it, you know, it is those two nerves, there is the irritated and then there is the reactive nerve, right?  I am irritated, so then I get emotional, and I am basically saying, “No, I’m not believing you anymore, you are just a habit.  I don’t need to get reactive when that happens” and then you start to actually uncouple your physical, emotional, mental experience from your ability to choose to have the kind of experience you want to have, and that changes your physiology, it changes your neural networks, it changes your gene expression, because you are living in a more calm, clear, connected state, where you are not as reactive.   We talked about how there can be setbacks and how a person can be learning to live in a calm or clear state of mind and body but then something happens that like knocks him on the ground, knocks him back into the hole or they fall in the water, so to speak metaphorically, so what is that about, how do you deal with that?  We talked a bit how just being mindful gradually that happens less and you develop the capacity to respond more effectively when it does happen, but the other thing is that there is deeper kinds of work than just sitting there and being mindful of what is going on.  There is deeper work that involves getting therapeutic support, whether it is with an individual or a group or in your own inner work and intentionally going in and meeting the dark places inside, because a lot of us, most human beings, we have had experiences of profound disappointment of hurt, of trauma, of fear, times when we felt like we were disconnected and it just was not okay and, you know, there is a language for this in various psychotherapeutic and spiritual traditions, but the point is meeting those places and evoking various tools for actually doing a deeper level of work, to reclaim that part of yourself and to free up the deeply held protective responses that you might have in your heart or your body, that is profound work as well.  It is a little bit beyond the context or it is a little bit beyond the scope of this video.  So, I am not going to go there now, but that is something else to think about and talk about, because a lot of people with chronic pain and illness have trauma.  We know that early life trauma is a huge part of what influences people to develop chronic pain and chronic illness and healing that trauma can be a profound influence on all of these physiologic processes, because what it does is sort of uncouples or discharges or disengages these deeply held patterns that said, “danger” and it is about healing those, so that your whole system can be more at ease in that rest, and there is techniques for learning that. Okay, so let us make a break now and we have talked really about the process of sort of saying no and uncoupling and unlearning negative protective responses, and we also want the process of installing and learning and actually awakening healing responses.  So, we will talk about that in the next vid, hope you tune in.