Your Mind-Body connection is almost certainly part of what drives your IBS, chronic pain, fatigue, or chronic illness. You can mobilize your mind-body connection to help yourself heal.One of the most common mistakes that I see people make is to do all the dietary, nutritional, and exercise stuff, while they don’t adequately take charge of the power of their mind-body connection.This lesson answers crucial questions that you should understand, if you want to heal:
How does the Brain-Immune-Gut-Hormonal integration create and perpetuate chronic illness and chronic pain?
What is the influence of the vagus nerve on all this?
How can you stimulate the vagus nerve to start reversing the disease process?
Why should you care that your brain and stress-response has cognitive, emotional, and physiologic aspects to it’s function?
What is the cell danger response, and why is it important in your healing process?
What are the six steps of mind-body healing?
In the near future, we will talk about the healing power of movement. Even if you feel too tired, weak, or have too much pain to move, there are things you can do to build your freedom and capacity for movement. And movement is one of the best medicines we know!Please comment or reply and share your thoughts, questions, and comments.I look forward to hearing from you.Scroll down for full transcriptSLIDE PDF so you can take notes if you want.
Did You Know:
Dr Shiller is responding to the chaos and overwhelm of the corona pandemic by offering regular free stress-busting mind-body training sessions on zoom. You can get the schedule and register at www.mindbodygroove.com
Dr Shiller is available for telemedicine consultation worldwide regarding chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, fatigue, and stress-related illness. Contact the office or schedule a consultation at www.drshiller.com
Inner Healing Essentials is an intensive six-week course taught by Dr Shiller, which teaches you the Six Steps To Inner Healing. It empowers you to transform stress into vitality, and begin to take back your life from chronic pain and illness. A new class begins quarterly. To get more info and be notified of the next start date: https://andrew-david-shiller.mykajabi.com/inner-healing-essentials-waitlist.
Welcome back my friends, it is Dr. Shiller.This is part B of a long video that is talking about the complexity of chronic pain and chronic illness and really discussing an overview of the three-part healing process of addressing your mind-body system, your metabolic biochemical systems as well as your movement and structural system as three essential aspects of really taking a big picture of holistic view and that is where the therapeutic leverage is in the integrated approach, because by and large conventional medicine is looking at all these different problems as separate things as opposed to understanding the big picture and realizing that the various symptoms are flowing out of similar underlying physiologic abnormalities or imbalances and then you can address those imbalances, and so this is really, these two parts are the first part of how to really heal, and in part A of this one, we talked about kind of the scientific underpinnings of mind-body medicine and why it is so important, not only why your mind-body connection is so important in the development of chronic pain and chronic illness, and why it is so important in actually transforming and healing chronic pain and chronic illness, and what we are going to do in this video right now is get kind of an overview of the landscape of mind-body healing and understand some of the different elements and understand the rationale about why you do it, and to get a bit of insight on some of the things that people miss when they are first learning meditation or visual imagery or other sort of mind-body approaches and how to really take a big picture of view so that you not only enhance your comfort but you transform the illness process in your body, in your mind, and in the integration of mind and body. So, I hope it is informative and inspiring and interesting.–Next Slide–I want to take this question of relaxation, mindfulness, imagery, and therapy, and how it impacts your mind-body state, your state of consciousness and just review for a second the ways that it can impact your health and have a huge impact on how you are feeling, and we have talked about this about how pain pathways are altered, how brain function can be altered, how the immune function can be changed for better. We did not talk so much about this yet, but energy production by yourselves, your state of consciousness is what determines how you do in life with the people you care about, with the person at the bank, with the police officer who reports you are speeding, with all the things that we need to deal within the world in our roles and in our functioning. If I am going to place a calm and clarity where I am present to my own self, I am present to other people, then all of that stuff goes better, and I can tell you that from my own experience. I was like an anxious, weird, introverted kid when I was a kid, who did not know how to pay attention to myself or other people, and I was kind of a dork, like it just what it was. I was not a smooth person. A lot of people did not like me. I had a lot of challenges interpersonally. Not a lot of challenges in various aspects of what I was doing in life, and when I learned to get quiet and calm and actually start to live from a deeper place in my own being and start to live with more empathy for myself and more for other people, my life changed profoundly, and guess what, my relationships are not as stressful. Our relationships tend to be harmonious and positive, and I am not saying that to say I am so great. I am saying that to say that anyone can do this, and so many of the people that I have trained than other people who have trained, people who have learnt to actually find a state to calm themselves, learn how to navigate through the world to flow with the challenges when the wave comes, to ride it like a skilled surfer or dive underneath it, because of awareness, because of skill and self-management. Motivation and self-care. It starts with you, it starts in your hearts, it starts in your soul. Are you eating stuff that is actually good for you or you are eating stuff that feels good in the moment, because you have got a lot of stress and emotional anx and you are eating sugar and bakers and saturated fats which tastes so good. There is a reason they call it comfort food, but the fact is, it destroys your body, it feeds into and poisons so many of your systems, and the same thing about alcohol and other substances, and on the flip side, exercise and self-care, whether it is going for a walk, doing something pleasant that feels good, doing exercise that feels good. These are the things that actually shift your physiology for the better, and they can actually have a huge impact on your health, and that starts with where you are at, what your state of relationship with yourself in the world, and we have talked a bit about gut barriers and motility. So, all of this obviously connected, you are one unity.–Next Slide–I want to step back and think a bit more about the science again, and you basically have three functional areas of your brain, right? You have got neocortex, that is the thinking part of your brain, you have got your limbic brain is your emotional brain, your arousal brain, your stress response happens here. All of your emotions and all of your sensory step is processed here and go to your reptilian brain. Core biological functions, like blood pressure, heart rate, influences on immune function, gastrointestinal motility and function, and so when these things were first started to be evaluated, they used to think, “Oh yeah, these were strictly anatomically distinct areas and that turns out to not be true, that there is processing that goes on at these three levels, and they are different aspects of how you process reality, but their functions, they are not anatomically distant, and if you look up the triune brain, we will see this like progression of the science over the past, I think 40 or 50 years, how initially they thought it was anatomic and evolutionary and like embryonic, but the fact is there is so much interconnection. It is all one brain, but you do have these different kinds of functions and to the extent that you are aware that you got an intellectual, rational processing brain as well as an emotional, reactive brain, as well a biological and body physiological brain. You can better understand how your mind-body connection influences your health, because it influences all three levels. So, let us unpack that a little bit, because this is one of the places where people frequently fall down. I do a lot of training for people in mind-body therapies and healing. A lot of people come to me, “Dr. Schiller, I have been doing all this meditation, it is great. I go to this deep relaxed state and I feel so good. I do not have pain when I am there, but then I come back and my pain comes back or whatever the symptoms,” and you know my sense of what is going on is they are getting some degree of limbic quieting there, and they are getting some mental emotional quieting there, but they are not really getting that quiet into their body and [07:26] healing, what their body is holding on to in terms of self-protective responses, and a lot of times that person who is doing those meditations where they go up and out, they go into some sort of expanded God’s space or some sort of spiritual, energetic, expansive space, but then when they come back into their body, they are the same old person, and so they have their pain, they have their interpersonal conflicts, they get really angry with their kids or with their spouse sort of, they cannot function on their job because they hate their boss. It is because they are soft of disassociating in a certain way, and it is great to achieve that level of calm, but it is really important to bring that calm into the body and allow to start to change you and shift your instinctive, instinctual reactive patterns that come out of your heart and you are in body consciousness and memory. The way I understand it after practicing for 20 years and studying all the science is that a fundamental question that your whole body is asking all the time, whether it is your cortical or mental thinking, your emotional processing or even your physiology is are you safe or are you in danger? And that is a huge thing, because on a physiologic level, let me just unpack this, but like here are things that make us feel not safe, things that make us feel like we might be in danger or we are at risk of something bad happening, things like life stress, pain, trauma. Pain goes into every aspect of your mental, emotional, physiologic functioning; immune dysfunction and inflammation does as well. Toxins and drugs influence everything. Acute illness, surgery, or being in the midst of a pandemic influences every aspect and creates a danger signal. Your entire being is a danger detector. If our human being is not aware of danger, then you have a risk of actually getting hurt or killed. Think about primordial human who is out there in a jungle looking for mangoes, and he is looking for mangoes and he is so into mangoes, he is not even thinking about the tigers that he knows lives in the jungle, because he sees the mangoes, really there is a tiger hanging out there. If he does not see the tiger, he is going to get eaten. If he is focused on the tiger and he misses the mangoes, he can go looking for mangoes tomorrow, but he will not get eaten hopefully if he knows how to defend himself from the tiger, but the point is that we naturally have a bias towards danger and negativity, because it is protective, and we have protective responses that are built into our neuromuscular system, right? You touch a hot stove, you have a reflex that withdraws your hand, you do not have to think about it. You have reflexes throughout your body at every level of your spine in terms of your neuromuscular system, and you have got protective responses in yourselves, in your immune system. Your immune system in general is a protective response. If they would stand at the gate and say ‘friend or foe’ and to keep the bad guys out and let the good guys in, and so the danger detector is in the level of our consciousness, which I will start right correctly later, it is in our immune system, it is our structural system, and it is our biochemical system, and we have cellular protective responses. This is kind of a new thing that is showing up in biology and metabolomics, which is kind of the study of broader cells in the context of all cells, which is systems biology approach, and more and more we are seeing that they are these protective responses on a cellular level, that cell seemed to be able to shut down in response to danger, and they shut down their energy production, they can shut down communication with other cells, they can create a state of hypervigilance and immune activation, they have reduced their actual production of DNA and cellularreproduction,. So, on an actual cellular level, your body can start to shut down when you have persistent danger that it is exposed to, whether it is through your consciousness and your understanding and something dangerous in the world, whether it is immune activation, whether it is structural trauma or something that is happening physically to you, or whether it is biochemical trauma or biochemical changes that are dangerous to your body. You know, we are starting to see that the immune system has these sort of cellular and protein patterns that are called basically danger detectors or damage associative patterns. I do not want to go too much in that detail, because it will fit people out, but the point is on a cellular immune level we are wide for danger, and that protective response becomes part of what is dangerous to us, and the protective mode that develops is probably part of what maintains chronic illness, whether it is psychological protection or limbic emotional protection or physiologic cellular detection, just going to that brain diagram or there is like the stuff you are conscious of and thinking about. Then, there is a stuff that emotional you, just reacting to, whether you are aware of it or not aware of it. Then, there is stuff that your biology is reacting to, and most of us are just not aware of that at all, and so healing depends on bringing this whole system a sense of safety and a sense of calm and a sense of “Hey, it’s okay to be me,” right?–Next Slide–The protective mode is the problem, and what I encourage my patients to do and what I encourage you to do is learn to bathe your body and your mind in the biochemistry of healing, and there is a number of steps to that, and the typical mind-body interventions of relaxation and mindfulness and visual imagery and therapy are part of it, but it is a deeper more compressive thing that we have learned how to measure, but it is an experience that many people can have, and when you have it, you know it. You know what is like to be bathed in a sense of, it is okay to be mean right now. You feel it in your body, you feel it in your bones, you feel it in your heart and you know it in your mind, and the question is and the incentive is and the imperative is to learn how to cultivate that state of being and to learn how to get back into it whenever you need to, and to learn to make it part of your lifestyle if you have a chronic illness or chronic pain, so that your bathing your body in the biochemistry of healing that you are giving a signal to the protective responses in your intellect, your emotions, and your physiology to say, “It’s okay, it’s okay, we can get back to life” and that is how we get back to life, calm, safety, connection. Connection is huge, right? Connection is huge. Connections, what it is about? Positive emotion, turning off the danger response.–Next Slide–So, I have come up with what I call six steps of mind-body healing. I am not going into the details of this right now, but I want to give the overview of that, and I will talk about it again at another time if people are interested, but the six steps are relaxation, mindfulness, body awareness, and then inner insight, as well as developing heart and soul power and transformation.It is all about turning off the danger response. Let me just unpack these a little bit for a second. Relaxation is relaxation, that is the physiology that we have measured. Herbert Benson in the 70’s started measuring the relaxation response, and all this stuff is being built on his research, and it is amazing what he did. He is a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School. The relaxation response is a physiologic, low metabolic state that enables your body to start healing. Mindfulness is a state of mind. Mindfulness is a way of paying attention on purpose in a particular way to your present moment experience, to your thoughts, your emotions, your bodily sensations, and if your are inclined that way to your spiritual sense, and it is a way of learning to see what is really going on in your life. Learning to see how your own mind-body connection is operating, so you can make better choices of it. Body awareness is actually just what it says, being aware of your body. Most of us are walking around like more connected, you know, disconnected from our neck up or busy going, going, doing, doing, we think about our body when it starts to scream it is with some sort of symptoms, but body awareness by bringing your attention to your entire body and feeling it and bringing it a calm state of mind is profoundly healing and that can be done by sitting or lying down meditation. It can be done by simple movement arts like tai chi or yoga, Feldenkreis. Pilates has a lot of body awareness. There is various other approaches that can be done with tremendous body awareness and are tremendously healing. It is about inhabiting the body. It is about bringing your mind and your soul into your body with consciousness. Insight, inner map. Insight is part of what comes out of mindfulness and it comes out of body awareness. An insight comes from relating to your own being with awareness and compassion, and most of us are so full of judgment and self-doubt and self-hatred, and it happens because we get those messages at an early stage in life. It can happen because you are sick and because your body is not working like it should, your mind is not working like it should, and it is very easy to say, “I hate myself. I hate what I become. I hate the fact that I cannot do: ABCDEFG,” and what is the “I” and what is “the self”? What I want to suggest from a Torah and Kabbalistic point of view is that you have an eye, which is your higher soul. It is a deep intelligence that is not limited to your body, and when you start to reframe I hate myself and to connecting with your deeper I, your deeper self-awareness, the place of deep self-acceptance, or you actually see what is causing things and you have compassion on yourself, and it is something you develop overtime and you see the aspects of what is not right in your life, and from that place, you are so much more empowered, they actually make positive changes. Because if you are relating to all the challenging things with self-hatred and self-doubt and self-blame, then you are creating and feeding into that stress access, you are feeding into that anxiety, depression, and misery access, and when you connect to a deeper level of yourself, that is insightful and aware. What we start to do is actually see where you can intervene in an intelligent and compassionate way in your own reality to make positive choices. The next one here is heart and soul power. It is about [18:36], and that means waking up love. It means waking up compassion. It means waking up higher insight. These are really hard things to measure, but they are not hard things to feel if you feel it. Part of what we do in the meditation training I do is we awaken heart energy, and awakening heart energy is something it has been done in every spiritual tradition through all human history until ours. It is starting to happen in ours through apps and, you know, things people do in hospitals, but the point is that you can develop the energy of love in your heart, and your heart is not just a pump, your heart is a system of nerves and endocrine function as well as this is a pump that pumps your blood, but it is profoundly integrated with your brain, and your heart influences your brain and it influences your entire nervous system, and I can guarantee you that as you generate the heart energy of loving kindness and compassion, you will begin to shift your physiology, shift your emotions, and shift your thinking process about yourself and your world and for the better, and the last thing is transformation, and transformation happens when we take our body physiologic responses and our emotional reactivity, and we start to draw our higher faculties of heart and soul into those places, and that is profoundly transformative and beautiful. So, obviously all this needs to be unpacked. A lot of it is experiential and talking about it does not give it to you, but talking about it can give you a sense that it exits, and what I hope that talking about it will do is encourage you and empower you to start looking, start looking for how you can develop relaxation and mindfulness and how you can develop body awareness and compassion and insight and develop the powers of your heart and soul to heal yourself and to transform the pain and the suffering that you are living in.–Next Slide–So, I want to close with just sort of an observation that kind of sums a lot of this up. Somebody I know recently said, he was like, it is great that science has finally seen all the connections between these different things, we were talking about integrative medicine. Yeah, the connections between your heart and your mind and your gut and your immune system, science has started to see the connections, and I agree within its core. Science has seen the connections, but my sense is that reality is different than what science understands. Science is powerful. I am a scientist. I studied scientific method, I really believe in science, but we have to know that science is limited. Science is like a light that we shine on reality and we learn specific things about reality based on the scientific tools that we have for measurement and for analyzing the doubt that we get, and it does not enable us to understand all of reality, and for sure it does not enable us to understand the complexity integration of a human being, and especially human beings in relation to other human beings, the society. It is just too big and too complex and science is not there yet, and I would take this I do that science is finally finding all the connections and turned upside down and saying that science is starting to discover the fallacy of the idea that there is disconnection, because if I am starting to see connections, what I suggest to me that you know what? My heart and my gut are different things, and my heart and my immune system and my brain and my immune system are different things, and on a certain level they are, but you start as one drop of water, and you can become two, you become 4 and 8, 16 and 32, 3trillion cells, and the fact is the amount of connectivity starts when your one cell, where everything is connected to everything else, and as you develop, everything stays connected. It is not like it is disconnected. You know, for sure, your heart has a different function than your digestive tract, but those functions are so profoundly interconnected, and one of what I suggest and invite people to move towards as there are starting to dive into and learn and practice mind-body self-healing is to experience their integration, experience their connection, experience that life has a unity to it, that you have a unity to it. If this is abstract, then it seems kind of weird too, that is okay. You do not have to believe it. My suggestion is just start, start to develop relaxation and calm, start to develop mindfulness, start to develop body awareness and compassionate awareness and insight, start to develop the power of your heart to transform your body and start to live. So, there are lots of ways to learn these things. I am going to keep talking about these things in other videos. Please feel free to share this with other people and thanks a lot for watching.
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