Science is revealing why chronic pain and associated problems happen. Understand this stuff and you’re on your way toward healing and feeling better.Chronic pain and illness don’t just happen. They are processes that develop over time. The body-mind learns chronic pain. And it learns the things that go along with chronic pain, like anxiety, depression, insomnia, irritable howel, high blood pressure, and so on. Just like your body-mind learns to be sick and suffering, you can unlearn sickness and suffering. You can learn to heal. If you want to feel better, then tune in to these videos and share them with others.
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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 .
Okay, so we have been talking about some of the basics of about why chronic pain and chronic illness are learning experiences, the physiologic, biological changes that happen from the interconnection of all your body systems that bring about the suffering, that bring about the dysfunction, that bring about the disability, and these are things that when you understand them, you can start to choose to unlearn them and to reverse them and start to actually install patterns of responsiveness to life in your mind/body system, in your biochemical metabolic nutritional system, and your movement system.So, let us continue. There are other aspects of neuroplasticity, right? So, like, you have protective responses in your body, you can actually say that the stress response is a protective response, because when that limbic system that says not safe to be, fires on, really what it is doing is making you vigilant so you can look out for further danger, and that is why so many people who have chronic stress, whether it is from some horrible trauma that develops PTSD or if it is just from living under chronic stress are a little bit hyped up, and they might be irritable emotionally, they might be just having a hard time sleeping, they might be developing digestive problems or cardiac problems, because their body is rehearsing a stress response, and that is a protective response. The person so to speak is looking to protect from danger. Meanwhile, the danger is over, but the system is stuck. Hope that makes sense. Similar things happen with your motor system, the nerves, muscles, joints, bones, the whole system that helps you move through space, move towards what you care about, and move away from what might be dangerous. If you put your hand in a hot stove, immediately you have a reflex that causes you to withdraw your hand, that reflex is plastic. If you have perpetual or persistent pain coming into a particular part of your body, those reflexes that create muscle contraction, tightening of connective tissue, shifting in joint position sense actually becomes set into the system.I told you about a woman who had some pain in her shoulder and after a while, two years, she was holding her arm like this, that is a protective withdrawal response. Maybe, I need to sit back a little bit so you can see that, but basically, she was walking around like this all the time, it is a protective withdrawal response, okay. Imagine you have got that in your hand and you are trying to reach out and type. Every day, you try to type and you are working against contraction, you are working against yourself. Same thing happens when someone is trying to walk. That is part of what perpetuates the problem, protective responses in your mind/body system, protective responses in your neuromuscular system, and the other aspect of it is changes that happen in your hormones, your immune system, your gastrointestinal system, whether it is from chronic stress, chronic pain or whatever, that feeds into dysfunction in your gastrointestinal tract, and this is something that is showing up in all of the research of last 10 or 15 years or so, and that feeds into problems with the brain, because when the gastrointestinal tract gets dysfunctional, it creates a situation where there is biochemistry and immune changes that can feed into and worsen anxiety and depression, can feed into and worsen pain transmission. There is this intimate connection that is in every part of your body, it is a learning process, it is the way your body presumably is trying to protect itself, but it gets a bit haywire and becomes chronic pain and chronic illness, and it is a learning process through neural networks that are all talking to each other, nerves, organs immune system functioning in a system that gradually learns to become dysfunctional, and so what I am suggesting is that there are ways to make it less dysfunctional, and that is what healing is about, but it takes time and practice.I want to take it to the next step, right. We talked about neuroplasticity as one mechanism of that, how the connection and communication among nerves of various regions of the brain or various parts of the body, the spinal cord, the immune system, the gastrointestinal system, it is all neuroplastic and it all responds to persistence of distress of pain of noxious painful stimulus. There is another level of it, which is actually genetic, right? And we tend to think of, well, genes are just genes and what my genes say or what my body does, but what we know from the past few decades is that is not at all true, that we have genetic tendencies and that gene on your chromosome is surrounded by even greater amounts of material that is intelligent so to speak and it responds to your experience, it is called epigenetic material, and it determines whether your genes are turned on or turned off, and what we are knowing more and more and understanding with greater clarity is that if you are subject to persistent stress, persistent insomnia, persistent in pain, persistent emotional distress, it shifts gene expression, it is another aspect of the learning process, which can work against you or it can work for you.In summary, the processes by which chronic pain and chronic illness take place, they take place overtime, they are learning processes. There are neural networks, there are circuits that work together through various organs, various areas of your brain, nerves that fire together wire together. If you want to recover from chronic pain and chronic illness, what is really important is getting out of this mindset that someone else is going to come in and fix you, getting out of the mindset that someone has got some magic bullet that is going to change it all and realize that your habits, how you choose to think and work with your mind/body connection, what you choose to eat and how you nourish yourself biochemically, and what you do with your physical system can potentially retrain your brain, your body, your whole system to be more healthy, to recover a greater degree of function and health that gets taken away by that chronic process that generates chronic pain and chronic illness. The mindset shift is one of being proactive of realizing that you know what, you need to be in charge. You might have great healers that help you, you might have doctors that give you just the right medications or do just the right procedures, and I am not saying stop that stuff, but what I am saying that there is a piece about ownership and taking responsibility and learning, that is going to empower you, because you might go to a great therapeutic person, whatever they are, and you might see them once a week or once a month and they do something and something shifts. Maybe, it is psychotherapy, maybe it is hands-on therapy, but what are you doing in between, and so what I am suggesting to you is to start to learn what you can do for yourself, what you can do to teach your body and direct the learning process, so that your system moves towards recovery and healing.Okay, so, this is the first video. There is going to be another video that is going to get a bit more practical about it, and so stay tuned for that, and I hope you have enjoyed. In the meantime, feel free to leave comments, leave questions, and hopefully I can respond. Thanks so much.
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