Unstoppable Body and Mind

Episode #35- Allowing Pleasure

Have you ever noticed that as humans we have a hard time allowing ourselves to feel pleasure, happiness or other positive emotions?

Our brains have a negativity bias, and on a primitive level feeling pleasure is perceived as dangerous to our survival.  We should not let our guard down, and we should always remember that negative things are about to happen.  Thanks, brain...

I talk about what Gay Hendricks calls the Upper Limit Problem, the difference between pleasure and buffering, and how to notice and cultivate more pleasure in our lives.  Even if you are struggling with pain, I will teach ways to begin increasing the pleasure and positive emotions you can feel each day.

 

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Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 35, Allowing Pleasure. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind.
Hello, my friends. I'm excited today because I'm trying something a little new. I, in addition to recording this podcast, I am videoing it too.
So I'm hoping to put it on my YouTube channel, which is Body and Mind Life Coach, as well as Instagram TV, Body and Mind Life Coach. You can find me there on Instagram. So today's episode is about allowing pleasure, which seems like something we would all want to do.
But if you think about it, humans really do have a hard time allowing ourselves positive emotions, allowing joy, happiness, creativity and pleasure. I first thought about this and heard about this when I was reading the book by Brene Brown. I think it was Daring Greatly.
And she sets a scene of people in a car, a family talking, and it zooms out and it shows them driving along a windy road, and then it zooms in and they're talking and stop. Imagine what is going to happen. Most people say something bad is gonna happen because this is how our brain works.
Remember the negativity bias that I talk about a lot. So this is a way that our brain helps us survive by always looking out for negative things, but it makes it really hard unless we are purposely trying to enjoy and cultivate more happiness to actually allow positive things in our life. Think about sometimes when you go on vacation and how you just have this urge to do things and maybe even check your phone a lot.
Think about, they call it Guilty Vacation Syndrome. In the UK, there was research showing that 66% of people did not want to leave their work to go on vacation because they felt guilty about leaving. Sometimes it's called the letdown effect, where you have a letdown of your perceived stress, then you're more likely to have illness or disease.
More people report having panic attacks on weekends. There was a study in Taiwan in 2015 that found that holidays and weekends have more ER admissions for peptic ulcers than weekdays do. It's like we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Gay Hendricks talks about this phenomenon in The Big Weep, and he calls it the upper limit problem. We have a limited tolerance for feeling good and having life go well. It's like we have this internal thermostat of how much capacity for happiness that we have.
And when it reaches that upper limit, then we actually do things to sabotage ourselves so that we bring ourselves down to that more comfortable level. We all have limiting beliefs about ourselves, that we're not good at certain things, that we're shy, that we can't make a lot of money. So when we hit this upper limit, our brain manufactures thoughts that bring us back down to proving itself right, basically.
Our brains will look for evidence of the bad things about us, and the brain would rather be right and miserable or in a painful condition than to challenge those beliefs about ourselves that just don't feel true. He says we may even start fights with people or have accidents so that we are not in that uncomfortable happiness and bring ourselves back down to the emotions that we are more used to feeling. Does that sound crazy?
If you look at the model, so if you think of episode five, the model that I taught, it actually makes sense because our thoughts are what create our feelings. Our feelings create our actions and then our results. So if we have negative core beliefs about ourselves, our brain is going to point out things when we start to have feelings that are too happy.
Remember how you're too bossy and people don't like that or don't get too excited about your new promotion because you'll probably just mess it up like you've done before or just because you lost that weight doesn't mean that you're going to keep it off. You always tend to gain it all back and then some, thank you brain. Our brain is so good at reminding us these things that limit us.
With pain, this can happen too. And I've seen it so many times where people start to feel better and then overdo it and get hurt again or start to have another body part that starts hurting. When we hit the upper limit, we are uncomfortable with tolerating happiness or pleasure.
So we do things to bring us back down. Joe Dispenza talks about it on a cellular level where we're actually addicted to certain emotions. So take the emotion of stress.
If you have cortisol at a certain level, your cells become used to all of those receptor sites having cortisol in them. In fact, the next cells that are made actually have more receptor sites to accommodate for that cortisol. And then if you start depleting that cortisol level, if you start feeling a little less stressed, your brain will literally look around for things in the environment to stress out about to produce that cortisol for your cells.
So when we talk about just allowing pleasure, it's not that simple. We have to increase our capacity for tolerating happiness and positive emotions. Now you may think I'm good at tolerating pleasure.
I come home and I have a few drinks, or I buy things online, and I have so much pleasure. But I want to take a minute and talk about the difference between pleasure and what I'll call buffering. So buffering would be something that you do to avoid your emotions, that you do to make yourself feel good, but has a net negative effect.
So if you're coming home every night and drinking a substantial amount, it might have a negative effect on your family, relationships, or on your body the next morning. If you're compulsively gambling or shopping online, it may have a net negative effect on your bank account. So it's definitely a case by case basis.
Some things may in moderation not give you that net negative effect and be pleasurable truly. But for example, if you're on social media to the point that you're not taking care of your responsibilities, you feel kind of depressed because of all the things you're looking at, that might have a net negative effect. So I really want you to think about the difference between pleasure and buffering and what buffering might look like for you, but usually it's a way to get away from your emotions, not to actually feel true happiness or pleasure.
So how do we increase our capacity for pleasure? How do we tolerate more positive feelings in our lives? We have to increase our tolerance of feeling joy and feeling good.
The first way, as always with this work, changing any kind of thoughts or beliefs starts with awareness of what you're already thinking. Where are those areas where you have limits for yourself, those self-limiting beliefs? Where are your upper limit problems?
And then realize that feeling pleasure, feeling good, feeling joy is actually safe. Really understand at a primitive level that your brain is trying to protect you by offering the negativity and don't let yourself feel too good because it's gonna end, and really increasing that capacity on purpose starts with realizing that it's safe to feel pleasure and joy. We have so much guilt and shame in our culture, it will take some conscious effort to allow yourself to feel positive things without that guilt and shame.
But it is healthy for us. We show up as better people in the world if we allow pleasure for ourselves. Most of the time, our brain is so focused on planning for the future, thinking about the past, guilt, shame, stress, anxiety, that we don't even realize some simple pleasures that are around us.
But have you ever spent time with a child? They show us a way of seeing the world that is so different than the way that we get desensitized to. I saw a four-year-old last week that her mom got her a bowl of grapes, and she just was anticipating those grapes.
And then when she got them in her bowl, she was like, mm, grapes. And she was doing a happy dance, and she was walking over to the table, taking them over, just so full of joy. And then, you know how children eat, she took like four bites to enjoy that one grape.
And the whole time, mm, mm, yummy, this is so good. And it was just like a pleasure to watch her enjoy something so simple that much. It reminds me of what about Bob when he's eating, and he's like, mm, mm, mm, yum, yum, yum, you know.
That scene is so funny. I'm not doing it justice. But that's the kind of attitude we could have if we were really enjoying all of the simple pleasures that are around us.
So what are things around you that bring you joy? I have made a joy list, and it's something that I just keep in my planner so that I can add to it at any time. And I've written down simple things that bring me joy.
And my planner is actually one of them. I love my planner. And other things that I have on my list are sitting on my porch, drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, even the smell of coffee when I'm at the grocery store, wearing a summer dress on a warm summer evening.
I love long walks on the beach. I'm just kidding. I love listening to children when they're playing and hearing them laugh.
I love seeing a dog with its head out the window. I love taking my dog on a walk in the mountains and watching him just run around with joy. That brings me pleasure.
I love when people wink. It brings me joy to give a compliment to someone. I have joy with taking a bath, listening to music, listening to podcasts when I'm doing housework.
I love kombucha. I love funny movies. I love the feeling of clean sheets on my bed.
I love going to yoga. I love teaching yoga. It energizes me.
So those are some things that I have on my joy list, and I suggest that you start a joy list too. And especially look for those things that you find joy in, that you've almost forgotten about, that you don't notice on the daily, but are there for you every day that you can take pleasure in, these small moments of the day. The more we notice and experience these pleasurable things, the more we will allow ourselves to feel positive.
So thinking back to the model again, pleasure is an emotion, a feeling. And emotions, feelings come from our thoughts. So we can also increase our pleasure by changing the thoughts that we have about things.
One of the thoughts might be, I can allow myself to feel pleasure, or it's not dangerous to feel pleasure. It doesn't mean that I'm bad or selfish if I'm taking time and doing things for myself. Taking care of myself is the best thing that I can do for the people around me.
Another big part to recognizing those pleasures that are all around you is to be mindful to be present in the moment. So whatever you're doing, if you're taking a shower, then you could really notice how the warm water feels on your body. And if you're washing yourself, really touch your body and feel it and feel the pleasure with that.
Maybe putting on lotion, taking the time to actually put it on like you would lotion up a baby rather than just slapping it on. If you're eating, are you savoring the food that you're eating or are you shoveling it in or are you eating in your car? Taking time to notice the touches and tastes and smells and sights around you.
I remember one time I had a student with me that was a photographer, and she would always comment on how the sky looked or how the mountains looked. And those were always there for me, but I had so much more awareness of them when she started pointing them out, and I began looking for how cool the sky looked, too. Notice the amazingness, I don't know if that's a word, how amazing it is when a child is telling you a story.
And maybe it isn't about something that you find necessarily interesting, but maybe have curiosity and fascination for why it's interesting to them. Being present with people and really listening to them will not only increase your pleasure, but allow them to feel more seen and heard. Having that attitude of fascination and being curious is a great way to increase the pleasure in your life.
Gay Hendricks has you think how much love and abundance am I willing to allow and how am I getting in my own way? Now, if you are struggling with a lot of pain at the moment, which you may be if you're listening to this podcast, this might seem very challenging for you. How can I find pleasure, possibly, when I'm in such a state of agony or such a state of discomfort?
And it starts with very small steps. But remember, the more you're focusing on the pain and obsessing about the pain and thinking about it continually, you're actually creating more neurons that are associated with creating pain in your body. More of your brain capacity starts being focused on pain, and your hypersensitivity to pain increases.
So it's especially important for you to start increasing your capacity for pleasure. I think of with the law of attraction, where you don't want to focus on the things that you don't want. So you're not focusing on, you know, when is this pain going to go away?
I hate this pain. But you want to focus as much as possible on what you do want. Maybe for you, you're not quite at the point where pleasure seems like a reality, but you can start by at least getting yourself out of the fight or flight response when you have pain.
I talk about this in my episode, Somatic Tracking, a meditation for pain. So you could actually lay down and do this meditation and really notice that you can feel sensations in your body. You can focus on them and describe them without going into fight or flight and without trying to retract from the pain and pull away from it.
Actually going into the sensations, discovering more about them. And this way, you're going to start decreasing that, you're going to start rewiring your brain to create less pain. I think about in yoga, when I've been in a very uncomfortable position and thinking about keeping that steady breath, focusing on my breathing, that can really help with the physical discomfort or the challenge that I'm feeling with my muscles burning or stretching.
So we always have our breath with us. It's a tool that we have from the moment we're born until the day we die. And it's something that we can use to actually get out of that fight or flight, get into the parasympathetic nervous system where we calm our bodies and we aren't in a state of creating more and more pain as we focus on it.
So being aware of your breath, slowing your breath is such a helpful tool in the times that either you're feeling pain or your brain is just feeling out of control. You know, you have a lot of thoughts, you have some anxiety, things that you're thinking of with guilt or shame from the past, whatever it is, taking a deep breath. That's always so important.
What brings you joy or pleasure may be different than what brings other people or myself joy or pleasure. So this is a chance to really think about for you what is positive for you? What do you want more of in your life?
I suggest really trying to tune in to your inner voice. If you find me on Instagram, I did a reel, which is a little short video clip with music, where I show you how to listen to your intuition by swaying back and forth. So what you would do is close your eyes, ask yourself a yes or no question, and depending on which way you sway, that's your answer.
Yes, usually forward. No, it's backward. And this is one good way of starting to tune in to your inner voice.
If you feel like you don't have a good connection with your inner voice, do know that the more you practice, then it does become stronger and stronger. I love how Glennon Doyle in her book Untamed talks about really connecting to her inner voice. She calls it the knowing.
She said that when she started meditating, she started with ten minutes a day, and she could feel that she would sink down into herself more and more, where she wasn't on the surface with all of those thoughts that were thinking about crazy things and jumping from one subject to the next. When she sank down lower and lower, she would have this answer. She would have the knowing.
And it would not necessarily come as a voice to her. It was like a nudge. And then she said when she would act on that nudge, it was like warm liquid gold flowing through her veins when she would do what the nudge had told her to do.
And this is how she would do the next right thing one thing at a time. She said it felt almost like a game where you're not focusing on the end. The knowing wanted her to keep coming back and keep asking what is the next right thing, giving her that nudge, and then she would do it.
So she said, just practice this formula, sinking down, feeling the nudge or the knowing, acting on it, doing what it says, feeling the warm liquid gold, and then repeat forever. I really like this because it is easy to get overwhelmed with what is the big picture, what are all of the things out there that are necessary to do. But we can always slow it down, find in ourselves what the next right thing is to do.
And again, it's very individualized, so it's not going to always look the same from day to day or from person to person. But that's what's beautiful about it, and that is what will help us evolve to the next versions of ourselves by following that voice, that nudge, that knowing, and allowing ourselves the capacity to enjoy, to have pleasure, to have happiness, to show love without guilt. So please think about this over this next week.
Maybe start the joy list, think of what things bring you pleasure, practice knowing the next right thing to do, and see if you can increase your capacity to have positive things in your life. Because once you're turning away from the negative, focusing more and more on the positive, that's what will grow. So thank you for joining me today.
If you haven't already, go to iTunes and give my podcast a review and a rating, please. I would love it. And we'll see you next week.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review.
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Episode # 34- What is TMS??? Lessons From Nicole Sachs, LCSW

I just finished an amazing virtual retreat with Nicole Sachs, LCSW.  Today I want to share with you wisdom I learned from Nicole- both from the retreat and from her podcast, The Cure For Chronic Pain.  She explains TMS so beautifully.

 

Nicole was a patient of Dr John Sarnos, and then went on to work with him.  In this podcast I will talk about what Nicole teaches- about TMS, JournalSpeak, and having patience and kindness for ourselves on our healing journeys! 

 

“The pain is not all in your head, but the solution is not in your body.” -Nicole Sachs, LCSW

 

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Episode # 33- Can Pain Be Your Superpower?

In this episode we look at pain in a different way.  Many people who have gone through the process of doing this body and mind work view their pain as something they are grateful for, their gift, or even their superpower.

Pain is a danger signal.  When people learn to see pain or disease as a sign from their body, and learn the tools to address what needs attending to, then pain can be used like a barometer.  A gauge to let them know it is time to check in or recalibrate.  This extra information helps with coping skills, stress management, and helps identify and change personal issues so they aren't passed on to others.  Learning to manage pain and disease is a meta skill that can be used throughout life to help you become more attune, and become evolved to the next version of yourself.

 

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Episode # 32- How It Feels To Be Wrong

I got the idea for this podcast from a Ted Talk by Kathryn Schulz, where she says how it feels to be wrong.  It feels like you're right.  

 

The brain has programming and the world we perceive is based on what what we bring in that validates what we already believe.  Even thoughts that cause us mental or physical pain are kept because they are known and predictable. 

 

I talk about questioning all of out painful thoughts.  As well as using pain signals or poor health in the body as a red flag to check in emotionally and mentally.  

 

This is the path to freedom.

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Episode # 31- The Evidence File

Today I want to share a life hack for rewiring old programs in your brain.  It's called the evidence file.  You write down evidence against the current belief you want to change- whether on 3x5 cards in a file, or on a list somewhere you keep.  For example, I have an evidence file of nice things people have said to me or successes I've had.  So when my old program of "you're worthless" comes up, I can easily look at evidence that proves it's not true.  

 

You can use the evidence file to make a case against your pain.  Notice on purpose the times you DON'T have pain when you expected you would.  It is so much easier to notice and focus on when you do have pain.  But reacting to pain with strong emotions like frustration, worry or fear, just strengthens the neuronal connections that reinforce the pain is important.  Most of chronic pain is neuroplastic pain that is created by the brain because of emotional factors, but felt in the body as pain.  

 

The evidence file will help you decrease the strength of the neuronal connections in your brain, and rewire your brain to make less pain.

 

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Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 31, The Evidence File. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind. I have a little life hack for you today, something that I've started doing in my life that I really like. And so something that I wanted to share because I think maybe you'll like it too.
And it's called The Evidence File because basically our brain has a lot of beliefs already, these programs that it's formed. And our brain likes to find evidence to prove the thoughts that we already believe true. So subconsciously, that's what it will continue to do.
If we're not actively taking a look at what kinds of things we're thinking, then these programs will just run on default. About 95% of our thoughts are believed to be subconscious. And so I think of those as the programs that are running behind the scenes where what we're thinking is what we're seeing basically on the computer screen, and all these programs are running in the background that make all of those things work.
You can tell I know a lot about computers. So when we're working on changing our thoughts, it can be really difficult for our brain. It's hard for our brain to change to new thoughts sometimes.
I mean, sometimes we can just choose to believe something differently, and it really clicks, and we can change instantly. But sometimes with some of those really old programs that we've been thinking since our childhood, it's a little harder to change those. And so some of the programs may be negative things that we think about ourselves, or just qualities that we feel like are facts about ourselves that we don't really question anymore.
We just find more and more evidence to prove them. So if I have a belief that I'm not good at making new friends, then when I go to a place where there are more people that I don't know, I probably will act a little bit awkward, stick to myself, not want to talk to people, and not only find evidence that supports that I'm not good at making new friends, I'll actually create more of that evidence by the actions that I take by not talking to people. So what we're going to talk about today is a strategy to start being conscious of things that may go against our strong beliefs and to start compiling some evidence in the contrary.
And I heard this term, The Evidence File, from another podcast, Danielle Savory, and she was talking about putting, actually making a file, like in your file folders, and writing down things on a 3x5 card that were for her. She was talking about things that are good about yourself, compliments you've received, things that you're proud of, that you did well, successes that you had, and writing them each down, putting them all physically into this evidence file so that you could at times pick it up, take those out and read through them and remind your brain that there have been some positive things that have happened in your life and that people do in fact like you and you can succeed at things. Because remember, the natural state of the brain is to look for what is negative.
In fact, we feel very uncomfortable with being very happy, you know, just tolerating that sense of fulfillment and happiness and success. It actually feels quite uncomfortable for most of us. We have to build up our tolerance to thinking of ourselves in this new positive way.
I've started doing this and for me, it's less convenient to have a three by five card handy and put it into a file folder. So I just have a page of my planner that I've devoted to my evidence file of those positive things or times that I've been successful. So when I've worked with a client that says I've changed their life, I wrote down Katrina Ubell said that I've changed her life.
If you're in the Life Coach School group, you know who that is. She's kind of a big deal. She's a doctor.
She's someone that I worked with. She said I've changed her life. At yoga, someone said I had a beautiful flow.
My dad said that I've always been a teacher and as soon as I learn something, I want to teach it. Another client said I'm saving her life. One of my friends said, you are a great mom and I see it and know it.
Don't let anyone or anything try and tell your brain anything different. My neighbor once said that my vibe is like sitting by the ocean, so I love that. Just reading over those, like I'm smiling, I'm feeling a little energized.
These are actually things that people have said and having it in one place like that where I can just read through, then my brain can literally go from a state of, you know, kind of thinking I'm worthless and I'm not doing things right to having some hope and remembering why I love this work. So I have this list of positive things. And then I heard on another podcast about keeping a list of your taxes, the taxes you've paid.
And those are basically the negative things that have happened, times that are hard, struggles that you've had, things that you wouldn't call successes, maybe failures or things you can learn from. But not trying to look at it in that way of like, what can I learn from this? But really just recognizing this was a really hard time for me, and I really felt emotional about this, and I've paid my taxes in this way.
I always talk about how life is 50-50. So we're not coming out of it pain free. We're not coming out of it without a little bit of struggle or difficulty or hard times.
And so by writing those down, it reminds me that I've been through that, and so those positive things are also going to be coming because I've been paying my taxes. I had someone sign up to work with me and then just change his mind at the last minute. I had a course that I waited a little too long to sign up for, and the morning that I was like, okay, I'm signing up, I found out it was full.
I had someone not respond to a message that I sent, and I made that mean a whole bunch of things. And again, I'm not trying to self-coach myself here. I'm not trying to sugarcoat them or find the silver lining or say that was really good that that happened.
I'm just putting them all out there, listing them, because I know that for each of those times, I can just plan on something good happening to me because I've paid my tax. And for me, it just kind of feels good to write them down sometimes to be like, look, this sucked. I didn't like it.
And it was hard. And just validating that, you know, there are some negative things in my life. And that's part of being a human.
There's one more type of evidence file that I would suggest. If you are having chronic pain or disease, if you're struggling right now with something that you're working on, healing and understanding, then what I usually tell people to do is to be a detective against your pain. We are all very good at thinking of physical reasons why we feel the way we do in our body.
So I might think, oh, my knees are hurting because I was running up and down the stairs a lot yesterday, or my stomach is hurting. What did I eat recently? Or I woke up with this kink in my neck.
I must have slept on it wrong. So we are all very good at being detectives who notice pain and notice what could be going on physically that would cause it. And of course, we notice pain.
It gets our attention. But what I would suggest here is that you make a case against those things that you've been thinking cause your pain. So what I mean is if you say that it hurts when I sit for 30 minutes, then really be perceptive to what's going on throughout your day.
And maybe there's a time that you have sat for more than 30 minutes and not had pain. Like you're watching a really good movie that you're interested in, and you notice it's been 45 minutes since you last had pain or an hour. Maybe you notice that as you're making the bed, the kink in your neck doesn't hurt.
Most people, when I talk to them, and I really get them to think about if there's ever been a time that they expected to have the pain but they didn't, they can think of at least one time that it's happened. Maybe it's like first thing in the morning, you roll over and realize you don't have any pain. And then as soon as you have that thought and that realization, you roll back and, oh, the pain is there.
But we're very quick to notice the pain, not as adept at noticing when we don't have pain. So it's going to be a challenge to think that way. But, you know, maybe if it hurts to walk up the staircase, you might notice that the first two steps don't hurt.
It's not until the sixth step. Just be really, really interested and curious about when you don't feel pain. I think about, like, hunger.
Sometimes I can have a physical sensation of hunger, but then I get either, you know, very nervous about something or I'm having a good time doing something, my mind is distracted, and I'm not noticing the physical hunger. And I think the same can be happening with pain. And the purpose of building all this evidence against your pain is basically rewiring your brain to not think of things so structurally, to not automatically assume that the pain is because of a structural change in the body.
Because we know from MRI evidence that people who have structural changes don't necessarily have pain, even bulging discs or rotator cuff tears or misalignment of your spine. Most of us do have something physical that if we looked with an MRI, we could see some structural changes, but it doesn't mean that that's what's causing our pain. So I want you to clue in to those times, being very selective and writing them down and starting to make this case against your pain.
Another thing to think about is what is going on for you emotionally or psychologically at the time when you're getting pain. So using pain as that red flag or warning signal to check in and then instead of automatically thinking, oh, it was probably because I was squatting down six times in a row to pick things up that my knee is hurting, but maybe the stress of moving to a new place and the timeline that we have and, you know, all of these other psychological factors could be what's going on. This is a quote by John Sarno.
I suggest to patients that when they find themselves being aware of the pain, they must consciously forcefully shift their attention to something psychological, like something they're worried about, a chronic family or financial problem, a recurrent source of irritation, anything in the psychological realm. For that sends a message to the brain that they're no longer deceived by the pain. When that message reaches the depths of the mind, the subconscious, the pain ceases.
And modern neuroscience does back this up. When we feel pain and we respond with fear and we have anxiety and lots of stress about it, then it reinforces that neuroplastic pain that's created by the brain and felt in the body. But if we can continually react with not focusing on the pain as much, not having fear around the pain, not strengthening all of those neural networks that are associated with pain, up to 95% of the pain in chronic pain is because of this neuroplastic pain.
Alan Gordon, the Director of the Pain Psychology Center in LA, says, the majority of chronic pain is not caused by physical problems in the body, but by learned neural pathways in the brain. So when we're not reinforcing these neural pathways by thinking of all the physical causes that could be contributing to our pain, then we are rewiring our brain. When we can react with calmness and knowing that this is just something emotional that we're feeling in our body, because our reservoir of those emotions that we try to repress and the stress that we've been carrying around for so long is getting too high and we need to do something to get ourselves back in balance, then pain doesn't become such a threatening, scary, vast of unknown that continues to keep us in fear and creating more pain.
So think about your evidence file. Do you want to start creating an evidence file of those positive things that have happened to you, nice things that people have said, successes that you've had? Do you want to have a list of the taxes that you've paid, like I do, or do you want to also have a list like a detective making a case against your pain, the times that you didn't have pain when you might have expected to and the times that when you did feel pain and thought of a psychological cause, if the pain changed for you at all or lessened.
Rewiring our brains does take some effort. It takes some energy. It takes some focus.
It takes a shift in your mindset, but it is absolutely possible, and it is totally worth it. So start gathering your evidence. Start making an evidence file so you can rewire those old programs from your brain.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review.
And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an Unstoppable Body and Mind.

Episode # 30- My Struggles , My Successes

In this episode I talk all about myself!  Struggles with my anxious mind, ulcerative colitis, and some things I've learned from my pains and doing this work.  

 

Follow Betsy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind- Episode 30. My Struggles, My Successes. 

 

In this podcast we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts,

to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind. 

 

Hello, my friends. I thought it would be fun today on this podcast to talk about myself. Today, I wanted to share with you a little bit more about what I'm working on and the things that I've accomplished and had some success with that I think you'll find interesting. 

 

Just like you guys, I am trying to better myself. And with that comes some pain.  Sometimes discomfort, sometimes emotionally and sometimes physically.  And I want to talk about that today. So you know that I go through the same stuff too.

 

But first I have an announcement.  Most podcasts already do this, but I've decided to have the day of the week that my podcast comes out as Monday. So I think I've been kind of hesitant to commit to it always coming out on a certain day because my brain tells me what if that doesn't happen?  And it's better if you just, you know, do it sometime during the week. That's the procrastinating part of my brain apart that doesn't want to be pinned down or held to anything.  But I've decided to do it. Monday is the day that you will be receiving new podcasts. I figured it was a nice way to start the week. And so that is my commitment to you all that even if it's midnight on Monday that you're going to be receiving a new podcast each Monday. That's if you're in the US. I know. Some people are listening in Australia. And so it might be a different day of the week there depending on what time you listen. 

 

Okay, so let's talk about me and my problems. We're going to start with my struggles, because I definitely have them and life is 50-50 for me.  And even though I have been doing thought work for about five years, it doesn't mean that I still don't have any mind drama, and that my thoughts are clean all the time. That's not really the point of the human brain, it will never get to that part where I'm not thinking negative thoughts, or I'm not struggling because I have a human brain that is programmed for survival. So it is always going to be on the lookout for negative things and will be very, very good at showing me all of the negative things.  Because that is the best way to survive according to the primitive brain. 

 

So one of my struggles is an anxious mind. I would say I have anxiety. I've never been diagnosed with it. I've never had to take medicine for it. But I definitely have a lot of anxiousness in my life. And I will just basically wake up feeling anxious, probably nine out of ten mornings. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I'll wake up and not be able to go back to sleep,

or even just during the day, I'll start perseverating on something and get really anxious thinking about it. I think my brain is very good at overthinking things, and looking for worst case scenarios and pointing them out to me. And even before I discovered thought work, I was this way

and with thought work on this way.

 

I honestly think my parents are quite anxious people, and it's probably just part of my genetic and cultural heritage. But I don't let it stop me. And I've learned some tools to deal with it. These are things that work for me.

 

The first thing is writing things down.  Sometimes I don't even know what exactly I'm thinking, I'll just have this knot in my stomach and tightness in my chest, maybe even a lump in my throat just kind of this constricted feeling and general uneasiness, almost sometimes dread. And usually there's a bunch of thoughts behind it. Something about my kids in school or

my business, or my ex, or feelings that I'm not doing enough, or how messy my house is.  Really, it could be anything. My brain wants to find all the reasons to feel, overwhelm and anxiety and it can find them.   Even on vacation, a lot of times I wake up anxious. 

 

So at this point, I know that's how my brain is. And I don't try to fight it. And I've found some strategies that work for me to deal with it. And the first one is journaling. So when I feel overwhelmed about all the things that I need to do, I start writing a list of what they are. I write down lists, I write down thoughts, anything that comes to mind.  I will write it down on the page so that it's not swimming around in my head and overwhelming my brain. And that usually helps at least a little bit. 

 

It's like I always teach these emotions need to be felt. Those feelings need to be validated. And so I don't try to push it away and pretend like it's not there. I actually dive a little bit deeper in and explore what is going on for me. 

 

The second thing I do is try to get my parasympathetic nervous system activated. Just try to calm my nervous system. Whether that is actually sitting and meditating, I've been doing that a lot more lately, and I really think it's been helping all areas of my life. Sometimes I'll just lay in bed and take some deep breaths before I get up. And for me, I feel so much of my anxiety in my stomach and it's related to my ulcerative colitis symptoms, which I'll talk about in a sec. And so I really try to breathe, as if I'm breathing all the way down into basically my intestines. Like I when I inhale, I breathe all the way into my pelvis. And then when I exhale, I try to exhale completely.

 

And this means that I'm taking longer, slower, deeper breaths, because the tendency when you are anxious, is to take short, quick, shallow breaths, which just ramps up the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight. 

 

And the last thing that I do with my anxiety is I get up and I get to work.  So once I've

kind of analyzed what's going on and what's stressing me out that day, I get up and do my morning routine, like making my bed, getting dressed. And I don't specifically try to repress the anxiety. I imagine it just coming with me. 

 

So Brooke Castillo, my teacher calls anxiety her “heavy purse.” She picks up her heavy purse, and she takes it with her wherever she needs to go. The other analogy I like for these emotions, is that they just ride in the passenger seat with me, they're in the car, but they're not driving.  They're just sitting there along for the ride.

 

And honestly, once I get going and doing things, I don't notice that they're there so much. So I wouldn't say I'm like, plagued with anxiety all of the time. But it's almost like it's just there in the background, waiting to show me reasons why I should believe it. 

 

What I've been thinking about a lot lately, when I am starting my day or getting going or have kind of those transition moments or some free time is what is the next right considered action. 

 

So if I'm getting ready because I have a zoom call at nine o'clock, the next right considered action might be to go brush my hair and look presentable, at least from the shoulders up for that call. 

 

And if I'm feeling some mom guilt, thinking that I haven't been giving my kids enough attention lately, then I will think maybe the next right considered action would be to go and watch a movie with them, or go on a walk with one of them. Because sometimes my brain gets overwhelmed with all of the things. So if I was like, Oh, my house is such a mess. And it's very overwhelming to think of every room and everything that needs to be done in each room.  So I would maybe just start with one of the rooms and one of the tasks, maybe it's just doing the dishes or maybe Just cleaning off my bathroom countertop, one thing at a time. 

 

Okay, here's another thing that I struggle with. And I don't even know that I would call it a struggle at this point. But it's something that I've noticed that my brain does. And I used to get frustrated with it. And I think that this is something that happens with all of our brains. And so I want to talk about it. And that's when I have a decision to make, my brain will offer me resistance. 

 

Here's an example of something that recently happened. I woke up and when I was meditating, I kept thinking about messaging someone to kind of ask for a favor.  And it was something I was a little uncomfortable with. But I also knew it wouldn't take too much of their time and that they would probably be willing to do it if I just asked. And so I did, I composed the message and then literally right after it I sent it, my brain was like, “that was a horrible idea. You shouldn't have done it. That sounded stupid. Why would you ask that?” You know, just all the things my brain wanted to tell me. 

 

And I've noticed that this comes up a lot. So I've actually gotten a lot better at not listening to that resistance. But I want you to know that it still comes up. It's still there. I think I talked about this in my decision making podcast, because it's part of what our brain does when we are trying to decide something. Our brains are pros at basically debate- where you argue for and against something.  Our brains can do that, depending on which way we're leaning towards, our brains will usually argue against that and I do notice that that comes up a lot for me, but I try to notice it and allow it to be there without listening to it too much.

 

Now, another thing I want to talk to you about is my ulcerative colitis. That is the autoimmune disorder that got me started on this journey of Mind-Body healing. And it's definitely a journey, not a destination. There have been times that I've been completely symptom free. And last fall when I had a colonoscopy, he said there was no active disease, which was awesome. 

 

But I've noticed, especially in 2020, that I've had some symptoms again, earlier this year in January, when I started this podcast and started coaching people and building a website and making posts on social media. I was admittedly much more stressed out and even got to the point, once there was some blood in my stool, and then I really got a little bit freaked out. I felt a ton of imposter syndrome. Like, “who do you think you are trying to teach people about healing that they can heal? And here you are. You're not even healed all the way. I mean, your symptoms are coming back.” 

 

Now, you know, looking back, I can see it was definitely stress related, I committed to taking some time for rest and repair. So not pushing myself quite as hard, taking naps when I was tired. I did a lot of coaching on my thoughts and my stress level. And what I was making it mean that I had some symptoms again, when I am pretty much symptom free and thought I was healed. But I don't think the timing was incidental. You know, I was really being vulnerable and probably repressing a lot of emotions to just kind of push through and my body was not going to let me get away with that.  So it brought up these symptoms.

 

I kind of recalibrated myself, and I haven't had those severe symptoms again.  Sorry to talk about like poop and stuff, but it's kind of what you deal with with ulcerative colitis. 

 

But what's interesting is I still do get the pain, I get it. That's where I feel my stress is in my stomach in my intestines, it feels like I would call it like a bubbling, green geyser, that when I feel anxious or stressed about things, then I have kind of this bubbly churning in my stomach. But I kind of use that as my barometer of me needing to either deal with some emotions, or give myself some time to rest and repair. 

 

And it happened to me last week where I had kind of some like sharp pains in my stomach and it was a little more than the normal just like stomach grumbling. And I didn't make the connection until I was telling my friend about it a little bit later, that what had happened is I had just made a pretty vulnerable post on Instagram where I had this big salad that I was holding and I was talking about how I used to eat salad out of fear, because I hated my body and wanted it to be different. And I was coming from this place of fear eating salad and I didn't

enjoy it.  And then when I had my ulcerative colitis symptoms, I just couldn't even eat vegetables at all. I mean, it was looking at a salad like that will literally just make my stomach churn. And so I had to, for years completely avoid raw vegetables.  And I have started eating salads again, and it's been fine. And it's, and I love salads now, and I'm not eating it for any reason, because I hate myself. I'm really eating it out of love, because sometimes a salad just really sounds good to me.

 

And so it was just this very raw, open post about basically how I was healed. And just a few minutes later, that's when I started getting those symptoms. And again, my brain in the moment, I wasn't like, “Whoa, I eat that salad. That was horrible.” I actually had a pretty important coaching call with someone that I was a little nervous to coach and I just thought it was kind of about that. But then when I was telling my friend about, like how bad my symptoms were this last week that one day, I was like, Oh, that was the day, and it was right after I made that post, and I ate that salad. 

 

Seriously, I think my brain and my nervous system were like, “this is dangerous, you're being vulnerable. You're putting yourself out there in a way that doesn't feel safe. And so I'm going to give you these symptoms and this pain, to keep you small, to keep you hiding to keep you in the cave and safe and in pain where I can take care of you. And you won't have to risk any of those hurtful emotions of someone rejecting you because you put yourself out there.”

 

So what I did in that moment was, you know, I had that call coming up and so I did some tapping.  EFT, I have an app for it called the tapping solution, which I think is really awesome. And they have meditations and tapping for different conditions or circumstances in your life.  Whether it's fear about Coronavirus, or being in the military, or wanting to get a good night's sleep and they have one for the intestinal issues or stomach issues or stomach pain, and I did that tapping app.  And it completely I mean not completely, took the pain away. It went from like a seven to a three, but it drastically reduced it enough so that when I went to do the coaching call, I felt fine. 

 

But yeah, you guys, I still struggle with it. A lot of people with chronic pain, who are no longer dealing with chronic illness have their pain or disease where, you know, they experience it every day.  And it's like the focus of their life. But it'll pop up every now and then. And I it's kind of I think of it as the way my body speaks to me. And again, kind of that barometer or signal danger signal, because that's what we know pain is to tell me, “hey, something needs to be recalibrated in your life right now”, or just for me to recognize, “yeah, you're doing things that are out of your comfort zone, and risking rejection is not the biggest thing to be feared.”

 

I really can't control how other people think of me and I want to show up the way that I want to show up. But just there just was some time it took me to just kind of uncover some of those emotions and figure out what was really going on. And I imagine that won't be the last time in my life that I'll have to do that.

 

So I count my ulcerative colitis as a struggle and a success because I've definitely learned so much through it. And I'm actually thankful that I do have it because that's what brought me to this work, and all of the amazing things that I've learned and the things that I'm helping people with right now. 

 

So I want to tell you a couple of interesting stories that I would call successes along this journey. The first was involving some knee pain that I had last year, and I had some knee pain that lasted about six months. And one thing that was interesting that I noticed was one time watching a yoga teacher demonstrate a move, and I thought it would hurt my knee and my knee instantly started hurting. So I knew that it wasn't totally structural. 

 

And of course, I've been you know, I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. reading about it, you know, exploring it. I knew that I was almost certain that it wasn't something structural, but I've also been a physical therapist for 20 years. And so in the back of my mind, I was like, “all of these symptoms really point to a knee meniscus being torn.” And a little part of me believed that that might be the part of my pain that I just couldn't get over because there was something structural. 

 

And I had a friend check out my knee. And she's in medical school and she was feeling around and said, Your fibula is really tight on this side. And literally, as soon as I really fully believed that there was some other structural explanation for what was going on. Then the next day, my knees stopped hurting.  I mean, this is a lot like the UC, where occasionally I will have some knee pain. It'll come every once in a while. And now that I do the pen vent process, I've actually had it go away quite quickly when I journal or if I'm kind of bored with it.  Like I've talked about before, just like “oh, there it is.” And not making a big deal of it. 

 

So that was an interesting learning experience. And that's how I try to look at these instances of pain that I have. Now, as you know, this is a great chance for me to kind of like conduct a little science experiment on my body and to learn something. 

 

And then the last thing I'm going to tell you about that I thought was fascinating was I spent some time at the lake cabin with my cousins and did some surfing behind the boat. And one of the times I face planted, and you know, kind of jarred my neck as I landed, and I thought, even in the moment I could start to feel it tighten up and I thought “for sure, tomorrow I'll have some soreness,” but like it's not a big deal. I wasn't worried about it. But I've also had a lot of experiences after falling waterskiing or any other activities like that snowboarding when I face planted. You know, I'm like, “Yeah, sometimes muscle soreness would probably be quite normal.”

 

And yes, the next morning, I did wake up with some muscle soreness, mainly on the left side when I would turn my head, and even a little bit of a headache. And I thought just for the sake of an experiment, I mean, I have a really good reason of why it should hurt. And it's within the first 24 hours. So I do believe there's kind of some legitimate clean pain that's not created by your brain. It's created by your body, like if you had a sprained ankle or a broken bone. But I thought just for the sake of an experiment, I'm going to try some journaling. And I did rage on the page, you know, I really let it out and didn't hold back with my emotions.  And anything that I could think of I wrote down.  And literally my neck pain went away. I mean, actually, so the end range of motion when I would turn completely, at the very, very end, I could feel, you know, a little pinch. But like as far as just walking around, my headache was gone. 

 

That day we went cliff jumping, and it didn't bother me at all. It was really just when I like turned my head fully 100% or 95% to the left, I could feel it a little bit. So most of the day, it was good. I totally didn't notice it. But later that day, we all went out to dinner, and I paid for everyone. And then I had checked my account and this big bill that I didn't expect to come out that day had come out. And I noticed like there was this money situation where I had to transfer some money pretty quickly and was hoping that I didn't already incur any fees or anything. And so I started feeling that neck pain again, wouldn't you know?  So I realized it, obviously quite quickly then.  And so that time I was with my cousin, her kids and all my kids and I wasn't able to sit down and journal. But I was able to just recognize this is exactly what's going on. My mind did not go immediately to a structural cause it went to this emotional cause. And as soon as I was able to like acknowledge, listen, this money situation is fine. It was just this little glitch I had to take care of, I'm safe. Then my neck pain went away again. 

 

There's even a quote from Dr John Sarno, where he talks about, if you are having some physical pain, think about something psychological instead of something physical. Actually, I'll just read it to you. He says, “I suggest to patients that when they find themselves being aware of the pain, they must consciously forcefully shift their attention to something psychological, like something they're worried about a chronic family or financial problem or recurrent source of irritation, anything in the psychological realm.  For that sends a message to the brain they're no longer deceived by the pain. When that message reaches the depths of the mind, the subconscious, that pain ceases.”

 

Guys, we're just humans, we are always going to have one pain or another, or an illness.  There are things that are going to happen. And instead of thinking of them as either a weakness and character that we know all this mind body stuff, so why would this possibly happen? I mean, that's how I used to feel for sure. When I was starting this work and putting a lot of pressure on myself. These things are gonna happen even to the most experienced Mind Body practitioners, I'm sure they still happen. And you can look at them as a chance to get deeper into yourself to maybe learn something about yourself.  And to almost do these little science experiments.  Definitely not a fearful way of thinking of anything that starts happening to your body.

 

Thanks for listening, I hope that you got some little pieces of inspiration from hearing me talk all about myself. But I do think maybe hopefully it was a little bit helpful to hear about my humaneness and the real struggles and things I've gone through and the success I've had too. Thanks for being on this journey with me.

 

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me.  Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an unstoppable body and mind.

Episode # 29- You Are Not Your Thoughts

In this episode I talk about what we make our thoughts mean about ourselves- especially our negative ones.  But as humans are brains are programmed to be negative.  If we don't expect that or allow for that, it is easy to feel frustrated with ourselves or feel like we are doing it wrong.  But just like life is 50-50, we will have good thoughts and bad thoughts.  And that's OK.  

I talk about becoming an observer of your brain, a watcher of your thoughts.  This is just as important for thought work as it is for healing chronic pain. 

So listen, and learn ways to be more gentle with yourself and your brain.  You are NOT your thoughts.

 

Follow Betsy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind. Episode Six- How to Get the Results You Want. 

 

In this podcast we learned to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind.

 

Hello, today we are going to talk more about the model. So if you want to review the model, listen to Episode Five. 

 

But basically, it's a way to break down any situation into the circumstance, thought, feeling, action and result. 

 

Now really looking at our problems in the model allows us to see what the circumstance is.  Which is basically something objective that a court of law would find.  

 

We learn how much is coming from our thoughts, and how our thoughts create our feelings.  

 

Feelings cause our actions, usually not showing up the way you'd want to. 

 

And the result is what your actions cause. Our results always prove our thoughts true. That's just the way our brain works. 

 

If you find that you're trying to do a model, and the result is not proving your thoughts true, it's probably because you have mixed models, which is very easy to do when you're first starting to do models. 

 

Remember, you have 60 to 70,000 thoughts a day. So it's very easy to get sidetracked on a different model. 

 

So now that you can understand your problem and the role you play, and where you have the power to change, how do you solve the problem?

 

It's tricky.

 

In life, we want an easy answer. So I warn you this does sound deceptively easy, but be patient with yourself in the application. Remember, the brain is programmed to be efficient. And there are lots of strong neural pathways that are activated with these thoughts that you've been thinking for decades possibly. And the cells even are used to getting certain neuro chemicals. 

 

Joe Dispenza explains this is how we can get addicted to certain emotions like anger, or judgment or shame. To make a change in our brain requires energy. Most of our models are based in the past our brain is very efficient and sometimes has even formed these models when we were children, trying to make sense of the world. 

 

But remember, that past is gone now. The only thing that is left from the past is the stories that we retell in our brain. And you know what happens to stories that get retold over and over and slightly morph over time. 

 

I watched a program on Netflix called Memory Explained. They said that 50% of the details about a memory change with each passing year, yet people are still convinced they're 100% right. 

 

Thank you brains. 

 

But we all do this. So if you've been telling a story from your past, over and over again for years or possibly decades, chances are that it's kind of a super glossed over photoshopped, almost social media worthy story.  

 

Sometimes we call it story fondling, which is just what our brains do to make sense of what happened and how it fits into our context. We might mold the story so that we are put in the best light, almost like using a filter to reflect what we believe and want to portray back into the world.

 

Maybe thinking this way we can continue to be a victim or blame someone else. In fact, one good way to know if we're living in the past is that we have a lot of stories of victimhood. When we blame someone for making us feel or do something, we have a model that is based in the past. 

 

If you also are having an emotion in your model that is guilt or shame, that is a model from the past. 

 

Another example that I like to use in every situation is the model with pain. Pain would be a model that's based in the past. Joe Dispenza says we wake up and remember our pains each day. So it kind of makes sense that the brain's programming is just reliving the story of the pain and this kind of background program that it runs efficiently over and over and over. 

 

In fact, research has shown that brains become more hypersensitive to pain and have a lower threshold of what's needed to register pain when pain becomes more chronic. 

 

What if we could Question each model from the past that has been causing us pain?  If it's from very long ago, the thing that we may be calling a circumstance may not even be 100% true, or really what happened in reality? 

 

If you're noticing that something from the past is causing you pain, can you accept the thought that things happened just as they were supposed to? Remember, Byron Katie's observation, that the only times we have pain is when our thoughts are in contrast to what happened in reality. 

 

If we could tease out each model, like a knotted up ball of string that we untangle one string at a time, and the more conscious we become, the more we can begin to choose and shape our future. 

 

Speaking of the future, you've probably already guessed now that the way to solve any problem using the model is by putting what you want in the result line? 

 

Really, you could put it in any line of the model because it's like a building with floors. And the model is like an elevator you can take up or down. 

 

But let's start with the result line, because that's the best way to show how you can get what you want with the model. So imagine what you want in the result line. Do you want more money? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to start a business? Do you want to learn to play an instrument? Do you want to find love? Do you want to play tennis again? 

 

You can literally put anything you want in the result line.  Do you want to make a million dollars? Put it into a model.  

 

What actions would you need to take to make a million dollars?  Working back from the actions, what feelings would you need to have to generate those actions? And what thoughts would you need to think to feel those feelings? 

 

Let's get more specific with a model about pain. 

 

So the result that I may want is to sleep through the night.  Then I think, what are the actions I might need to take in order to sleep through the night?   I would probably start by journaling, just letting my mind go into a receptive mode and writing down whatever I might think of. 

 

One way I might start is to ask my body what it would need to do to sleep through the night without pain, then just grab some paper and start writing without a filter without thinking.  Just fill up pages. 

 

Maybe I might decide to drink some herbal tea, or not to drink liquid past a certain time. Maybe I might think to listen to some soothing music, or try a meditation app. I could try some yoga nidra which is sleeping yoga, which is restorative and has comfortable positions. Or I could think of taking a bath. Maybe I might try reading a book like Divided Mind by John Sarno, that looks at pain in a way different to what I'm used to. That is how I can help my brain rewire. 

 

If you want to have some fun you could look up the books by Louise Hay or her explanations online for why a certain pain or ailment in your body is manifesting in you. Like sciatica, she says is related to being hypocritical, fear of money or fear of the future. And neck pain is because of inflexibility or unbending or stubbornness. 

 

So those might be thoughts of things you can journal about. Maybe they relate to you and you can apply it maybe not.  But just a springboard of ways to get you thinking a little bit differently.

 

Maybe I could look into joining a pain coaching group which is something I do plan on starting. So we'll look forward to that in the future. There are apps like Curable that can teach you modern neuroscience, and how the newest research is suggesting a whole new way of looking at and treating pain. 

 

Gaining information is the first step and helping your brain rewire. You cannot continue to think the same way and create change. Here is an example of some information that might cause you to question your thinking about how you've been taught to view pain. 

 

MRIs are traditionally used to determine if there might be a cause for the pain or a physical need for surgery. But research has been showing that MRIs really should just be used for red flags for things like cancer or infection or tumors because they're not reliable and showing a structural cause of pain. 

 

A study I learned about from 2015 performed MRIs on people who did and didn't have back pain.  47% of the people who reported back pain had no abnormalities on their MRI findings. They had no signs of disc degeneration. 32% of the patients who had no lower back pain did show abnormal MRI results. They had clear signs of disc degeneration but had no

back pain.

 

They were tracked over the next year and 13 of the patients who had no back pain initially started experiencing back pain. But when they did another MRI, they did not see any physical changes that could show why or explain this onset of pain. 

 

Dr. Tim Flynn who hosts the International Spine and Pain Institute's podcast says that changes on imaging are just common with age.  We get “wrinkles on the inside”. These are normal age related changes, but we give them nasty names like “degeneration”, and “torn”, and “herniated”.  

 

For the majority of people and chronic pain, these structural abnormalities are unrelated to the pain they are experiencing. The action of learning more information could help with rewiring the way you conceive of your pain. 

 

And remember, this is not just for pain. This is for other body maladies like skin disorders, gi issues, allergies, or even asthma.

 

So back to our model, what other actions could I take to help sleep through the night?  I could brainstorm and list maybe pages of things that I might be able to do just in my imagination to help me sleep at night. 

 

Now, how would I need to feel to take those actions?  I would say I would need to feel trusting. I really like that emotion. For me, it really embodies hope and belief, empowerment, and letting go. 

 

You could look on an emotion chart to see what emotion you like the best. Try to feel it in your body.

 

What would I need to be thinking to feel trusting?

 

I like the thought, “I'm rewiring my brain and taking control of my health.” 

 

The thought is really important though, it has to feel true to you. If you don't believe that you can rewire your brain, this will not generate the feeling of trust for you. 

 

So just pretend and get creative here. Future models can be fun. We often don't even plan our futures with a purpose like this. Also, most of us start to think we are at the effects of our circumstances, or the all we're capable of doing is things that we've already done in the past. 

 

But what if you had a magic wand and you could pick out a result? Most of us don't spend any time thinking about the results we want. Once we're adults, no one is asking us what we want to do and where we want to go. We just settle into our routines. And we don't think about our plan, what we want to do or where we want to be in five years. 

 

We worry about the future. We want maybe something to be different in the future, so we can feel differently than we do now. But I think we should spend more time thinking about the results we want to have in our lives, and what we would need to do to achieve those results on purpose. 

 

In Becoming Supernatural, Dr. Joe Dispenza describes his walking meditation.  Where you totally embody how the person you want to be would talk or walk or even think by choosing, imagining, and visualizing details of the life you want to have, and the way you want to feel. This is the way you can achieve that reality. 

 

Just like a method actor, you could play the part of a wealthy person or the calm person, or the unlimited person you want to be. 

 

Your beliefs about yourself are all of your thoughts about yourself. So try to think of yourself more in these ways you want to become, or imagine how it would feel. Don't forget to pick an emotion that really moves or motivates you. Changing our brain takes energy. So the fastest way to create change and rewire our brain is to add the power of an emotion. By choosing with intent and purpose. Your mind can control your body rather than your body, controlling your mind.

 

So I want to share with you three different brain hack strategies that I found. 

 

One is by BJ Fogg. I learned about him from the Untangle Podcast by Muse. BJ Fogg wrote a book called Tiny Habits, which I'm reading right now. It's awesome. It's based on 20 years of behavior research. And he created a behavior model, which explains our behaviors, in terms of a few different factors so that we can not blame our behaviors and inability to change them on us having character flaws or problems with our self discipline.  But we can look at it more objectively about what all is going on. 

 

So what I want to tell you about from him, though, is kind of a brain hack to forming new habits. He says the best way to create a new habit is to break it down into the tiniest possible steps, like the tiniest step, like flossing, one tooth Or just putting on your walking shoes. But creating this habit that you do consistently and making it part of your routine, or a prompt that you're consistent with. 

 

So for example, if you're flossing your teeth, when you put your toothbrush down, you start by just flossing one tooth. And then the most important part is that you celebrate doing this first baby step. I found this part of it so interesting. 

 

So in a few days, you can start flossing all of your teeth but you start by just building the habit, putting your toothbrush down, flossing, one tooth, and then in a few days, if you want to start flossing all of your teeth you can, but if you go back to just flossing the one tooth, you still celebrate that when you start seeing success that you have with these tiny habits. Then the motivation that you have to change really snowballs. It's kind of like a life hack to get your brain breaking out of the models from the past and starting to see yourself as a more confident, dynamic person that can change. 

 

Then you start to naturally want to change and take on new challenges without needing to rely on willpower, or resistance or force. 

 

The other thing I found interesting is that if you want to decrease a bad habit, like stop eating sugar, you don't even focus directly on stopping the bad habit initially. He starts by having you build positive, tiny habits. So maybe you would build some habits around starting an exercise routine, or making your bed something where you can be successful and build that power. 

 

I love this.  I really think of David Hawkins and the vibrations of the emotions and how much more powerful you'll be if you're coming from a place of courage, or even neutrality than  if you're starting from a place of disgust or being critical of yourself.  Most of the time we start our habits in a place where we're not liking where we are kind of disgusted with ourselves and already negative. 

 

I love how in BJ Fogg’s model, the power of change is coming from success and positivity. So remember to start tiny, and celebrate the little changes. 

 

Life Hack number two. I also found from the Untangle Podcast, they interviewed the author MJ Ryan, who wrote a book called Habit Changers. It's not on Audible yet, and I've ordered it and I haven't gotten it yet. So I might be sharing more from this brilliant author. It sounds like an amazing book. But at least from her interview, I was able to understand a few of her main ideas, and I think they're valuable and habit change. 

 

She talks about how up to 90% of our behaviors throughout the day are automatic So our brain wants to be very efficient. It learns things like how to pour a glass of water or how to drive or how to believe certain things. And those behaviors are housed in the basal ganglia where habits live, and they just run and they're hardwired and they are hard to change.

 

So you really need to bring a lot of intention to changing a bad habit or forming a new habit. She says you end up doing the same old thing, not because you're weak, but because you're on automatic pilot. 

 

She has 81 game changing mantras in her book, which are mantras that help override the autonomic nervous system. So they're not mantras like I am calm, I am calm, where you might not feel calm, necessarily, when you say them.  She combines the statements with a few other key things. You have to have a “strong why” .  You have to pick one thing that you want to work on changing.  Pick one thing that you have the most motivation to change first, and to have a “strong why” you have to have a reminder of what you want to do. 

 

You might put it on a card that you hold in your wallet, or have a bracelet or something that reminds you of this phrase that you want to say. Now the phrase or a mantra should be directive. It should tell you what to do not I am calm, I'm calm, but something that's directive, like, “reach for a better thought.”

 

Now, this I thought was super interesting.  She talks about pairing your mantra with an action.

She references Amy Cuddy, a researcher who found the Wonder Woman pose or standing in a powerful position with your hands on your hips and your feet out wide. If people would stand like that for two minutes, it would significantly increase their testosterone, it would decrease their cortisol They would have more risk taking behaviors.

 

And in other studies, they found that similar positions, increase the pain threshold caused you to think more abstractly, and have helped people perform better in interviews when they're seated in a power position. 

 

I think that's so cool because I've been a physical therapist for 16 years working with pediatrics. So I know that the way that children learn first is through their motor actions. So think of maybe clapping or pointing you might see a child do something like that before they would actually say the word or speak. In fact, a lot of kids learn to do finger plays or things like patty cake before they would say the words. So learning a motor action like a sign for sign language usually ends up that that is one of the first words that that child also says the one they've learned the physical sign for.  So she suggests if you're working on patience or being more calm, you might want to touch your heart.

 

So this way, you're pairing a visual, if you have the reminder on a card, and audio hearing yourself, say the mantra, and a physical gesture, and that is much more powerful for change.

 

One of the mantras that I thought of when I was listening to the one she gave as an example, is “become curious, not critical.” 

 

I would like to do that with my hand on my heart. I think that's the place where I feel the vibration of gratitude. And she also says that when you touch one or both hands to your heart, you increase the production of oxytocin, which is the feel good or the love hormone. 

 

Here are a few other mantras that she suggests. “My response is my responsibility.” “Stop, breathe, rewind”. “You're on your own path.”

 

This one is one of my favorite favorites. “People do what people always do.” Isn't that great? It just relinquishes you from any power of trying to control anyone or judge anyone. You're letting people do what they do. And you're not surprised when people might disappoint you or not follow through, because that's part of what people do, right? 

 

I think of this with kids, kids do what kids always do. And that might mean sometimes siblings are fighting or sometimes kids are drawing on the walls, or sometimes they're disrespecting you, (according to you.) And that's what kids do. 

 

I think of this also, with our brains with all that we talk about. “Brains do what brains always do” when you catch yourself obsessing or worrying or going back to the past. You can just think up there's my brain. Again, it's working brains do what brains always do. 

 

The last Life Hack is from Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School. This is called the urge jar. I love this idea. It's so simple and brilliant.  If you're working on changing a habit,

then anytime you have an urge that you don't give into, you put a bead in the urge jar. 

 

So usually when we have an urge, we just try to resist it. And that's kind of like pushing that beach ball underwater. You can only do that for so long and have so much willpower. But with the urge jar, it's like a little hack for your brain, where you still get a reward, even though you haven't given into the urge. It's really fascinating how your brain likes this reward system. I really liked the urge jar and encourage you to try it. 

 

So I challenge you to think of a result you want in your life. Try doing a model work backwards from the result line. Don't worry about how you're going to get it exactly. You can brainstorm at this point. 

 

But if you could pick anything for yourself in the future, what would that result be? What actions would you need to take? What feelings would you need to feel? And what thoughts would you need to think? 

 

If you can get to the place where you can think and believe a thought on purpose, it won't even matter what the circumstances of your life are.

 

Thank you so much for listening.  I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an unstoppable body and mind.

 

Episode # 28- The Cause of your Suffering

In this episode I talk about the cause of your suffering and how to eliminate it!  The concept is straightforward, and it comes from this formula: pain x resistance = suffering.  

Pain is part of life, but suffering is optional.  And suffering is amplified by the amount of resistance we have.  

Listen for examples of resistance and how to decrease your resistance by acceptance.

 

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Transcript-Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 28, The Cause of Your Suffering. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind.
Hello, my friends. Today, we are going to talk about the cause of your suffering and how to eliminate your suffering. Now, if you're thinking, you don't know me, you don't know what the cause of my suffering is.
And it's true, I may not know the specific examples in your case unless you work with me as your coach. And then we can go through this specifically for you. But in general, I can tell you what causes suffering and how to stop it.
I think I talked about this equation in the episode about clean pain versus dirty pain. But in Buddhism, they have an equation that pain times resistance equals suffering. The first point that I want to make is that pain is a normal part of life.
I believe that about 50% of life is positive and about 50% is negative. And in that negative part, there is pain. There's mental pain, emotional pain, or physical pain that's kind of just part of life.
We should expect that that's there because if we didn't feel those negative emotions, we wouldn't even know what positive emotions are. We wouldn't have that contrast. And remember, pain actually does serve us.
If we have physical pain, that can warn us of danger. If we have emotional pain, it might signal that we need to make some kind of a change in our lives. If you think about all of the things that were invented in the world, it's because we wanted to somehow decrease our pain or we wanted to prevent pain.
The person who invented TVs with remotes wanted to make life a little bit easier, not have the pain of having to get up and change the channel or ask your kids to do it. The people who invented a sleep number bed wanted to decrease the discomfort of having a mattress that's too hard or too soft. Cars, phones, all of the great things that we have in our lives have been thought of by people who wanted to make life easier, make life less painful.
So just realizing that pain is going to happen no matter how much we hate it or don't think it should be there, pain is a part of life. The part that we do have control over in the equation is how much resistance we have to the pain. So if pain times resistance equals suffering, then the more resistance we have to the pain, the more suffering we will have.
If our resistance is zero, then pain times zero equals zero. There's zero suffering. So pain is a part of life, but suffering about that pain is optional.
So if you tell me you have a lot of suffering in your life, then even if I don't know the specifics, I know that you are resisting something. You are resisting some pain. So what is resistance?
What does that look like? It could look like denying what is. It could be wishing things were different.
It could be trying to control things that are out of your control. So that includes other people, acts of God or the universe. Basically anything other than ourselves and our thoughts, if we're trying to control them, can lead to some resistance.
It's like a tightening up. It's like a withdrawing. It's an emotion of fear and of scarcity, and it's uncomfortable.
You could have resistance about things that happened in the past. And this is so, so common, right? When something painful in the past has happened, we have that 2020 vision of the past.
We think we could have done it differently. We should have done things differently. They shouldn't have happened that way.
And these are normal things to feel. Our brain wants to learn from the past and make different changes for the future. But our primal brain also wants to keep us in fear and wants to keep us always on the lookout for danger.
And so we interpret the past through this lens of things have gone wrong. How do we change this for the future? Why did this happen?
And a lot of times blame ourselves. But I really like how Byron Katie looks at the past. She is a lover of reality.
And so whatever the reality that happened, she accepts it. In fact, she says things were supposed to happen exactly that way. We know that because that's how it happened.
So be really careful when you're looking at things in your past. Are you looking at it with a mindset of this is something that I can learn from? Or are you looking at it like this shouldn't have happened?
This is unfair. Why did this happen? I can't accept this.
This was wrong. And that's for sure not easy to do. I can use something that happened to me this week as an example.
I was dropped from my car insurance because of having a couple of accidents. And the new policy that I had to get is significantly more. And so I was going through each of those incidents and thinking of all the things that I should have done differently or that basically it just wasn't my fault.
It was the other person's fault. So I had a lot of resistance. About things that happened in the past that I couldn't change.
And it made me pretty mad. And I definitely spent some time this week suffering every time I would think of the past and how it shouldn't have happened that way. I've heard of this happening a lot when there's a death.
People will say, I should have called to check in on this person, or I should have checked my rear view mirror, or, you know, all of these things that seem so rational. If you look back at the situation, I could have done this differently. But the fact is, in that moment, things happened exactly as they were supposed to.
We know that because that's how it happened. And maybe if that seems too fatalistic for you, then think of it like there were multiple things involved, other people's models, other people's decisions. And if you could somehow make some kind of equation or algorithm out of all of the moving parts and pieces and factors that could not be controlled by me, well, that's how it ended up in that moment of time.
So the more you can let go of things that have happened in the past, the more you can accept that that's the way they happened, and it was for learning or it was for some reason, or maybe that's just how life is, then the less resistance you have to the pain and the less suffering. It doesn't mean that there won't be pain, but you could eliminate the suffering. It's totally what I talked about in the clean pain versus dirty pain episode.
There's some clean pain, and then when you add resistance and their suffering, that's the dirty pain. That's the pain that you're causing yourself. You could have resistance to what is going on in the present moment.
And again, it's like a denial of reality. This shouldn't be happening. I don't like that this is happening.
I can't handle this. I'm too weak. I'm too overwhelmed.
And then often in the present moment, we tend to think of the future and have some thoughts of resistance about that pain in the future. How long will this pain last? What does this mean about what's going on?
So for example, if you hurt your knee and you've had knee pain before, you might think, this is like pain I've had before. And it might mean something about the future. It took me three months to get over this pain before.
So does that mean I'm going to have pain for three months? Did I damage something that is irreparable? Am I going to have to spend a lot of time and money trying to fix it?
Is it possible that I won't be able to fix it and I'll have to live with pain the rest of my life? What if I'm not able to hike the mountain I wanted to hike next year? I mean, our brain can give us endless resistance about things in the future.
A lot of what ifs and worst case scenarios. And part of it is because our brains are designed to like stories and to like having completion of stories. So Brené Brown talks about how there's actually some dopamine that you get when you have something that makes sense to your brain and kind of completes this question in a story form.
So if your knee hurts and you don't have an explanation as to why, your brain goes to work on trying to figure out all of these things, what it could mean, having some kind of story to go along with it that explains it, even if it ends up causing you a lot of suffering. I see a lot of resistance when we reject the emotions that we have. And this ties in so closely with the work on chronic pain and disease.
Dr. John Sarno talks a lot about how trying to repress the emotions that we have that we find unacceptable is actually what causes our physical pain. So one example that I can totally relate to is a new parent with an infant. Of course, you love your child, but there are times that are very, very difficult.
You could be sleep deprived. You might have a cranky child. There are times that you feel less than loving towards your infant, but you don't want to hate your baby.
You don't think that that is something that a parent should do. And of course, deep down, you have love for your child, but there are moments where you might really wish that you didn't have that baby in your life right now. And then when you have resistance to that thought, then you create a lot more suffering for yourself.
And again, with those stories, you kind of try to make it mean something. How could I have a thought that I don't like my infant right now? That's a horrible thing for a new mother or father to think.
That must mean that I'm a horrible person. I really have problems. How could I hate my child?
You don't want to acknowledge that that frustration or regret might be there. And so you stuff it down. You repress those emotions.
You have a lot of resistance. And that can literally cause you to experience pain in your body. That emotion that you're not feeling could show up as pain in your back or pain in your neck or GI issues or autoimmune disorders.
So resistance to the emotions that we have as normal humans that have the whole spectrum of emotions, and sometimes they're not pleasant, can definitely lead to more suffering. When we beat ourselves up, that's another form of resistance that adds to our suffering. And this is, again, a very natural thing that we want to do.
It's normal for our brains to want to go into this critical mode. It almost feels like we're going to be better people if we can just beat ourselves up enough, if we can criticize ourselves enough for our negativity, then that will inspire us to be better people. But in this case, two negatives don't make a positive, two wrongs don't make a right.
So when we tend to layer on the negativity on top of what we're already feeling, that's a good example of resistance that leads to suffering. So be on the lookout for times that you guilt yourself for feeling guilty or you're angry at yourself for feeling angry, or you feel ashamed that you have so much shame. Realize this is your primitive brain in its default mode.
So nothing's wrong with your brain when this happens, but we're going to try to evolve our brains here to be the watcher of what's going on, to notice it, to press pause, to see what is really happening, and to make different choices and think thoughts on purpose. So be on the lookout for this. It can happen with emotional pain.
It can happen with physical pain. It can happen where there is some emotional pain, and then you add resistance to it, and then the suffering ends up being a physical manifestation of that pain. Our emotions cause physical changes in our bodies.
Think of crying. There's something physical that happens in response to an emotion, and it can happen just the same way with chronic pain and disease. So what are the causes of your suffering?
Think about how you suffer in your day to day life, and then think about the resistance that could be causing that suffering. Remember, if the resistance is zero, you can still have pain, but the result, the suffering, will be zero. And if you would like more help with this, with your specific examples of your life, because often we have blind spots to ourselves, it's easier to see in other people how they have resistance, but it's sometimes hard to see in ourselves.
But if you're looking to dive deeper, to evolve your brain, to uplevel your life, then check out my website, bodyandmindlifecoach.com, where you can sign up for a free consult call with me, and we can talk about specifically in your life, how this applies to you. And if you've been enjoying this podcast, please go over to iTunes, give it a quick rating that can take just 30 seconds or less. And if you can carve out just a few minutes of your time, please leave a review too.
It helps this podcast be found by more people, and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me.
Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an unstoppable body and mind.

Episode # 27- Sneaky Little Thoughts

It's easy to identify thoughts that are obviously negative.  Some thoughts sound pretty and nice, but come from emotions of fear or scarcity.  Thoughts like, "I just want everyone to get along" or "I want to be a better person" are examples of thoughts that are well meaning, but don't create positive emotions when we think them.  And of course, we will talk about sneaky little thoughts that are common with chronic pain and disease.

 

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Episode # 26- Somatic Tracking, a Meditation for Self Healing

This is a special episode where I take you through a 15 minute somatic tracking/meditation exercise.  

 

Chronic Pain is mainly neuroplastic pain (pain created by the brain and felt in the body).

It is usually interpreted with certain thoughts or emotions

-fear, frustration, uncertainty, despair, sadness, 

There are thoughts like what did I do? How long will this last? How can I get rid of the pain? How can I avoid it?

We may think there are certain positions that are safe and some that are dangerous.

 

These thought and feelings reinforce to the brain that there is something to be scared of, which strengthens the neural pathways that produce more pain

 

Somatic tracking is a way to reframe the sensations in your body from a lens of neutrality or safety.  It helps you change understanding of what the actual sensation is.  In chronic pain the brain is over reacting to perfectly neutral totally safe sensations.  When pain is no longer dangerous, the brain stops making more pain.

 

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Transcript- Automatically generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, Episode 26, Somatic Tracking, A Meditation for Pain. In this podcast, we learned to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind.
Hello, my friends. We have kind of a special podcast episode today because I'm gonna take you through a meditation for pain. Hopefully, that didn't deter anyone.
We're not going to try to increase our pain. It's a meditation for when you feel pain. It's also called Somatic Tracking by Cureable.
That's where I learned of that term. And basically, we'll be addressing the neuroplastic pain or the pain that the brain produces that's felt in your body. This can happen especially with chronic pain.
Most of the pain that people feel is coming from the brain where it is interpreting safe signals of the body as if the signals were dangerous. Pain is a danger signal. So if you have your hand on a hot stove, you're gonna feel that pain so that you remove your hand and don't cause more damage.
But with chronic pain, the brain begins to interpret these danger signals where there is none. Especially over the last five to 10 years in neuroscience, they've found that the majority of chronic pain is not caused by structural problems in the body, but by neural pathways in the brain. So many MRI studies have been done that they have taken healthy people, that when they do MRIs in certain areas of their body, do see that they may have arthritis, even bulging discs or a torn rotator cuff or meniscus, and have no sensation of pain.
So there's no evidence that there is cause and effect relationship between a structural abnormality in your body and the feeling of pain. Chronic pain is basically a false alarm. When pain becomes chronic, the brain becomes even more hypersensitive to pain.
Like it's always on the lookout for anything that might be dangerous or trigger it. There was a study where they played an annoying sound for people like nails on a chalkboard, and the people who had chronic pain, their brains reacted 25% more to that sound. So people who have chronic pain signals have a hypersensitized brain for any kind of danger.
Usually people who have chronic pain have certain thoughts or emotion patterns. Fear is one of the biggest ones. There could also be frustration or uncertainty or even despair or sadness.
There could be thoughts like, oh, what did I do? How did I hurt it? How long will this last?
How can I get rid of the pain? How can I avoid it? How come it's not getting better?
Is it always going to be like this? There may be thoughts about what certain positions are safe and which ones might be dangerous. And all of these thoughts and feelings reinforce to the brain that there's something to be scared of, which strengthens the neural pathway that produces more pain.
It's like the brain is always on the lookout for anything that could be dangerous and turns up the volume signal for any of those things that could cause you damage in order to keep you safe. So what we're going to do here is pay attention to the sensation you're feeling in your body while you're in either a curious or a positive emotional state. So looking at it through a lens of safety and not coming from fight or flight will allow your brain to rewire how it perceives the pain.
Our goal is to change the understanding of what that sensation actually is. Your brain is overreacting to a totally safe sensation that's perfectly neutral. The more you can practice feeling the sensation with a neutral or curious emotion, you can rewire your brain to make less pain.
Your brain realizes the sensation is no longer dangerous. It's totally safe. And so the brain stops making more pain.
So find a comfortable spot. You could be laying, sitting. You could have your legs up on a wall as you lay on the floor.
You could be in a recliner or laying on your side or even standing if that's most comfortable to you. But get comfortable, and we'll start.
I want you to start by noticing your breathing. Start trying to take deeper breaths if this feels comfortable to you. And pay attention to how easy it is for you to breathe deeper and deeper.
Deeper and deeper.
Where do you notice your breath most? In your nose, in your throat, in your chest, in your stomach?
Allow yourself to breathe a little deeper and a little slower.
And just notice how breathing is safe.
Breathing more deeply and slowly can help relax your brain and your nervous system and your body. Unstoppable Body.
Now, notice any sensations in your body. Do a body scan. Where do you feel any sensation?
And what do you feel there?
If you have sensations in multiple areas of your body, then pick one to focus on.
Describe that area.
Is it on the right side or the left side? Is it in the middle? Is it widespread or is it localized?
Is it deep or is it where you could touch it on the surface?
Remember, your brain has been interpreting this sensation as dangerous, but it's just a sensation in your body. Maybe it's not dangerous.
Imagine if you could describe this sensation to someone else, maybe an alien that's never experienced what it feels like. How could you describe it? What is it?
Is it sharp or dull? Is it tight, aching, burning, tingling? Does it feel like pressure?
Does it stay in one place or does it move?
Is it constant or does it come and go?
Keep paying attention to the sensation and watch it. You don't need to get rid of it or run away from it. You don't need to be scared of it.
Think of a feeling of pressure. You might get a massage and feel pressure that does feel good. It's not dangerous.
What if the feeling is burning? Have you ever had a burning that feels good like in a hot tub?
So it's not the sensation that's negative or disruptive. It's our brain's interpretation of the sensation as being dangerous. That's what makes it uncomfortable.
If you've had pain in this area for years or decades, then there is neurogenic pain, pain produced by your brain because it does not feel safe.
So imagine that part of your body that has sensation. Imagine that part is not in danger. It's your brain overreacting to the sensation.
You feel some sensory input. You can feel it right now. But your body itself is safe.
Imagine watching the sensation like you would if you were a passenger on a train. You're just watching what's going on and not reacting to it. It's effortless.
Explore it with interest and curiosity.
Think to yourself, even though I am feeling this uncomfortable sensation, I accept myself and honor how I feel.
I am safe.
If the pain moves around, follow it, like that passenger on a train that is along for the ride.
Give yourself permission to feel the sensation wherever it goes or whatever it feels like.
Give yourself permission to relax and notice.
Think of it like a firework show. You can watch it and be intrigued and curious.
But your brain is like a dog that reacts to fireworks with fear, thinking the world might be ending. This is how your brain is used to thinking of pain.
But you can imagine you are a human that knows that you can watch these fireworks from a safe place and they cannot hurt you. And you can observe calmly what is happening in your body.
Think to yourself, even though I have been so frustrated or scared by this pain, I accept that there is sensation right now and honor how I feel. I can feel curious about this pain.
If my brain wanders, I can let it wander. I can just follow it and see where it goes, just like the pain in my body may be moving or changing or lessening. I can open up to it and continue to breathe calmly as I notice the feelings.
Breathe in lightness and energy.
Exhale anything toxic, anything dark or anything not serving you.
As you breathe in, let the breath go to the area that you have sensation. Imagine it like a flashlight illuminating the area, so you can see what's in there.
Keep breathing air into the area and let it flow inside your body. Release any negativity when you exhale. Maybe you can listen to your body.
It's safe to listen to this pain, to address how you're feeling, and let it go.
Maybe focus on the breathing and add some movement to your body. Stretch your arms up or straighten your legs. Feel the muscles in the joints, stretch and relax.
If there's a way your body wants to move, to stretch and to feel good, experience the positive sensations of movement.
Think to yourself, what is it about my pain that stresses me out the most?
If there was an emotion in this part of my body, what would it be?
Would you feel anger, anxiety, stress, disappointment, frustration, sadness, grief, overwhelm?
Do you remember when you first started experiencing this pain? What was going on in your life at that time?
Think back, like you're watching a movie of what was going on in your life when you developed this pain. If it was an accident, replay that accident in your head.
Try and feel if there was something else going on in your life at that time that might have been causing tension or stress.
As you replay the movie, think of what was going on.
Notice how you can release some of the tension and stress at this time. As you acknowledge these emotions, you begin to let them go.
Keep breathing and relaxing as you replay this movie and think of that time in your life.
Can you acknowledge any negative emotions you had at the time?
Begin to let them go.
Notice that when you play this movie, you may feel some sensation.
When you acknowledge the pain behind the pain, it begins to lessen. Your body begins to relax.
Think to yourself, this is how I felt. This is what I've been holding on to. This is what I'm letting go.
Your body begins to relax more and more step by step as you let go.
Check in with your body now, and notice if the sensation has changed.
Enjoy the movement of the breath. Know that right now, you are safe.
Even if the pain is still there, you can focus on your breathing and feeling safe. This is literally healing your brain, rewiring the signal to be less responsive and to create less pain.
Feel whatever sensation, if there still is some, from this calm state.
The pain may subside or it may come back at times, but that's okay. The goal is not to prevent the pain from ever coming back. The goal is to change the way you respond when it does.
Reacting with fear or panic reinforces to the brain that there's something wrong and keeps the pain cycle going.
But no, it's not dangerous. It's just a misinterpretation by the brain. You can still breathe and feel safe.
Choose to breathe and relax.
We will end with some positive affirmations. You can either repeat them in your mind or out loud after me. When you say these words, bring them to life.
Bring the meaning of these words into every cell of your body.
All right, you guys, great job today. Think of how you felt before you began this and how your body is feeling now. And remember, this meditation is only 15 minutes.
So in your 24-hour day, this will only take you a short amount of time. And the more times you are focusing on this and doing this work, it will rewire your brain faster. And if you want one-on-one coaching with me to figure these things out a little deeper for yourself, then head over to my website, bodyandmindlifecoach.com, or email me at info at bodyandmindlifecoach.com.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review.
And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an Unstoppable Body and Mind.