The Body Doesn't Lie (4 page)

No matter where you are right now, you can stop the pain cycle the moment you take the very first, smallest step. As you move through each stage, you will come to understand, beyond any doubt, that the mind and body are not just connected—they are
one
—and that pain is a clear message that cannot and should not be ignored or medicated away.

Wherever you are now, whatever pain you’re feeling, the Positive Feedback plan will help you. You’ll learn how to sketch out your own big picture so that you can start to heal yourself. You’ll design a unique program to trigger your own Positive Feedback using everything you are—your anxieties, your cravings, your fears, your dreams, your passions. Perhaps most important, you will gain the strength to tackle the
truth.
Secure in your own skin, you will release the pain, once and for all, and finally move forward, with courage, with joy, and with radiance.

What is the story your body is telling you right now?

What is the story you would
like
to tell?

Then let’s get started.

PART ONE

The Power of Positive Feedback

1

What Is Pain?

Man is composed of matter, movement, and spirit.

—A. T. Still, founder of osteopathy

A
my had just turned forty, with two children and a demanding desk job that created tons of stress for not much reward. In order to get herself through her projects, she relied on adrenaline-fueled deadlines and junk food. Amy never ate candy unless she was under the gun at work—which is just about the worst time to eat poorly!

Her neck was like a block of cement; her lower back and sacrum constantly ached. Amy came to me on an almost monthly basis, and I would do everything I could to help her—sometimes a spinal adjustment and deep-tissue manipulation, other times acupuncture and cranial sacral treatments. She would have a good cry and good laugh on the table, and then she would get up feeling better—she had had the emotional release. But I knew it wouldn’t stick. She wasn’t facing her pain; she was eating it, drinking it, working around it. I was giving her an itty-bitty Band-Aid on a gaping flesh wound. I knew she’d be back.

Every time I treated her, I urged Amy to stay in touch with her pain and to stop running for those inflammation-torching sugar treats. She’d nod. “Absolutely.” Then she’d call a month later and come in for another treatment. Cement-block shoulders. Deep-tissue manipulation. Good cry (followed by a good laugh) on the table.

She’d feel better, swear to follow the program, then leave and fall right back into her bad habits. And on and on it went.

Until one day, a month after her most recent visit, I got a voice-mail from her. “Vicky, I
get
it,” she said. “I finally understand what you mean. I need to listen to my pain. I’ve started to reflect. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

Her voice-mail ended there, but I could tell by her tone of voice that something had shifted. She was getting unstuck.

By the time Amy came into my office several weeks later, I noticed a change in her: Her skin was clear and rosy. Her eyes were brighter. Her face seemed to have more muscle tone. She walked straighter. She had even lost some extra pounds.

What had happened?

She’d finally heard her pain—she’d been
forced
to listen.

This forty-year-old executive, used to moving mountains at work, had finally been knocked over by pain. After a particularly intense work binge, her immune system had finally given out, and she’d contracted shingles. The chickenpox virus (the same virus that causes shingles), long dormant in her body, had been awakened by her overtaxed immune system and came storming out of her nervous system with a vengeance. Shingles sores consumed half her face, almost spreading into her eyes. The eye doctor had warned her that if it got worse, the virus might damage her eyesight.

The shooting and throbbing pain had confined her to bed for the better part of a week. Later she told me that as she lay there with an ice pack over her face, all she could hear was my voice:
What is your pain saying to you, Amy? Are you listening?

When you’re in Negative Feedback, it can feel like you’re swimming through mud. Your body may feel weakened from injury or sickness—but, more important, without even realizing it, you’re listening to a negative voice of fear, ego, and darkness.

You may be blaming others for your problems; you may be holding back, not sharing with others. Alternatively, maybe you’re acting “aggressively happy,” trying to prove your happiness to anyone who will pay attention to you.

When you’re operating in the negative, you can’t seem to make decisions. You feel like everything is on overload. You’re scared to be alone, but also scared to reach out. You’re living your life on autopilot.

Things can go along like this indefinitely . . . unless and until something happens: Rushing to the subway, you trip and fall down a few stairs. Or you feel a chest pain that scares you. Or you’re suddenly laid off without the nest egg you’d sworn you were going to save.

While you’re waiting for the ambulance or walking your box of belongings out to the parking lot, you wake up and look around you. You realize that you don’t really know how you got there or what comes next. However, you also realize the most important thing: You are
alive
, and this is your moment of truth.

Whether this moment of pain and breakdown comes from a fall, a serious illness, a sudden job loss, or a bad breakup, I want you to see it as a blessing, a breakthrough. Sometimes we need a pretty heavy-duty signal to make us stop and think about our life. Do you rush around all day long, pleasing everyone but never leaving any time for yourself? Are you stuck in a negative routine, comforting yourself with junk food, not really connecting with your friends or family? Are you asking yourself those age-old questions, “Am I ever going to be happy? Is this all there is?”

Your pain—physical or mental, sudden or chronic—has arrived for a reason: to wake you up, and to remind you that you’re a fighter, not a victim. To make you realize that you’re alive, you’re strong, and it’s your turn to shine. The three steps of the Positive Feedback program can help you fully wake up, dust yourself off, and take back the reins of your life.

Emotions,
all
emotions, are normal. They’re neither good nor bad; they simply
are.

Problems don’t start because of emotions themselves. The trouble comes in when you don’t express emotions or release them. Layers of buried emotions build up in our scar tissue, causing adhesions in your fascia, the layer of tissue that stretches around all your muscles and organs. These festering, unprocessed emotions clog up your circulation and generally create disharmony within your body.
¹
Once you really see and feel those buried emotions, and can pinpoint where the pain is actually coming from, you can consciously increase the flow of your body’s natural painkillers and anti-inflammatory chemicals to help you release the pain and heal.

One of my clients has a scar between her big toe and second toe that she got over fifteen years ago, the night she broke up with an old boyfriend. He’d been the jealous sort: “Don’t look at other people.” “Do you like him? Do you think he’s better looking than I am?” One evening, when his paranoia had hit a fever pitch, she dropped a piña colada on her foot and the glass smashed—and, with it, her relationship.

That point where the broken glass cut her—between her big toe and second toe—also happens to be an acupuncture point for the liver meridian, where Chinese medicine says your anger is stored. Research at the Mayo Clinic found that over 95 percent of these acupuncture points, which Chinese medicine has described for two thousand years, correspond to common myofascial trigger points.
²
So after using acupuncture on her scar to good effect in the clinic, I taught her how to use the self-healing trigger point of that scar as a portal to her own healing.

Now, whenever she is feeling overwhelmed or angry or she can’t sleep, she will put her thumb on that trigger point and press until she can feel it “give,” until the scar tissue softens and she can feel the bloodflow increase in her feet. At first, we used this scar to help her release the pain of her past. Now she uses it herself to unblock the pain of the present and to nudge herself back into Positive Feedback. (You will learn how to do this, too, in chapter 5, “Release.”)

We experience all our feelings, thoughts, actions, and reactions through these connections between our nervous system and our musculoskeletal system. Consider all the parts of the brain that intersect when we experience strong emotions:

• The limbic system, the site of our instinctual emotional reactions
  
• The hypothalamus, which connects with the endocrine system and the gut organs
  
• The amygdala, where we process sensory information into memory and learning
  
• The cortex, where we regulate emotion
  

Every emotion we experience leaves a trace throughout these areas of the brain. Those exact emotions can be retriggered by anything we experience, whether in the real world (through our senses) or purely in our minds, that seems similar to those memories written into our cells.

Emotional pain is the same as physical pain—not just metaphorically, but literally. The body and brain process both types of pain in absolutely the same way. So while it may make perfect sense to you that your body still holds on to an old tennis injury or the whiplash you got in college, it should also seem reasonable that the pain of your breakup with your college boyfriend might still be locked in your tissues in the same way.

Those emotional and physical connections endure for years and years, drawing direct links between our past and our current experiences. Not surprisingly, researchers have found that people who endured trauma as children and still have lingering feelings of helplessness or despair have higher levels of inflammation in the body. Our early, unhealed wounds leave us more vulnerable to the many forms of pain, as well as to life-threatening diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
³

We even carry the experiences of our
parents
, in the cells they contribute toward our growing bodies. Their cells migrate into every part of our tissue through our mother’s placenta, nestling themselves in our lungs, liver, heart, kidneys, and skin, influencing our immune system. And it’s a two-way street—mothers absorb cells from their babies back into their bodies. Imagine: There’s evidence that the cells of a grandmother and an infant can
compete
with each other within the body of the mother, triggering an autoimmune response.
⁴

We are all connected to one another, and to our past, and these connections are more than just words or memories; they are blood and bone. We haul our entire personal history around with us in our tissues and nervous system for life. Unless we become aware of our pain, we can remain befuddled and imprisoned by automatic responses to an event that we
think
we’ve long since consciously “gotten over.”

Let’s say an old boyfriend once, during a heated discussion, raised a hand to strike you—and you flinched. Or you once had a small car accident that made your neck tense up. Unless you found a way to release that tension, to relax that flinch, the original injury could still be impacting you. Flash forward a few years (or decades) and that same stagnant connective tissue that braced for impact remains stuck, frozen in time, dried out and cut off from healthy blood and oxygen supply.

Some of these emotional triggers may have been “installed” during high-intensity moments or as a result of unhealthy emotional patterns way back in childhood. Just touching these tender places can instantly recall the depth of the original emotion and unleash a strong stress response, a biochemical cascade that zooms us back to the core of that feeling, even if the precipitating incident was thirty years ago. Your nervous system doesn’t discriminate; that fight-or-flight reaction feels just the same as when you were ten years old—even if you can’t consciously recall the original incident. And each time old emotional issues are triggered, they leave brand-new residue in your organs, systems, and tissues—those systems that are all connected. Unless you can stop and face that pain, and work all the way through it, you will continue to carry and replay your entire personal history, over and over again.

Even today, now, in this moment, if you have a negative thought (whether conscious or not) in your brain, your nervous system carries the imprint of that negative thought directly to your spinal column, which connects directly to your heart, your liver, your ovaries—your entire body. We acknowledge that interconnection with our vocabulary: We talk about an insult that “hurt our heart”—literally, because the heart has more neurons (nerve cells) than the brain does. Or we refer to knowing “in our gut” that something is wrong—also a literal truth, because the gut is, in effect, a second brain. Our digestive system, from mouth to bum, boasts over one hundred million neurons—more than we have in our entire spinal cord, or even in the full peripheral nervous system, which reaches out from the spine to the tips of our fingers and toes.

Which Organ Is Hiding Your Pain?

These are established medical facts, yet many Western medical practitioners still seem to have trouble accepting that our bodies can register thoughts and react to emotions, in extremely severe ways, before our brains are even conscious of them.