For the past five weeks, my family and I had a surprise Guest stay with us.   Guest arrived without warning and with no communication when Guest would depart.  Why had Guest decided to visit at this time and what was Guest trying to teach us?

Our questions were left unanswered until around day 21 of Guest’s visit I went for a run and the answer came to the surface.  Guest would stay as long as necessary and not a moment longer.

What the heck did that mean?

I dug deeper into the question.  I asked Guest, “Why would you stay for so long when we are really not very fond of you?  And to top it off we didn’t invite you.”

To which Guest replied, “Oh, but you DID invite me.  You ALL invited me, welcomed me into your bodies, each one of you.”

Allow me to blow Guest’s cover.

Guest started as a little cough and sore throat for a few days then progressed into a chest-rattling, gunk-producing, smoker-hack-sounding cough and none of us ever smoked.  I don’t recall in my life ever having such a cough.  No fever, no aches, no chills.  This Guest set up residence in each one of our lungs and got comfortable.

After using some mind-body tools, I discovered Guest’s purpose was to clean out years of toxins built up in the lungs.  I recently wrote another post about my son Ian, Ian’s Message About Toxins, where I began to put it all together.  He is my nine-year-old son with autism and one of my greatest teachers.

For the past six weeks, I’ve done a TON of work to clean out the toxic thoughts in my mind; clearing out painful, stressful thoughts using The Work by Byron Katie and Abigail’s mind-body tools.

What I’ve learned through my training as a mind-body coach and working with clients struggling with physical pain is that when you shift your mind, the body follows.  Sometimes that means there is quite a mess and that is just as much a part of the process of healing as any other part.  In my case, a four-week Guest setting up camp in my lungs.

Here are two additional golden nuggets.  Your thoughts create your reality meaning your view of life all begins with thought and according to quantum physics and string theory we are all connected on an energetic level.  Check out physicist Brian Greene’s TedTalk from 2005 on string theory.

So, it made perfect sense to me that as I cleaned out a Mack-truck load of toxic thoughts, my body would follow and rid itself of toxins as well as my family to whom I’m deeply connected.

I put out the welcome mat.

For my final week of “clearing”, rather than curse Guest I welcomed Guest with open arms and accepted the gift that my body invited.  My oldest son welcomed Guest two weeks after me so he continues to rattle and cough but I find it so fascinating that he’s not unhappy about it.  When he has trouble breathing, we do a breathing treatment and then he’s back to being happy.  He lives in the present moment, unencumbered by stressful thoughts about the past or the future.  And as I let go of the painful thoughts and release them from my body something amazing happens.  Not only does MY body heal but HIS body heals.  His healing has actually accelerated over the past year.

I share this story with you to invite you to consider the power of your thoughts and how they are connected to the health and healing of your body and even possibly your loved ones near you.  The power of thought continues to amaze and awe me.

I leave you with this thought.  At the core of every human being is love.  Some of us just have thicker layers of painful, stressful thoughts shrouding the view.  Let love and acceptance blow the view wide open.

Feeling emotions without knowing how to deal with thoughts can feel very overwhelming.  Why?  Because thoughts create emotions.

Thoughts and emotions are both energy in your body.  They are linked to each other energetically, which is a really important point to understand.  If you try to change thoughts/beliefs without feeling emotions, you’ll discover that thoughts recycle and come back into your mind even after you’ve worked on changing them.  Think of thoughts and emotions as having a connecting energetic cord between them.  Throw out the thought without the emotion and the cord is still there, keeping that thought in your consciousness.

When you do emotional work, you quickly discover lots of beliefs you probably didn’t even know you were thinking.  Our unconscious thought patterns drive our emotional lives, our actions, and the results that come from those actions.  If you discover a thought you didn’t even know you were thinking – rejoice!  There’s another mystery uncovered, allowing you to move forward.

For example, I used to struggle immensely with overeating.  I haven’t written about it much, but I spent most of my early twenties fifty pounds overweight.  Every time I ate to suppress emotions, I also suppressed thoughts.  Working through that confusing tangle of fear, guilt, shame, anger, sadness, grief, and the accompanying nest of thoughts took some time.  I remember one day, late in this process, when I sat down to eat dinner.  I felt really upset, and I allowed myself to feel the emotion.  Into my consciousness popped a thought:  I shouldn’t eat anything.

Now, my logic mind realizes this thought is completely ridiculous.  But I felt as though it was true.  It was buried so deep in my unconscious that I had to work through layers and layers of emotions and thoughts to even discover its existence.  After I did, however, I was able to release that belief using thought-work (such a the Byron Katie process called The Work, which I discussed recently in the post Coaching Myself).

Allowing and processing your emotions while also working with your thoughts gives just the right one-two punch to these tangled nests of painful energy in your body.  It is not a linear process.  You’ll sometimes feel confused, frustrated, or lost.  That, of course, is why coaching is so helpful.  But, if you want to do it on your own, you can.  Just know that you’ll need to take it slow, learn bit by bit, and be gentle with yourself.

Think of this as an archaeological dig.  Feel an emotion layer, find a thought layer.  Work that thought layer, discover another emotion layer.  Work through several emotion layers in a row, discover more thought layers.  Sometimes you’ll be working a thought to try to open up to emotions.  Other times you’ll be feeling emotions for a few days to discover the thoughts driving them.  There’s no set formula or pattern.

The good news is that I’m developing lots of new ways to help you with this process!  With the impending site makeover, you’ll have new resources.  But, those are just the beginning.  I’ve got some AMAZING stuff in the works that will help you access emotions and work thoughts more easily.  And, of course, I’ll be writing more about thought-work!

Two weeks ago, I had a little pelvic pain and some mild bladder symptoms.  They’d probably measure practically nothing on the good old “pain scale,” and in the past would have probably gone unnoticed.  However, this time, something interesting happened.  Instead of simply noticing the message from my body and turning inward to feel emotions and clean up my thinking, I completely avoided the issue.  I suppressed emotions like mad.  I avoided coaching myself.  I resisted my own coaching processes and tried to just ignore everything.

Then, today, I realized I’d been avoiding the emotional/mental work.  I noticed that my bladder was still slightly funky – still patiently sending me a message.  I got curious.  Why, I asked myself, am I avoiding this message?  If I’d woken up with a headache, a stomachache, or knee pain two weeks ago, I’d have been coaching myself up one side and down the other, investigating, curious, learning, and growing.  Why, in this instance, was I not doing this?

And then the aha moment occurred.  Thoughts came pouring out of my pen onto the notebook in front of me.  Quite soon, a theme appeared.  Apparently, in my mind, having a headache or stomachache is perfectly acceptable.  Having pelvic pain is not.  Why is this an issue to my mind?  Because I coach people around pelvic pain.  Interesting, no?

As I sat and free-wrote, I began to see my past in a different light.  When I first found mind-body work, I was so happy.  It worked like a charm, and I went from constant pain to mild bumps in the road here and there.  Then, I pretty much felt fine for years.  I probably had a mild symptom or two but just didn’t give them any thought at all.  I considered myself healthy, I had the mind-body work down, and I was just living my life.

The funny thing is, the first time I noticed a pelvic symptom was AFTER I became a coach.  Even then, it was not a major symptom.  It was so slight that I had to sort of focus on it to see if it was there.  Not surprisingly, the more I focused on it, the more I noticed it.  I worked myself up into quite a freak-out.  “Why,” I railed at the heavens, “am I completely fine for years and then start having symptoms when I become a coach?”

As it turns out, it wasn’t some punishment from the Gods.  It was quite simple.  As soon as I became a coach, I put about four tons of pressure on myself in the form of perfectionism.  I thought I had to be this perfectly healthy specimen to prove the effectiveness of mind-body work.  I felt so passionately about mind-body work and wanted people to have the experience of joy and health that comes from it that I promptly stressed myself into pain.  Hmmmm.  Isn’t the mind amazing?

At that point and time, I coached myself, figured out what was going on, and then started telling my clients about it.  It was a perfect example of perfectionism and how quickly it creates enough stress in the body to result in physical pain.  As a result, several clients had breakthroughs, one client said nothing I’d done before could ever match the effectiveness of that bit of coaching, and I felt a whole lot better.  No more stress, no more freaking out, no more pain.

Yet, even with that experience under my belt, I still avoided facing the recent mild bladder symptoms for TWO WHOLE WEEKS.  Clearly, I hadn’t quite routed the belief system that was creating stress and fear in my body.   Prior to becoming a coach, having a mild symptom didn’t mean a thing to me at all.  It was so meaningless that I can’t even remember if I had any mild symptoms, though I’m sure I probably did.  Now, though, I have assigned meaning to having a symptom.  For example, here’s what came out in my free-write:

To show everyone that mind-body work is effective, I have to be perfectly healthy.

To be a good mind-body coach for people, I have to be perfect at it myself.

So, I took these thoughts through one of the major coaching tools.  It’s called The Work, and was created by a woman named Byron Katie. Here’s what it looks like.

To show everyone that mind-body work is effective, I have to be perfectly healthy.
Is that true?
Hmmm.  Seems true.
Can you be absolutely sure that is 100% true?
No.
How do you react when you think that thought?
I feel panic.  I stress out.  I get upset and angry with myself.  I suppress the emotion created by this thought and avoid the whole issue.  I forget to be a coach for myself.
Who would you be without this thought?
I’d be the effective mind-body coach, coaching herself!  I’d be relaxed and open.  I’d tell everyone about this so they could learn from it in case they ever had a similar, stressful thought.
Turnaround (new, stress-relieving, truthful thought):  There are lots of turnarounds for this thought, but here’s one that really resonated with me.  To show everyone that mind-body work is effective, I have to be perfectly open.

Here’s the turnaround I like best for the other stressful thought:

To be a good mind-body coach for people, I have to NOT be perfect at it myself.

I LOVE those thoughts. They ring true in so many ways.  To understand the mind-body work, you all need to see it in action.  What better way than to show it to you as I use it myself?  What else would help you see so clearly that in doing this work, you NEVER have to fear symptoms again.  When they come up (and they will, because none of us are perfect – we will always suppress emotions now and again), you’ll know exactly what to do.  You won’t get caught in the fear and panic, creating more symptoms without realizing you’re doing so.  Instead, you’ll say – hey, I know about this.  It just means I need to look inward a bit and see where I’ve been in a pattern of dealing with stress that isn’t working for me.  (You’ll also see that I’m dead serious about allowing yourself to NOT be perfect – since I’m willing to share my imperfection right here in the written word!)

When you have little bouts of pain after years of feeling great, you’ll know that you just have a thought somewhere creating something that doesn’t serve you.  You’ll feel your emotions, you’ll find your thoughts, you’ll do the processes you learned, and you’ll be just fine.  A symptom doesn’t have to mean anything scary at all – it’s only our minds that assign meaning and create a mountain out of a molehill.  This is the beauty of the mind-body work.  It gives you such solid ground upon which to work that you have confidence in your own health.  You’re not worried that if you eat the wrong thing or do the wrong thing your health will fall off its precarious balance and come crashing to the ground.  Instead, you’ll feel the solid structure of your health supporting you, and you’ll know that if your body pops out a symptom, it’s simply a message.  You’ll know that the definition of healthy is not feeling perfect all the time – it’s being willing to listen when the messages arise so they don’t become larger health problems.

I sit here, in my living room, bringing you into the intimate world of coaching myself, full of appreciation for this process.  I went from feeling panicky and stressed to absolutely blissed out with gratitude.  Thank you, body, for sending me this very important message.  I hear you loud and clear – I still had some very painful story around this issue that was blocking my effectiveness as a coach.  Without you, I would have kept coaching, unaware, and missed opportunities to truly transform someone’s experience.  Without you, someone might have felt the exact way I feel now and thought – well, I must be doing this wrong, because Abigail never has any pain.  What a tragedy that would be, because it would hamper their mind-body experience and they might not trust their own process as a result.

I see so clearly that the very best thing I can do is be open, honest, and authentic about my own experience.  It’s perhaps the most reassuring thing I can do as a coach.  I remember once talking to a weight loss coach who said, “Sure, sometimes I gain a few pounds.  But it’s not a problem – it just means I need to do what I know.”

We all forget sometimes.  We all don’t do what we know sometimes.  But thank goodness we have these bodies to let us know, to keep us moving forward, learning, and growing.  I just released some serious mental baggage today that I would not have been aware of without my body and its magical message system.

The amazing this is that when we listen to our bodies, the small little pain reminders never become big, unwieldy pain reminders.  The body gives us exaclty what we need to learn the lesson of the day.  It never throws a flame torch your way when a match will serve the purpose.  You don’t have to be afraid that you’ll be laid flat with the kind of pain that started you on this journey.  That pain was what it took to get you started – to wake you up to the stresses and pressures you were unknowingly putting on your self and body.  Now that you’re aware, it will only take a small poke here and there to keep you on track.

I know that I feel best when I am absolutely an open book.  Whenever I go against myself, it feels terrible and stressful.  Whenever I put perfection pressure on myself, it leads to emotional stress.  Most of the time, I can feel the emotions and do the work on my thoughts.  But, I’m not perfect.  Sometimes I suppress the emotions and avoid myself.  Thank you, body, for waking me up to that fact.  You are a gentle but unyielding teacher, leading me always to my best life.

Have a great two weeks everyone!  I’m off to the final week of Martha Beck Master Coach Training, where I plan to be open, honest, and myself.  I’ll thank my body for the incredible payoff in learning, knowledge, and joy that authenticity will bring me.  More in the Emotions Series when I get back!

In my recent telecourse, The Power of the Mind-Body Connection: Less Stress, Less Pain, More Freedom, I introduced the Healthy Mind Toolbox.  The toolbox consists of four tool categories: Understanding, Awareness, Focus, and Persistence.

The toolbox is my way of organizing the aspects of mind-body healing to make it as easy as possible for you.

(Did you miss the telecourse?  Sign up for the Healthy Life Newsletter to get the free download.  The telecourse was an overview of the toolbox and its components, and now I’m presenting an in-depth look at each tool category in the upcoming Mind-Body Connection Power Series. To get more help with personal application of the toolbox, join the Mind-Body Connection Power Group – members get free access to the Mind-Body Connection Power Series.  You won’t want to miss the FREE  Success Secrets telecourse next Thursday, March 19.)

The Understanding Tools focus on two vital parts of mind-body work: thoughts and emotions.  Today I’m writing about thoughts.  This post is VITAL to your mind-body work, and will serve as a reference point for every post I write from here on out.  If you pay attention to this one, everything else will make sense.  Your knowledge and healing process can be built around this central concept.

You may already have some idea of the role of thinking in physical pain, but for those who don’t, I’m going to start from the beginning.

Though the common practice in our culture is to revere and depend on the logic mind, there are a few problems with that.  I can practically hear you thinking, “What?  Is she nuts?”  No really…it’s true.  Let me explain.

Thoughts are just electrical impulses that happen in our brains.  Often, they come from the area of the brain Martha Beck likes to call the “lizard brain,” which, without boring you with scientific details, is the part of the brain we share with reptiles.  It’s the part of your mind that helps you recognize threats, whether they are in the form of scarcity or overt attack.  The good old lizard can really take over your life if you are unaware of it, because it spews out “lack!” or “attack!” thoughts regularly.  You have little choice in this matter, being human, but you can learn the ultimate, life-saving trick:

Don’t believe what you think.

The many millions of thoughts you produce daily/weekly/yearly are just that – thoughts.  If you were to let them print out on a little thought-printer for several days, you would begin to notice patterns and lots of repetition.  They are just benign entities existing in your mind.  The trouble starts when you BELIEVE those thoughts.  If you think, “I will never get well,” for example, and don’t believe it, that thought has no impact on you.  If you believe it, it becomes devastating.

My favorite metaphor for this comes from Martha Beck.  (Naturally!)  She likens the mind to a large German Sheppard.  Imagine you and this dog on a walk together, but it’s the kind of walk you have with a dog who’s never been trained.  You’re being yanked all over, your arm is pulled out of its socket, and you end up exhausted.  However, if you were walking the dog rather than allowing the dog to walk you, then you would end up with a nice, energizing walk, some fresh air, and exercise.  And a happy dog.

Many people are getting walked by the dog, and spend their whole lives trying to fix the problem by hoping to control outside circumstances.  They feel victimized by events, because they don’t know the secret.

The secret is this: thoughts create feelings.

If an event or circumstance takes place, most people assume that it “made them feel” a certain way.  I used to continually get upset with my husband for “making me feel” any number of things.  However, it was not him making me feel, it was ME.  Whatever I was thinking, in response to his actions or words, was what created my feeling.  So, I would have running commentary in my head, like, “He just doesn’t understand what it’s like.”  Or, “He doesn’t really care, he just wants to do it his way.”  Those are just two examples out of the millions of thoughts I once believed.

By now, you’re probably imagining a situation, saying to yourself , “In that circumstance, it would not be my thoughts causing me to feel bad!  It would be the situation/in-laws/weather/pain making me feel bad!”

This is normal.  This is your mind’s reaction to this very shocking concept that everything your mind says is not true and in fact can create unnecessary suffering in your life should you believe it.  It’s very natural to resist this concept at first, and to try to disprove it.

Why?

Because understanding that thoughts create feelings means you are accountable for how you feel.  All the time.

Yikes!

That may sound like bad news at first, but it is actually the most freeing, energizing revelation once you begin to experience the results.  Once you learn how to see your thinking, asses it, and then change it, you discover huge amounts of untold power at your disposal.  The world no longer feels like such a scary place, because you have the ability to change how you feel, no matter what is going on in your circumstances.  (Not that you shouldn’t ever feel bad – but we’ll get to this when we talk about emotions.)

This might just be the most effective stress-reduction technique I’ve ever encountered.  I used to spend my life being walked by the dog, but no more!  I walk the dog, every day.  I am in charge of how I feel.  As a result, I get to feel good a lot more.

So how does this affect your mind-body healing process?

It gives it a boost of super-powered energy that rockets you to a whole new level.

Think about it – if you are able to reduce your stress without changing your unsolvable problems or difficult life circumstances, you end up with much less internal tension.  Your body stops living in fight or flight mode, and stops creating inflammatory responses and generous doses of stress hormones.  Also, you discover where you have been unwittingly creating massive doses of stress by reacting to thoughts like, “I will never heal,” or “I’m never going to be able to live a normal life again” as though they were true.

For those of us with the personality traits described by Mind-Body doctor Dr. John Sarno, such as perfectionism, good-ism, etc., this opens up whole new doors for healing.  What a revelation to discover that “I have to do this just right,” or, “I can’t make any mistakes,” or, “Everyone will think I’m a failure” are just powerless, little thoughts.

As you can imagine, not believing these and other, similar stressful thoughts reduces your stress levels fast.   You may not realize how much tension you are accumulating in your body while believing self-directed stressful thoughts.  When that stress begins to leave, suddenly you notice huge changes physically.  I used to be plagued with upper and lower back muscle knots.  I really thought I’d have to see a chiropractor for the rest of my life – and this was BEFORE I discovered I had a pelvic floor full of muscle knots!

Now, my back, neck, and pelvic floor are loose and relaxed – unless, of course, I start accumulating tension.  Now I know that tension is just a signal to look at what’s going on in my unconscious thought patterns.  Once I get the thoughts on paper (because it’s not like we CHOOSE to believe these thoughts, or even know we’re doing it) I am often shocked.  I often think – “I was thinking THAT??!!”

So now that you know the secret power of thinking, you might have a lot of questions.  I will definitely be posting more about this in the future, so please ask them.  I’d love to know what you want to know and what is confusing.

Since your mind has so much power over your body, you may be chomping at the bit to learn how to walk the dog.  There are many ways to do it – some people simply meditate (Pema Chodron is a great resource for learning how to detach from thoughts through meditation).  Others read books (there are many, many books about this very topic – see my Resources page for my favorites, listed under Self Coaching.)  Some choose to try coaching.  Martha Beck coaching is entirely about changing your thinking.  It’s based on the branch of psychology called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is an extension of cognitive behavioral therapy.   Martha Beck coaches are also trained in The Work, a method for working with thoughts created by Byron Katie.

A fellow Martha Beck Coach named Brooke Castillo developed a very helpful method of learning to work with your own thinking.  It’s called Self Coaching 101.  I am certified in the method and find it extremely useful in my own life and in my work with clients.  I can tell you this: the thought-work methods are extremely effective and helpful in releasing emotional suffering.  This simply has to result in less physical pain.  Every single practitioner I am familiar with who works with mind-body healing, such as Dr. Schubiner (and to some extent, David Wise, Ph.D), advocates or incorporates a form of thought-work.

In fact, Dr. Schubiner tells people in the fourth week of his month-long program to read Byron Katie’s books and learn the thought-work methods.  Monte Heuftle, an author and TMS coach, advocates “thinking clean” in his resources.  This kind of mental work is truly one of the biggest pieces of mind-body healing.  It is fast, effective, and something you can incorporate into your life forever.

If you have looked at some of the resources I’ve mentioned above and are still struggling to understand or incorporate this kind of mental work, don’t worry.  It can be tricky, because you’re trying to do it through the filter of your own thinking.  That’s why it can be so helpful to speak to another person who is trained in this kind of work.  As a coach, it’s my job to spot those stressful thoughts that you are unaware you are thinking.  (We call them unconscious limiting beliefs.)   Keep on working, keep on practicing, and you will soon see the benefits.  Persistence is the key.