by Endorsed Coach, Meryl Feldman

Dr. John Sarno revolutionized the medical field with his radical approaches to healing back pain and other physical ailments.  He coined the term TMS, tension myostitis syndrome, to describe a circulatory constriction in blood vessels that results in pain in the body.  This is also know as Mind-body syndrome. To sum up what Dr. Sarno wrote (“The Mindbody Prescription”) and taught for over 30+ years is that the brain will cut off blood/oxygen flow to different parts of the body in order to distract the individual from recognizing and feeling emotions that they are trying to avoid.

This lack of blood/oxygen flow is the direct cause of pain. In order to get relief from the pain, a person will go running around to different doctors and googling the internet to get answers and diagnosis for help with pain relief, when the healing is within their reach and within their own body.

They just need to feel to heal.

This is not to say AT ALL that the pain is only in the mind.  The pain is real and the symptoms are real. But the healing comes from turning inward, getting honest about one’s emotions – especially anger, fear and sadness and allowing for emotional energy flow.  Sounds good, right?

But how to do this is the question especially when so many of us have the habit of ignoring these emotions or getting stuck in them.

It’s quite simple actually, yet needs to be exercised to get the brain to cease it’s tricky behavior.

Emotions are energy in motion. They show up as physical sensations in the body, starting out very quiet and subtle, almost vibrational. When ignored, they get louder and louder until screaming as a migraine, backache or some other pain or weakness in the body.

The key here is to notice as soon as possible and as often as possible what we are feeling, and this means being honest with ourselves.  This is where the healing begins.

Here’s an example: A friend shows up late again for a lunch date?  Do you ignore that slight irritation you feel in your body and just smile when she/he shows up? Or do you blast them with your anger and risk the friendship?

Neither of these options may be the best choice for your body’s health and for your relationship.

A Mind-body (Somatic) healing approach to the situation is the following: Your friend is late.  Put your attention inward. Wiggle your toes, take a deep breath in and out and NOTICE what physical sensation is happening in your body.

Does your stomach hurt? Is there a lump in your throat, a surge of heat welling up in your chest? Is your breathing shallower? Jaw clenched?

Whatever the physical sensation is, just be aware of it and allow it for ½ a minute or longer. You can even put your hand on that part of your body to keep your focus on it.

Breathe and know that you are safe in being in your body and feeling that emotion.  Keep breathing consciously, allowing that physical sensation to be the center of your attention. An emotion word may also come up for you – anger (irritation, annoyance, rage) or sadness (disappointment, hurt).

That is called letting emotional energy flow. You may notice that the sensation changes and morphs into another physical sensation in another part of your body. You also may want some privacy in doing this.

Great! Even better! Go into a bathroom stall.  Shake your fists around if you’re feeling anger.  Do a silent scream -opening your mouth real loud with no sound coming out (Barbara Sher writes about this). Bow your head, allow tears as well if they want to flow.

No one can see you.

The best part is that you body’s emotional message to you is being heard. The recognized energy flows so it doesn’t get stuck as a neck ache later on.

This is how you are taking care of your health!

And after this very physical allowing of emotional energy, your intuition opens up so that you can choose from a place of higher wisdom the action you want to take with this friend. Perhaps you will decide to say something, but it will most likely be with clarity and consciousness.

Perhaps you’ll just accept that this is your friend and you’ll make adjustments – no more lunch dates or you’ll bring a book, having a clear recognition that this is your friend’s personality and it’s not changing.  Or you’ll say something and end the relationship.

There are so many choices, but most times, because we are afraid of change, we ignore and suppress the emotional message our body is trying to communicate to us. When we choose to  feel, we allow healing.

According to Dr. Sarno, when we give the message to our brain that we are not afraid of our emotions, it won’t try to distract us by constricting blood/oxygen flow and causing pain.  We are freeing ourselves from the suppression – pain cycle and living a more vibrant, healthy life.

Miriam Racquel (Meryl) Feldman is a Somatic Healer and Certified Mind-body and Martha Beck Coach. She is a published writer and speaker based in Chicago. Integrating her knowledge of Kabbalistic Judaism, Somatic Healing, and Coaching, Miriam Racquel empowers women with clarity and peace-of-mind in their relationships, career and health.For more information, visit MiriamRacquel.com or email her at miriam@miriamracquel.com.

Of course, I never do that, ever.

Well, ok, maybe a couple of times.

I’ve been studying the art of failing or making mistakes for a long time, because perfectionism was killing me. (Somewhat literally, since it was the root of my pelvic pain syndromes; vulvodynia, interstitial cystitis, and pelvic floor dysfunction.) Trying to be perfect, make no wrong moves, and generally be loved or liked by everyone resulted in enormous amounts of stress in my life.

Perfectionism is pretty frustrating, since there is no perfect.

It’s like chasing your own tail all the time; exhausting, futile, and kind of silly.

Recently, I made a new and exciting discovery on the perfectionism front. I realized that the only reason I try to be perfect or avoid mistakes is this: I’m afraid of feeling that terrible sinking feeling I feel when I screw up.

Imagine for a moment that you’re heading to an important meeting, and you’re a big executive. You have prepared the perfect presentation. You’re set. You’re going to impress your boss. You walk into the meeting, sit down, and open your folder. The boss calls your name, and it’s your turn to present. You reach for the papers that your boss has requested you show him, and they’re not there. Oh, no. They were all set, and now they’re simply not there. You’ve FAILED.

Can you feel it? (Of course, you might need to imagine a different failure scenario, and that’s perfectly fine! Use whatever works.)

Your heart is racing; you feel dread, a sinking feeling, waves of sickly shame, and horror. There is a sensation of “not ok” within you. You’re wrong. You’ve messed up. Your core stability is shaken; you lose yourself into this pit of failure. You’re bad.

So that explains why most of us don’t really revel in failure and generally try to avoid it at all costs. There’s a lot of yucky sensation that comes with it.

The amazing thing, though, is that the sensation of failure, while uncomfortable, is quite survivable.

Your only task is to be with it and allow it to happen in your body. Let it all wash through, like the ocean waves at the beach. Feel the emotions as physical sensations, and let them happen.

Like waves, the emotions die down. They pass through. You discover that you are still intact. You are still ok. You are not wrong or bad; you’re just a person. Then, from that place, wisdom can emerge. You might discover or learn from your failure. You might take a new path as a result. You might be kinder to yourself, because you’re not stuck in self-recrimination. With that self-kindness, you might have new ideas flow in or open up to new solutions.

When you talk to the people around you, you’ll be less defended and more open. You’ll have new conversations.

When you can be with the sensation of failure and just let it be that – a sensation – you discover freedom. You discover a new strength within you, because now you don’t have to avoid mistakes or failure. You’re less likely to be vulnerable to others’ judgments, because you know the secret; you can survive that sensation. You’re always ok. You can mess up and feel shame and learn from it all, because that’s how it’s supposed to work.

That is how perfectionism loses its grip and you gain a whole new freedom to be yourself. With that freedom comes less stress, and, of course, less physical pain or other symptoms.

So, it might seem odd for me to say this: Anger is one of the most healing emotions you can feel.

To feel anger is to be present with the sensations of anger in the body. You might feel heat, sweating, rolling waves of energy, a buzzing in your chest, a thundering in your ears, or, fill in the blank here with whatever you feel in your body! Being with that energy, walking around the block as it flows within you, or sitting still while you allow your awareness to track it is not dangerous to your health.

In fact, it’s the only healthy way to handle any emotion, because there is no other way. You can’t make anger vanish by thinking positive thoughts. You can’t suppress it, because it will simply return or leak out when you least expect it. And, of course, if you do suppress it for a long period of time, your body will start to have chronic tension and eventually pain. Suppressed or unfelt anger causes TMS, (aka Mind Body Syndrome).

Feeling anger is actually essential to your health.

Without feeling anger, you don’t know your own truth. Anger lets us know when we’re not setting clear boundaries, when we’re feeling trampled or invaded, and welcomes us back to our ability to take care of ourselves.
Here’s how you do it:

1. Feel the energy of the anger as sensation in the body. Use your mind to notice what it feels like when anger is present. Walk or move if that makes it easier. Sit still if that makes it easier.
2. Let the anger energy simply exist, and don’t try to make it leave. It will dissolve in its own time when you’re present with it. Just noticing it as a physical sensation in your body allows it to pass.
3. Be open for any insight to arise. Sometimes it may show up immediately, and other times it may take days. Insight may show you where you need to speak up, where you need to create change, where you need to take care of yourself, where you need to own up to something or admit wrongdoing, or more. You’ll know when it arises because you’ll feel clarity.

What isn’t so healthy is the reaction we sometimes have to our own anger. I’ve had many experiences where, instead of feeling the anger energy and simply being present with it, I jumped into reaction. Reaction might look like yelling at someone, stewing for hours in a mind-loop about a situation until steam comes out your ears, physically harming yourself or others, treating others rudely, saying something cutting, or any form of acting out the anger with behavior.

Reaction to our own anger prevents us from actually feeling it.

You could say that our reaction to anger is what causes a negative impact on our bodies, because suppression and behavioral reaction both carry similar consequences; lots of tension, amped up heart rate, and a prolonged fight or flight response in the body.

However, learning to stay with the anger itself instead of suppressing or acting it out is a life’s work. All we can do is practice, and with each experience, get a little bit better at feeling the emotion. Self-judgment around having done it wrong simply makes it harder.

There is no perfection. There is no battle against anger. There’s just the ongoing process of being human, noticing ourselves with self-kindness, and openly welcoming the chance to practice staying, yet again, with the discomfort of emotion.

P.S. Want to learn how to feel emotions and heal your body? (And maybe even to help others?) Take the 2016 Mind-Body Coach Training! Click here for details. Only a week left to register!

The idea that this was causing my body to react with tension and pain really blew my mind. And, it made so much sense. It was, truly, the only logical explanation for the sudden, out-of-nowhere chronic pelvic pain syndromes I’d developed; vulvodynia and interstitial cystitis. Every other explanation lacked the simplicity and clarity of that one, and so I decided to use a mind-body healing approach to my syndromes.

In doing so, not only did I eliminate the pain syndromes, but I changed every single aspect of my life for the better. Why? Because I changed the driving force behind all of my actions and decisions.

I used to act from fear. Fear of not being perfect or good enough. Fear of not succeeding. Fear of people not liking me. Fear of something failing or falling apart. Fear of messing up. Fear of losing something or someone.

When you look at it like that, it’s quite a lot of fear. Fear, unfelt and un-faced, remains within the body. This causes tension and stress…and pain.

To heal my body and mind, I had to find the antidote to a fear-based life.

What’s the antidote?

A love-based life.

I had to learn how to make all choices, actions, and decisions based on love.

In every moment, there’s a fear-based focus and a love-based focus. The fear-based focus says, “I have to do/should do x,y, or z because something bad might happen.” The love-based focus says, “I am choosing this because it feels right, and it feels like love.”

A love-based life means asking myself if what I’m thinking or doing is because I love me and want to care for me, or because I’m afraid of something.

I have to stop and pay attention. Am I tense? Holding my breath? If so, I’m trying not to feel fear. It’s time to connect to myself, be aware of the fear, and find my way back to love.

If I love me, I don’t have to be perfect, good-enough, or responsible for the whole world. I can just be.

If I love me, I can treat myself with kindness instead of criticism.

If I love me, I can choose actions because they feel joyful, loving, and fun.

Now, I listen deeply to the truth in my heart. From there, I choose to eat foods I love. I choose to enjoy activities I love. I choose to work in a career I love, in ways that I love.

Before anything can become a part of my life, it has to pass the love test. If it doesn’t feel absolutely right and loving for myself, then it doesn’t pass.

This love-based life has given me my health back. It’s given me my life back – only it’s a much better life! It’s given me the work I love, the child I love, and so much more.

Choosing to love me and to live a love-based life healed my body and united me with my spirit.

Exhausted.

Like part of your body is permanently molded into the bed.

When you start paying attention to your body and actually listening to its needs, one of the first things that happens is usually exhaustion. It’s like you pick up the rug and realize you’ve been sweeping stuff under it for years. Now, here you are, faced with reality: You. Are. Tired.

So very tired.

This is normal! In our culture, we often push ourselves crazy-hard. We ignore our bodies and blow past signals for rest and recuperation. We focus on doing, doing, doing. Our to-do lists become more important than our physical bodies.

I frequently fall into this habit, even after years of deep practice around listening to my body and respecting its messages.

Self-kindness is called for when you confront your tendencies to shove aside your body’s guidance and end up sick or in pain.

You didn’t do this on purpose.

You’re not bad or wrong for ignoring your body, or for being tired.

This is all just information, and you can simply be curious. Why did I think it was more important to clean my house, work late, and then paint the ceiling than to take a few moments to settle in for a little rest?

You’ll probably find that your mind thinks you should work 24/7 to be a worthwhile person, you’re a little afraid of the emotions or insights that might pop up if you stop, and nobody ever says, “Wow! Amazing job resting today!”

All of these reasons make it more challenging to get off the treadmill and stop moving.

When you finally do, you’ll probably have some accumulated exhaustion in your body. That’s ok. No judgment necessary. Right now, just rest.

Then rest some more.

Then rest some more.

It’s your path to health. And joy. And creativity.

You are doing SUCH A GREAT JOB RESTING! You are AMAZING when you rest so much!

(Print those last two sentences out and post them somewhere handy.)

Keep up the good resting.

Whether you’re new to mind-body healing or a veteran of many years, there’s only way to stay sane: DON’T GOOGLE IT.

If you’re using a mind-body healing approach and you’ve realized you have TMS (also called Mind Body Syndrome), then Googling your symptoms is probably the worst thing you can do.  I can’t think of a faster way to create doubt and fear in your mind that what you’re dealing with isn’t just TMS, but something deadly and permanent.

If you want mind-body healing to work, you have to decide to go all in and let go of the conventional thoughts and ideas around your symptoms. You have to drop the medical lingo for your syndrome (I remember feeling so free when I stopped saying I had vulvodynia and switched to calling it TMS. It was pivotal in my healing process!). You have to leave the conditioned way of viewing the mind and body and open yourself to something much more powerful – seeing the mind and body as a team.

Stop researching your symptoms and start spending the time on yourself, instead. Use that time to feel emotions, journal about stresses in your life, and relax the body. You’ll find yourself improving much more quickly without research blocking your progress.

If you’re like most people I work with, you’ve already seen a plethora of doctors, researched deep into the night many times, and right now you’re just facing a momentary fear that’s driving you to Google. Recognize the fear for what it is; the siren song of TMS. It’s the way the syndrome works. Your own mind keeps you distracted with fear around symptoms when the real work (feeling emotions, seeing truths with yourself) awaits.

There’s nothing new for you to learn on Google about your symptoms.

There is, however, much more for you to learn about yourself, within you.

It’s time to research your innermost emotions, how you’re treating yourself, and where you might need to make changes in your external life. That is what will heal TMS and create the well-being you want.

1. Ask yourself what you are feeling emotionally throughout the day any time you feel afraid or upset by symptoms. Allow yourself a few minutes to feel any emotions related to the symptoms themselves, then focus on other stressors in your life. What ELSE is stressing you out, besides the symptoms? What was going on today before you started worrying about symptoms? The non-pain-related stressors are the real issues that need to be dealt with, faced, and felt. It’s the mind’s tendency to suppress emotion and avoid feeling around the “real stuff” that causes a mind-body syndrome to perpetuate.
2. Give yourself some space to journal about your life and whatever is stressful, besides the pain syndrome. Start your sentences with, “I feel _________ about….” Allow yourself that expressive space and you’ll find yourself healing very quickly!
3. Relax your nervous system whenever you can so that you’re not living in constant fight-or-flight mode. Using long, slow exhales, music, relaxation techniques, or guided meditations can be very helpful for this. Become aware of when you are in a fight-or-flight reaction so that you can learn how to shift your body out of that activated state and into a rest and digest response. The fight-or-flight response is very connected to the bladder and will cause you to have frequency and urgency around urination.

If you have these basic steps in place, you’ll be on the road to healing in no time. These are the steps I used to heal interstitial cystitis and have shared with so many clients. They are based around Dr. John Sarno’s work, which was a pivotal piece of my own healing. Dr. Sarno has taught hundreds of people how to heal by implementing emotional awareness and the understanding that the mind and body are intimately connected.

However, there is also one other very important connection to make if you suffer from frequent urination or urgency. You must look at your relationship with food and dieting. This is something that is often overlooked or simply unknown to many people who struggle with urinary symptoms or IC. (I prefer to call interstitial cystitis by it’s real name – Mind-Body Syndrome, or Tension Myositis Syndrome – but for the sake of clarity, I’m referring to it as IC here in this blog post.)

Many of my clients who have IC have a history of dieting, diet-mentality, or patterns of food-restriction and binge eating. Dieting is the quickest way to cause stress on the body, which then turns on its fight-or-flight response. Every time you go on a diet, you might as well be telling your body, “There’s a bear chasing you 24/7, AND it’s a famine on top of that!”

Diets are extremely hard on the metabolism, and a metabolism that isn’t working optimally will start to show signs of damage through symptoms like low body temperature, frequent urination, and fatigue. Trying to fit our bodies into the cultural media beauty standard creates a great deal of mental stress, but it also causes true metabolic stress on the body.

If you want to heal IC, it’s time to allow yourself to eat normally.

I happen to know what this looks like, as I’m married to a man who has never been on a diet in his life. He has no food hang-ups and simply eats like nature intended. What is this mysterious thing called normal eating? It looks like this: You eat when you’re hungry. You let your body know that food is abundant by feeding it regularly throughout the day. You look for food that would satisfy your body and soul, and know that pleasure is a valid part of the eating process. You enjoy every meal, and you also enjoy desserts. Sometimes, you eat too much, or for comfort, or out of sheer enjoyment. A lot of the time you just eat the amount your body is requesting. You allow all food to be equal, with no good/bad labels. You don’t make yourself wrong for eating too much, eating for an emotional reason or anything else. You don’t put any food rules on yourself.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned as a recovering dieter is that anytime I have a strange eating pattern showing up in my life, I have a secret food rule hidden somewhere in my head. Once I find it and drop it, then I’m able to approach food with normalcy and relaxation. This allows my body to enjoy my meals while in a rest and digest state. This means I’m able to let my metabolism regain its normal rhythms.

IC is actually asking you to heal something much deeper than a single symptom. It’s asking you to heal your relationship with your body, food, and culture. The number one thing you can do to get out of the dieting trap is to embrace your body’s natural shape, qualities, and size, right now. Embracing the diversity of the human body and its various lovely shapes and sizes is of utmost importance. 

Those of us who are on the Mind-Body Syndrome/TMS track are already bucking the cultural trends around health and well-being. We’re ignoring a large chunk of the cultural messages around our health and bodies in order to create health. Why not also ignore the cultural imperative to be stick-thin? Let’s go full-on contrarian!

Let your body be the size it wants to be when you eat regularly, enjoy your food, and have fun, rest and relaxation in your life. Watch your metabolism return to health and your bladder calm down as you do so. Pay attention to your emotions so that you can get out of the symptom-obsession trap. Any time your mind wants to think about symptoms or why you need to go on a diet, you know that something emotional wants to emerge from under those very compelling decoys. Look for what is really bothering you in your life, beyond your body size or symptom. That is the key to emotional, physical, and mental health.

1. Discover amazing resources like The Mindbody Prescription by John Sarno, M.D or When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate, M.D.
2. Feel hope for the first time in forever.
3. Dig in and try to apply mind-body healing to your situation.
4. Feel some skepticism, but do it anyway.
5. Start feeling emotions rise up into your awareness.
6. Feel a little nervous about this emotion stuff, and worry that the pain hasn’t gone away yet.
7. Start worrying that you’re doing it wrong, because now you feel emotions AND pain.
8. Have a wee freak-out.

When you start down the path of allowing and feeling emotions in order to let your body release tension and pain, you might feel very optimistic. You can see how this could work. You’re excited to try it. However, the mind always pictures the healing process as a linear, improve day-by-day experience. When the actual healing process sets in, the mind usually wigs out, not understanding or liking what’s happening.

The thing is, when you apply concepts from Sarno, Mate, or other well-known mind-body experts, you aren’t actually experiencing a true physical healing. Healing TMS, or Mind-Body Syndrome, is not the same as a cut on your skin that heals bit by bit each day.

Instead, what you are experiencing is a healing within your mind-body system.

It’s a healing from the inside out, of the inner child, your connection to your soul, your relationship with your emotions, and so much more.  Because of this, the healing process is highly erratic. One day you may feel lots of pain or symptoms, and the next you might be pain-free. That might last for a week. Then, you might have a couple weeks of mild symptoms. After that it might be a couple days of lots of symptoms, then nothing again.

I like to think of it as a learning rather than a healing, because that’s more accurate. What you are doing is teaching your mind a new way of being, and that means fits and starts, back and forth, successes and failures – just like when you learn anything new.

When I was learning the violin, there were times when I’d play something amazingly well for a week and then for several weeks suddenly sound like I’d regressed two years. This is the pain of the learning process.

The key to surviving the agony of learning your way to health via mind-body tools is this: Count your successes! I’m going to tell you what they are right now, because you may be accidentally putting them in the failure column.

Three Signs You are Healing (Learning!) and on the Right Track! (In other words, pain relief is going to happen to you, inevitably!)

1. You feel a lot of emotions all of a sudden. You feel like you’re in emotional kindergarten, and a little off-center because these damn emotion things keep surfacing and messing with your usually daily flow. The pain/symptoms may still be very present, erratic, or even increase for a while. All of these are signs of success! You are learning, and it is working.
2. You have more pain than before, or even new pain/symptoms. This is very common, and it does not mean failure. It means success! You are learning to switch your attention to your emotions rather than obsessing about pain, and your mind is pulling you back to your old distraction, the pain, by amping it up. You shall prevail! Keep at it! Feel those emotions.
3. You’re learning all sorts of new things about yourself as you open up to your emotions. You think by now the pain/symptoms should be gone, but they’re not, and you feel really tired. This is normal! It just means that you’re in the midst of the learning and you are on track. Tell your mind that the biggest sign of success is the new self-awareness you are gaining as you use the tools. Keep your focus there and you will soon see pain relief.

I’m in the midst of training a group mind-body coaches right now, and we’re about two-thirds of the way through this 2015 Mind-Body Coach Training. I’ve watched the participants experience these very things, and I’ve told them these very words I’m telling you. They’ve been using the tools for several months now, and have learned so much. This week, I just started getting reports in from many of them celebrating the lessening or cessation of physical symptoms. Voila! Just like that, eventually your mind learns to let the pain go.

The hardest part of mind-body healing is this seemingly backward concept: The healing starts within and slowly works its way out to the body symptoms themselves.

Healing first takes place within your psyche and your relationship with your own mind, emotions, and soul.

Focus on the improvements you’re noticing in those realms, because you can trust that the freer you feel within yourself, the closer you are to a healthy, active body. You can do it.

I went on several different magical detox diets that were supposed to cure IC, but to no avail. Finally, I attempted a candida cleanse, as I was convinced I had systemic candida. The reason that sticks out in my memory is not the terribly restrictive and limited diet (I was used to that by then), but the incredibly disgusting digestive experiences I endured while on the “cleanse.” I am putting “cleanse” in quotation marks, because I am now highly suspicious and skeptical whenever I see that word. I did not feel any better after that dubious cleanse, and in fact ended up with vulvodynia, a whole new pain syndrome, while still on it.

Eventually, I wised up, having read about Tension Myositis Syndrome/Mind Body Syndrome in Dr. John Sarno’s The Mindbody Prescription. I realized that my symptoms had nothing to do with my diet, supposed “toxins” in my body, or any other such theory. After applying the mind-body tools from Sarno and other resources to my own life, I was able to free myself from symptoms and horrible detox diets. I could eat any food and felt fine. I learned to turn inward and ask myself what I was feeling emotionally, not suppress emotions, and to see obsession around symptoms or food as the mind’s way of avoiding emotions.

What was going on in my mind when I went on those diets was not rational, aware, or even sane. I was frozen with fear, caught in the trap made by my own mind. As soon as I read anywhere that a certain food caused symptoms, pain, or was “toxic,” my mind made that true. If I ate a certain food before or during pain, I assumed it was the cause and cut it out of my diet. I was terrified all the time, madly creating a smaller and smaller box in which I could live.

In truth, I wasn’t on the IC Diet, the Candida Diet, or the many other this-or-that diets. (You name it, I tried it.) I was on the Fear Diet. I was afraid, and hoping that food would be the magic bullet answer. Focusing on the food became an easy obsession, which took me even further away from any awareness of my internal world, my emotions, and my thoughts. Not only that, but the fear kept my nervous system on high-alert all the time. I lived in a perpetual fight-or-flight response, which had a much more damaging effect on the body than, say, eating one donut.

The brilliance of John Sarno’s work saved me from myself.

I was able to see that not only was my pain syndrome a giant distraction from my inner emotional world, but my food fear was as well.

I discovered that Hebb’s Law, which states that what fires together wires together in the brain, was the reason so many foods seemed to cause symptoms. In other words, if I ate a certain food and pain was present, my brain connected the two experiences as though one caused the other. Once I practiced eating foods while telling myself they did not cause symptoms, I was able to eat those foods and be symptom-free. This makes sense, as I had basically told myself they caused symptoms in the first place. The power of the mind is truly amazing.

I now believe that TMS or Mind Body Syndrome (the two descriptors are used interchangeably) can manifest not just as pain or symptoms in the body, but as detox diet obsession. Whether a person’s desire is weight loss or health, the siren song of the detox (or any other) diet is sung loudly across the internet and hard to ignore. The mind is almost always much more willing to believe in a magical diet that gets rid of pesky “toxins” or hidden allergies, no matter how hard to apply and follow, than an emotional awareness healing process.

If you’re in the midst of a Mind Body Syndrome, you don’t have to stop your detox diet cold turkey. You can, however, slowly return to a balanced way of eating and release symptoms as well.  Pick one food at a time to work with, and add it back into your diet. Before, during, and after eating it, remind yourself that it does not cause symptoms. No matter what happens with your symptoms, keep repeating that to yourself. Your mind simply has an association between that food and your symptom. Over time (usually not too long!) you will be free of that association and eating that food will no longer seem to cause symptoms to occur. Using this technique, along with allowing yourself to feel emotions instead of suppressing them, you’ll return to health and food freedom. When you make a food choice, let it be from inner wisdom and delight, not fear.

When I look back on those years of restrictive eating, I am amazed by the sheer number of different diet plans I tried. All of them were endorsed by well-meaning people who want to help others, but I find it extremely hard to believe that cutting out food groups is really healthy or “detoxifying.” I realize that what I’m saying flies in the face of much of what is currently trending in the nutrition world. I’m pretty delighted to be free from all of those trending beliefs and happily enjoy my well-being.

Nowadays, I enjoy regular old gluten bread, food with sugar in it, fruit of all kinds, grains of all kinds, legumes of all kinds, dairy, vegetables, and meats. I look for organic whenever I can, but that is the only thing I pay attention to regarding food labels. I eat a balanced mix of foods, and I don’t label any food as “good” or “bad.” Instead, I ask my body what it truly wants to eat. Sometimes, sneaky food rules will appear in my head, and I’ll have to spend time reminding myself that just because someone says one food is bad doesn’t mean it’s true.

The only source of food wisdom I really need is my own body.

I feel healthy, am physically active, and don’t have pain or symptoms. After being on all those crazy diets and seeing no improvements, I’m sold on the mind-body healing process. Food freedom and health make a pretty amazing combination. I’ll take it!
Abigail

P.S. If you want more help learning how Hebb’s Law works and how you can be free of so-called pain or symptom triggers, join me for this month’s Kindness Community class! As a Kindness Community member, you’ll get to join the live class around dealing with pain/symptoms (it’s today!) and have access to the class recording if you can’t make the class live.

However, the reason I natter on about it is this: Listening to your inner wisdom is actually one of the most important (if not THE MOST) elements of healing, stress-relief, and creating a life you truly love.

Learning to hear your inner wisdom, trust it, and follow it is the shortcut to everything you want.

It’s a seriously awesome life hack.

Got pain? Got stress? When you don’t know how to access your inner wisdom, you rely on others’ guidance, pressure yourself to do things the way others think you should, go against your gut, feel confused from all the conflicting information out there, and end up with tension, pain, and stress. You pressure yourself constantly and try to live up to your inner ideal, because you have no clear guidance from within to clarify what’s really right for you.

You get hooked on others’ approval because you have no other way of knowing if what you’ve chosen for yourself is “right.” Yet, everyone has different opinions, so you find yourself spinning from the various feedback – and, of course, it’s impossible to please everyone. Trusting your inner wisdom takes the pressure off and releases you from the approval trap. It releases tension and stress. It brings you back to self-awareness and knowledge about how to best care for yourself.

It is counter-culture to ask your inner wisdom before you Google it.

Even though I have learned to trust my inner wisdom, it took a long time to apply it to every aspect of my life. For nearly my entire adult life, I’ve bounced from one food plan to another, read a million diet and nutrition books, and generally felt completely lost about what to eat.

After researching nutrition for this many years, there’s only one thing I know for sure: pretty much all food is either good for you or bad for you, depending on your resource. Eggs – BAD! No wait, GOOD! Grains – GOOD! But only whole grains. No wait, now grains are the devil. Except in France, where white flour is perfectly healthy. Olive oil – GOOD! Except, don’t eat very much of it, because you should be focusing on coconut oil. Don’t eat meat. Do eat meat. Only eat organic meat. Mushrooms are the best thing, ever. No, actually, they are bad for your digestion. And, let’s not forget – gluten will basically kill everyone. Yet, I am willing to bet you a million dollars that in fifty years, gluten will be re-discovered as the most potent healing nutrient a person can eat.

To make it even harder, many experts will fervently explain to you why their food plan is really the ONLY healthy one, and all others are causing dreadful, deadly inflammation inside your body that can’t be seen, but is absolutely killing you. (This is why I love Dr. John Sarno, who has debunked hundreds of scary health issues, including inflammation, by using his highly effective TMS protocol.)

Finally, I started doing something radical: eating according to my inner wisdom. I’d had such success with pain-relief due to following my inner wisdom that I figured it might work. (Interestingly enough, it took me much longer to apply this to food than it did to physical pain – the result of so many years of brainwashing myself that someone else knew more about what I should eat than my own body.)

Now, when I hear nutrition advice, I filter it through my inner wisdom. Then, if it feels right, I try it, checking in with my inner wisdom the whole way.

I didn’t even think of parenting from my inner wisdom until my daughter was several months old. Then, I realized that all the parenting books, while somewhat helpful, were only useful if I started with my inner wisdom and then used them to figure out how the different pieces fit together.

Now that I’ve realized inner-wisdom is the key to everything, I treat every situation like this:

1. Check in with inner wisdom
2. Experiment with what it’s told me to do
3. Follow my inner wisdom to any new resources – which usually help me understand how the inner wisdom information was accurate and is working

This way of solving problems saves time, eliminates confusion, and keeps me grounded in myself. I’m certainly not perfect at it. I’m guessing trusting one’s inner wisdom is a life’s work and a pretty big part of this being human thing.

To get started, close your eyes and ask your inner wisdom this question:

What is your guidance for me today?

Then, listen quietly for a few moments. Sometimes you might hear a clear answer within yourself. Other times, it may take time for you to realize an inner knowing around a situation or issue. You might see images or hear short one-word answers at first. The more you ask the question and listen inward, the more you’ll understand the responses you get. It takes time to cultivate this new practice.

I get a lot of remarks from people that sound like this:

“I don’t know how you do what you do, or how you do all the things you’re doing!”

“You are so lucky!”

“How are you making that work?”

“You’re just magical, so it works for you.”

The truth is, I’ve just given you my big secret. I was forced to learn to listen to my inner wisdom, trust it, and follow it when I experienced years of chronic pain. (Which, trust me, did not feel magical or lucky at the time.) That was the only road that took me back to health. Then, I realized that’s basically the best life-hack for everything. I live my life completely backwards from the cultural norm. I check in with my soul before I research, take action, or try to figure something out with my mind. Quite often, I take action long before my mind understands why or what I’m doing.

A year ago, I moved from one city to another. I truly had no idea why. When people would ask, I had no clear answer. I had some ideas about what the reason might be, but they were just guesses. I was following my inner wisdom.

All I know is, when I listen to my inner wisdom, things work out for the best. I heal. I feel good in my body. I eat foods that give me energy and work for me. I live in cities that feel great for me and my family. I have success in my coaching practice. I enjoy my life. Things go well. I connect to my daughter in ways that feel right and good. I am able to create what I want most in my life.

Sometimes, people don’t approve of choices I make. Some of the experts would gasp in sheer horror. (I ate BREAD. And SUGAR.) I feel connected and approved of by the only person I really need approval from: me. My soul and I are aligned. And when we’re not, I know it’s because I’ve forgotten to listen to my inner wisdom instead of some outside source.

Listening to and trusting your inner wisdom creates an inner confidence that radiates into every part of your life. It’s the most powerful thing you can do for yourself, your body, your well-being, and your happiness.