The Secret to Living Without Pain
It was a rainy Thursday afternoon and I was a bit tired after seeing my morning clients. A new client was coming in this afternoon, and little did I know how life changing this appointment was going to be for her.
As Daphne walked in, I noticed how run down, tired and in pain she looked. I gave her my intake forms and had her come and sit down for a chat. I specialize in helping people with chronic issues, and it is important for me to hear the whole story from the beginning. At this point, my job was to just listen.
“Do I have to go through everything?” Daphne said, “it just makes me so upset when I have to re-live everything again.”
“Unfortunately, yes,” I responded “I need to hear how and why you are here so that I can find the quickest path to get you to where you were before.”
Daphne started tearing up, so I handed her a tissue. She started telling me her story.
“I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at a young age. The first surgery did not work, so the doctors decided to do a total thyroidectomy. Following the surgery I was put on hormone treatment, and was given radiation and chemotherapy. This whole process of going in and out of doctor offices took ten years…” she paused as another tear fell, “can I have another tissue?”
This time I passed her the box. She took a couple of deep breaths and continued.
“Now the doctors are saying that I am all better, but I live in chronic pain. When I tell them about it, they just give me more pain killers. I feel like I have been cut up into pieces and haven’t been put back right. I have gone to physio, chiro, and massage, but nothing has been working. A friend of mine told me about you, and that you help people with chronic pain, so you are really my last hope.”
I wish I could say that this wasn’t normal for me, but the reality is that there are many people living in chronic pain that can’t find relief.
We talked for another 45-minutes dissecting the issues. “When did this pain start? What happened before this? What about this pain? Where do we rate the pain on a scale of 1-10?” I usually would not spend this much time chatting with a patient before we start manual therapy work, but I could tell what she needed was someone to listen to her and help her figure out where this could have all gone wrong.
Finally, after we were an hour into the appointment, I asked her to lie down. This is when the true physical issues started to present themselves. Daphne was in severe sympathetic mode, meaning her “flight-or-flight” response was on high alert. If I tried to go close to any structure to assess, she would go into a full-blown back spasm. So, I decided to stay at the cranium, which is where many of our parasympathetic – or “rest-and-digest”- nerves come from. Here I could get her body to relax.
At this time I was teaching my course “Lasting Change: How to become a Super Manifestor.” In the course I go through the science and the steps to creating lasting change in your life. During my research, I found tons of academic articles and science that supports the notion that what we believe to be true will manifest for us in our lives. I see this in practice all the time. People who believe they are going to get better do, and ones who believe they are not going to get better end up getting worse.
According to research, if you can think it, feel it, and put action toward it, then that possibility may manifest for you. I see it as having a goal that you are working towards. If you have no goal, then you have no trajectory and no way of knowing when you have achieved that goal.
I asked Daphne, “I have heard you tell me about all the ways that your life is bad and not getting any better. I am curious, what would your life look like if you were healed?”
She looked at me with the most confused look on her face like I was the craziest practitioner she had ever seen!
“What do you mean? I have been dealing with this for so long, I couldn’t even imagine what ‘being healed’ would even mean!”
Bingo.
If Daphne couldn’t even conceptualize what heath was, how was she ever going to achieve it?
I gave her homework. “Over the next week, every night while you are lying in bed, dream about the possibilities. Imagine I gave you a magic wand and you could create your life however you want it to be – pain free, healthy, happy, the whole works. Then feel it in your body as if it were already true. When I see you next week for our follow-up, come with a better answer to my question.”
“That is the craziest thing I ever heard!”
“Ok fine, it may be crazy, but I might also be onto something here. How about you try it for one week and if we see no improvement then we can try something else.”
“Ok, I can do that,” she consented.
We came to the agreement that for one week she would spend 30-minutes a day ‘feeling as if she was all better, healthy, and happy’ – whatever that meant to her – and then come up with a better answer to my question.
It’s funny looking back because I felt like I didn't do that much. It was an experiment based on the research I had done for my course. However, when I saw her for her follow-up visit she seemed like a completely different person. She was over the moon with gratitude. Her chronic pain had almost completely disappeared. She went from an 8/10 all the time to a 2/10 only in the mornings. Her spasms had resolved as well.
At each follow-up Daphne shows improvement. Until she knew what being healed looked like and understood that it was attainable, her pain status had never changed. I don’t know if it was her homework or if it was the minor manual therapy I did, but she was so much happier. That happiness spilled into all parts of her life. She also remembered that before her diagnosis, drawing made her really happy but she had stopped after she was diagnosed with cancer. She showed me drawings she was working on and they were beautiful. Everything is connected and what being pain free meant to Daphne was bringing happiness back into her life.
I’m not sharing this story to illustrate that “you can heal anything with a positive mental attitude” because that is obviously not true. I have seen many very positive people in worse condition than Daphne.
I wanted to share this story to illustrate the following points:
To change in your life you need to know what you want to change.
To find “health” you need to conceptualize what that word means for you.
And to leave you with this question...
How can we use what Daphne learned about her condition ,and translate it into manifesting great things in our lives?
If you want to find out more I recommend looking into my course “Lasting Change Super Manifestor – a step-by-step guide to creating lasting change in your life” In this course I guide you through both the energetic and physical steps needed to manifest what you want in your life. Everything that I present is backed by research and presented in a way that is easy to understand. To find out when the next course starts, click the button below.
Warm Hugs,
Britte
For the interest of keeping patient confidentiality, I have changed the name of my client and all defining medical details.