When dealing with and healing chronic pain, a top to bottom, inside to outside approach can have the best outcomes for you.
As we learned in the article “Chronic Pain, its ‘all in our head”, chronic pain is not necessarily a result of tissue damage but rather the brain’s response to a perceived threat. This can come in the form of physical or psycho-emotional. This means that a holistic, combined therapeutic approach has a far better chance of being successful at managing pain than a singular and at best, temporary approach like pharmaceutical pain killers. Here are 8 ways you can begin the healing process get relief from chronic pain.
I have personally trialed, use and recommend every single one of these ways to deal with and heal my own chronic pain. I now experience pain free days more often than not. If I do find myself dealing with pain, I know what my pain triggers are and how to handle the fallout effectively and quickly! If you're interested in how and where to get hold of any of these methods please contact me personally. I am passionate about passing on the love!. I'd love to hear from you... how do you manage your pain levels? have you found a technique or tool that works particularly well? Feel free to share in the comments section below or visit our page directly on Facebook. ![]() Meditation doesn’t have to be hard if you understand a little about what it is, and what to expect! I started meditating and teaching meditation at aged 20 when experiencing a spontaneous spiritual awakening and opening of my third eye. My spiritual teachers were ‘not of this world’, and so, they were not able to help me with the nuances of a meditating human body and mind in the 3rd dimension! For me, opening to the enormous psycho-emotional and physical benefits of meditation was easy and immediate. However, establishing a regular practice was a little more difficult as it came with a whole host of belief systems and doctrines that no one could explain for me. I trust that these 7 secrets that no one told me when I learned to meditate will help you hone and enhance your practice, and help you cut to the chase to get the most out of your meditations.
If you always wanted to try it, but perhaps you didn’t think you’d be able to do it, or maybe it’s not easy for you to attend a group class, you may find a private guided meditation lesson is a great place to start. In a private session you will learn how to break through any beliefs that are stopping you from getting the most out of your meditation. You’ll be able to hone in on any specific life challenges that is bothering you or weighing you down and get immediate relief, and I’ll be there to guide you the whole way, which will help you to anchor your mind, reign in a restless body and really tap into your true personal power. We also record your live guided meditation for you to keep! A personalised meditation that is exactly customised to your needs can be used to practice your meditation skill as often as you like at home. Better still, come to my consult room and experience meditation with me in person, or let's meet via skype if you’re somewhere else in the world! Head over to the My Holistic Nurse facebook page and let me know about your experience with meditation. Are you just starting out, or a seasoned meditator? Let's connect! Kristy Do you want to learn to meditate but can’t get to a group class? Do you want to focus on a specific personal issue in a meditation but have trouble guiding yourself through it? Are you interested in how meditation can help you manage chronic illnesses like pain and fatigue? Find out more at www.myholisticnurse.org or call My Holistic Nurse on 0487 769 629. ![]() Back when I first read this phrase in a research document, I have to admit I got angry. I was on a search to cure my chronic pain, and was trying everything to solve the pain problem. My thoughts flared; Pain is NOT a figment of my imagination, it is a very real condition that I have to manage every minute of every day, for years. Clearly the author has never experienced chronic pain. Luckily for the author, unlike my pain, this rant was in my head! Since I was determined to find a way to deal with my pain, I kept reading in spite of my offended and wounded ego! What I found was initially very confronting. Then a light began to go off in my head and a wave of excitement flooded my mind. If chronic pain is “all in the head”, then I have the power to find the trigger and turn it OFF. If it’s all in my head, then I have control! This was a revelation…and then also a little scary. I am responsible for my pain, and for its healing. Not responsible in a negative way, but rather a feeling of empowerment and possibility. What is Chronic Pain? Chronic pain is defined as pain that lasts longer than 6 months. Irrefutable scientific evidence now shows that pain is a function of THE BRAIN and does not necessarily indicate damaged body tissue. It can be signalled in the brain by any perceived or actual threat from any source; emotional, mental, historical trauma, stress, physiological damage, you name it. This is why pharmacological interventions to manage chronic pain have limited effect – they suppose that there is a physiological cause for the pain. At time of writing, there are no pharmaceutical pain relievers that are designed specifically for chronic pain. This poses serious consequences for long term use. Trauma and its link to pain On the other hand, there is now lots of research about traumatic stress and how it relates to chronic pain. Interestingly, the trauma can be very old and manifest as chronic pain years, sometimes decades, after the traumatic event, i.e. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-PTSD. It is important to note two things here
3 year old Susie is sitting on the floor carefully pulling the eyes off her favourite teddy. She is curious about Teddy and wants to understand why his eyes don’t move. Mum enters and catches Susie damaging the bear that she had carefully and lovingly spent an entire evening making for Susie when she really needed to be sleeping. Mum is tired, stressed and overwhelmed. The sight of her hard work being ‘damaged’ sets her off and she yells at Susie for “hurting teddy” and then bursts into tears. The shock of the loud yelling rips Susie out of her bubble, the sight of her mum’s angry scrunched up face frightens Susie and the sound of her mum’s accusing tone hurts her heart. In that moment, Susie unconsciously forms a limiting belief that she is the cause of pain in others. From then on, Susie imprints that event and the attached belief, internalising the trauma, fear and hurt. Years of repeated reinforcement of this belief system compounds and associates her actions with feelings of pain and trauma in the form of ‘life experience’. One day, decades later, that little girl who believes that she always hurts the ones she loves, reaches a tipping point. Her relationship breaks down. Now being highly sensitised for emotional trauma, her brain perceives the breakup as danger and threat of injury (emotional in this case), and this seemingly ‘new’ traumatic event (actually compounded from similar events from the age of 3 onwards) triggers pain in her body that can’t be healed with medicines. This is, of course, a simplified version of how chronic pain might work from emotional trauma, but you get the general idea. If medication doesn’t work, then what? If medical drugs can’t heal our chronic pain, there must be another way. We need to limit their use and shift focus to finding and dealing with the true cause, then set about rewiring the brain for less pain. Whether physical, emotional or mental pain, chronic pain is a signal that something is amiss in within the healthy functioning of the person. Thus, we can take the approach that our pain is trying to give us a message; there is something within us that our brain perceives as a threat to our wellbeing. It may be physical, but in the case of chronic pain, more often than not, it is triggered by our emotional response to events around us now, in the past, and thoughts around possible pain in our future too! My personal experience with chronic pain stems from both chronic musculoskeletal damage, compounded and triggered by a lifetime of painful emotional traumas and stress which, in 2012 resulted in a chronic illness that stopped me in my tracks. Since then, I’ve tried many approaches to chronic pain management and researched my butt off to find answers for management and a cure. Manage pain from the inside out, AND the outside in I have found from cutting-edge scientific research, best practice medical approaches, natural and alternative healing practices, and from my own practical and holistic approach to pain, that a multidisciplinary, multi-modality approach is the most effective way to manage chronic pain, and has the greatest chance of successfully eliminating it all together. We need to address chronic pain from the inside out, AND the outside in to be pain free. It is my contention that by using a combination of management techniques that include:
Changing minds about pain We can teach our brain to rewire neural pathways that are highly sensitive to physical and emotional pain triggers. This is why I got excited… we have the ability to literally CHANGE OUR MINDS about chronic pain, and heal it! What's your experience with chronic pain? Do you have it or care for someone who does? What management tools to you use to keep on top of your pain? Leave a comment about your experience. I'd love to hear from you. If you'd like more information about how to deal with and heal your pain, you may like to look at our Nurse-led packages for chronic conditions. The Kickstart programs are a great place to start, or simply call My Holistic Nurse on +61 (0)487 769 629.
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