Pain Free Living

I KNOW A GUY WHO, FOR THIRTY YEARS—in the course of writing four books, taking part in more than a half-million clinical consultations, speaking at hundreds of seminars, giving media interviews, and conducting health workshops and classroom discussions—asked the wrong question over and over again.

See what I mean? What could possibly be wrong about that? A lot. Now we know there was a trapdoor built into the sentence, hidden between the “do” and the “you.” When the question was asked, the floor suddenly and silently dropped away, and a meaningful answer disappeared.

It’s a fine, serviceable question—How do you feel? It seems to cover a lot of ground and leave enough space for “I feel cold,” “I feel thirsty,” “good,” “bad,” “better,” or “worse.” The question provokes a quick inventory of what’s most bothersome, particularly pain— whether there is currently pain, or a fresh memory of it. If people happen to be pain-free when the question is asked, most tend to cautiously double-check in case it has managed to slip by them unnoticed. In the process, most other feelings—particularly those that can be transitory and fragile, such as happiness and peace of mind—are often overlooked.

Here’s a more-or-less accurate translation of “How do you feel?” What’s really being asked is “Do you feel pain? Where? Does it hurt more or less or not at all when you . . . ?” (Fill in the blank with one of a thousand possibilities.) Pain is pain for a reason: the official bearer of bad tidings, its duties include shouting down, distracting, and rudely jumping in line ahead of other feelings.

What this errant questioner should have been asking was, “What are you experiencing? Setting aside the pain for a moment if you can, please describe all the physical and emotional sensations that you perceive.” Is it pain, or pain’s sidekick—fear? Your body respects pain as an important messenger, but it deeply loathes fear. Among its other responses, the body reacts to fear by radically adjusting your internal chemical mix and modifying essential cellular functions, throwing some into hyper-drive and drastically curtailing others. The objective is to urgently fortify the membranes of your cells to exclude whatever it is that is giving off the smell, the taste, the vibes, the rot of fear and possible death.

This is a good thing, but damaging if pain is allowed to override all of the other feelings that often provide a more comprehensive and accurate reading of your health.

Pain is not an emotion, although it evokes strong secondary emotion-like states of mind. In the case of chronic, recurring illness, pain can lead to panic, dread, and depression, which are close cousins of fear. But first and foremost, pain is a symptom of a physical condition—a form of sensory perception that announces itself in a way that is impossible to ignore.

The mind has an amazing talent for converting routine physical sensations into conscious awareness that can instantly influence behavior without engaging in a formal, carefully executed cognitive process. Courtship and mating rituals are examples. Romeo and Juliet embraced first, and only later considered the pros and cons of love. Driven mad by jealousy deviously stirred up by Iago, Othello strangled Desdemona. Likewise, random mood swings seem to come and go independently of any obvious provocation. In a flash we jump from glad to sad, from selfish to generous, from calm to anxious. We slam down the phone, honk the car horn, or yell at the dog. Alternatively, perhaps we don’t slam, honk, or yell—choosing instead to shrug or nod or smile. Some of us are better at managing our emotions. Managed well or poorly, the bottom line is that emotions convey messages inspired by direct interaction with the real world. Feelings allow us to re-experience the experience. Emotions tend to have an honest, utilitarian, and traceable lineage.

Fear instigated by pain, however, is a bastard that lacks the legitimacy of context. Once the sensory readout crosses the invisible threshold between mild and moderate discomfort, the response to pain isn’t modulated by reason, recollection, or experience, like a relatively healthy emotion. Oh no. It hurts, and we want it to stop. The arc of escalation leaps from “so what?” to “I’m hurting . . . help!”

We are going to take a close look at why emotional escalation happens and what can be easily done to recover healthy control. For now, though, it is more useful to establish the powerful pain-fear connection, and introduce how it hijacks a fairly simple, orderly biomechanical sequence to set off a chain reaction of damaging consequences. By treating pain as just another emotional component that is always hovering nearby in moments of sickness and in health, Mr. How-Do-You-Feel unintentionally condemns those he is trying to help—except for a small minority—to the futility of symptomatic treatment, where pain escalates, despair and disorientation set in, and the body’s amazing power to heal itself is compromised.

What wonderful answers! Based on these responses, I could immediately go to work eliminating the pain. Except it was a symptom—perhaps not even the most important symptom— rather than the actual cause of very real, ultimately life-changing, and possibly life-threatening situations.

If you break a leg in a fall, the fracture is the cause of pain, and the pain is obviously a symptom. But if a physician manages to kill the pain, the leg is still broken. Suppressing the pain symptom is relatively easy, but there is usually much more work to be done, and my point is that too often the work isn’t done.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, Mr. How-Do-You-Feel was me. I asked the wrong question again and again because I knew with absolute certainty that these painful conditions could be fixed with a few simple postural remedies. By asking, “How do you feel?” I really meant, “I already know. Save your breath. I can fix you.” I had become an “expert,” telling people what to do and how to do it. Meanwhile, I was criticizing other experts for offering remedies that substituted their knowledge and skills for the pain sufferer’s own instincts. “The patient knows best,” I insisted. “Each of us knows how we feel.” The Egoscue Method—my life work—delivers results because it rests on trust that stems from how the patient really feels. Those feelings are always right.

Don’t worry, this book is about you, not me. I will get out of the way after presenting a bit more background. Then it will be my privilege to guide you on a journey of rediscovery that can change the way you experience the rest of your life. The Joseph Campbell quote before this chapter isn’t just window dressing. It is the real deal—you can experience the rapture of being alive.

Okay, back up three paragraphs to my first direct reference to the “Egoscue Method.” As a non-medical postural therapy program, the Egoscue Method works, and works quickly. Often, in less than ten or fifteen minutes, there are dramatic results. Musculoskeletal system pain is accompanied by a distinctive posture. By changing the posture, the pain diminishes significantly or abates entirely. Typically, patients are evaluated by a therapist, coached through a customized series of postural exercises, and then they are sent home to do daily workouts for a week or two. When they return to us, we expect to see a big change. I never understood what was happening when I, or one of my staff therapists, asked “How do you feel right now?” as the second round of in-clinic treatment began. We’d hear the blandest of generalities come from 80 percent of our new patients. We would get “Fine,” “So-so,” and my least favorite, “I don’t know, you tell me.”

Were these the same people who could barely move ten days before? Instead of high fives or rejoicing that the pain had subsided or gone away completely after weeks and even years of suffering, they had a forgetful, guarded, almost disbelieving attitude.

Often I had to press them to grudgingly admit, “Yes, my back feels much better.” Or, “Pain comes and goes after I do the exercises you recommended instead of hurting constantly.”

I’d glance at their original intake interviews and might note that the pain had caused severe insomnia. “How about sleep?”

I dealt with these baffling responses by telling myself that these patients were so obsessed with their pain that they were unable to look beyond their symptoms and realize that by restoring their posture they felt a whole lot better in general. They had more energy, soaring activity levels, recovered mobility, improved mood, and so on. The vast macro changes didn’t register on their consciousness, and the many significant micro effects of pain abatement seemed to be quickly forgotten or severely undervalued once the hurting subsided.

When I asked, “How do you feel?” I was focusing on the big picture, the panorama of benefits. Most people were satisfied if the pain close-up went way. They wanted a successful treatment, and that’s what they got. Case closed. Move on. Many of them dropped out of the program (though overall, the percentage was single digit at worst), though they frequently returned eventually to seek our help later with other incidents of pain and dysfunction. I took this repeat business as a vote of confidence in the Egoscue Method.

Among those clients who stayed with the postural program, they reported feeling pain reduction and major improvements in energy levels, mood, balance, and sense of well-being. They didn’t need prompting or prodding—they were excited and raring to do more. Frequently, it led to a total health makeover. Favorite sports and activities that had been put aside because of age or “wear and tear” were resumed and deeply savored.

The best I could explain it was that one group “got it” and the other didn’t. I was right, but it took me a long time to figure out why.

The turning point was when I realized that even I didn’t get it. I was treating my own body as if it were a machine: keep it fueled, lubricated, put air in the tires, and everything would be fine. I ran, lifted weights, took vitamins, and watched what I ate. After all, I was “the posture guy”; I worked conscientiously at tuning up my musculo-skeletal system, and pain was no longer an issue. Yet there were other issues: anger, frustration, regret, fear. On one level, I could say I felt okay. On another, I felt lousy. What was my body telling me?

Meanwhile, I was forced to grapple with an alarming business trend. Starting in the mid-1990s, my growing national network of Egoscue Method clinics was retaining a smaller and smaller percentage of the clients who started with us. Roughly eight to ten in-clinic therapy sessions of ninety minutes each would constitute “full” treatment. In most cases, full treatment meant a cure of the condition that brought the individual to us in the first place. In other words, our non-medical, postural therapy eliminated pain and physical limitation, and it restored musculoskeletal function. Less than 2 or 3 percent of our clients expressed dissatisfaction. Still, the fact that some weren’t finishing the therapy cycle indicated there was a problem.

I ran the numbers over and over again in disbelief. Too many of my clients were dropping out of the program as soon as the pain abated, which in almost every case was before musculoskeletal system functions were fully restored. Our mantra was, and still is, “A cure, not just treatment.” Why would patients settle for treatment when a comprehensive cure was available? I started quizzing those clients who remained. I wanted to know what was motivating them to continue.

Slowly, the pieces fit together. One, the Egoscue Method alleviated pain without surgery or drugs. Two, being pain free left the patient feeling healthier in general. And three, by escaping pain, regaining musculoskeletal alignment, and strengthening posture, those who persevered regained peace of mind and enormous self-confidence. Most importantly, what they felt sprang from their inner emotional perceptions, not from externally provoked physical sensations.

What I was looking at was a classic mind-body connection that confirmed my own personal experience. Often, troubling health issues are centered in the emotions rather than in any internal, physical malfunction or shortcoming. Since many of the major Eastern religions have led the way for centuries in exploring how and why the body and mind interact, it seemed reasonable to explore what those religions have learned. It has been an enlightening pathway, and I am grateful to the many helpful teachers, scholars, philosophers, and friends who have guided me.

This book sets out to demonstrate that the mind-body connection is the pivot-point on which your health balances. Furthermore, years of studying the human musculoskeletal system convince me that posture functions as an on-off switch that activates emotions. Through emotions, the musculoskeletal system allows you to optimize your health without the need for increasingly common, major medical intervention driven by experts, many of whom operate on the sincere but erroneous assumption that the body is fragile, makeshift, and prone to break down.

When the mind-body connection is working well, and working with fully balanced posture, you directly experience the effects of your external environment—an effusion of positive, pleasurable, life-affirming emotions that help regulate the mind and the body. Hence, cell membranes, which I already mentioned, do not need armor plating to exclude toxins. Nor is it necessary for the body to urgently adjust our inner chemistry by pouring hormones into the bloodstream or dumping T-cells into combat zones of infection like so many ninja warriors.

Balanced posture amounts to an unobstructed window. It tells us many things in real time about the landscape of our mind-body health, not the least of which is that positive energy is flowing in abundance through your cellular membranes—the “brain” of the cell. The destination for this energy is the mitochondria in each of the tens of billions of cells in your body. The mitochondria contain enzymes that accomplish electron transport, the citric acid cycle, and fatty acid oxidation to rejuvenate the cell with adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a concoction of oxygen, heat, water, and nutrients—the equivalent of jet fuel and matzo ball soup. The cells gorge on ATP, gobbling up and burning off the volume equivalent of half your body weight each day. Courage, calmness, strength, and renewal flourish. The cup runneth over, and it is on display in plain sight.

To survive, every form of life must stay in close contact with its external environment and engage in constant two-way negotiations. If the environment changes abruptly—and change is a historical certainty of living on Earth—the organism either adapts successfully to its new circumstances or dies. Of the 30 billion individual species of organisms believed to have existed on this planet since life first emerged, only a hundredth of 1 percent survives today. Extinction is the rule, not the exception. Clearly, change is not easy to accomplish. Contrary to popular belief, it is highly unlikely that the secret of our longevity is brain power—or to be more precise, “prefrontal cortex power.” Cell power is probably more like it, cells being the classic know-it-alls. Each of your cells comes with a complete copy of your genetic code. In short, cells have two instruction books: one, chapter and verse on how to do its assigned specialty, and two, information on all the fine points of every other cell’s specialty. Information sharing is total. A small minority of biologists assumes there are some blind spots, but so far there is not a single gap within the body.

However, if the connection is off-kilter, your posture may be compromised, almost always visibly by imbalance and dysfunction. The arrogant, egocentric mind thinks it possesses the power to control reality by the force of intellectual firepower. Although human beings are gifted with capacity for high EQ—“emotional intelligence”—bending reality to our will thanks to our large brains is an illusion. The effort to change your posture without a simultaneous request from the cells of your body brings on a dark cloud of negative emotions—thunderheads of fear, futility, and anger. Why? You are in way over your head, and you know it. The frenetic, calculating “me mind” tries to fix the internal problem when, in fact, no fixing is required. Nothing internal is broken. The cells are fine, but even so, they are put on red alert, revved up to fight the thinking mind’s illusory fears. Little by little, the defeats that come from battling the wrong enemies take a damaging toll. Health deteriorates, and the symptoms of dysfunctional posture bear silent witness to that decline.

Poor posture is a symptom—a limitation—or a warning from your body through pain or stiffness. A drooping head, slumping shoulders, and wobbling gait, as well as a host of other characteristics, are confirmation that the mind is too busy sending out frantic SOS messages to find the energy resources needed to keep your musculoskeletal system functions operating up to par. Eventually, it has no other choice but to ring the big gong of pain. The modern, thinking mind—a term I use to distinguish it from the much older, aware, feeling mind—is a worrywart. Perpetually alarmed by the losing struggle to perfectly control reality, the worrying mind bombards the body with hormonal warnings that end up reshaping our musculoskeletal system, and over- and under-revving important internal physiological processes. In turn, anxiety is stoked up even more by the musculoskeletal system’s precarious condition, which can include muscular weakness, inflexibility, instability, and severe limitations of function and routine mobility. And we all should know that prolonged, increased anxiety can cause trouble for us.

I used to believe that by returning to good posture, the peace and balance of the aware mind would be simultaneously restored. My mistake was to regard the absence of pain as the principal requirement. By eliminating pain, I assumed people would continue to eagerly work on recovering their musculoskeletal system to full function because it felt good. I underestimated the power of the thinking mind to remain locked in crisis mode.

But why does a minority of patients escape from such a dire situation? They possess peace of mind securely anchored by the positive energy accessed by an aware mind, which is reinforced and even supported by less-than-perfect posture. Yes, indeed, positive energy can at times counteract imperfect health, because it is a causal source of determination and confidence.

The first task of this book is to forge a reasonably coherent understanding of the causal link between positive energy, good posture, good health, and the aware mind. Vitality and vibrancy come from peace of mind, which lies deep within our oldest and richest legacy as human beings.

The creation of the experiential pool consists of a series of events that form an experience. This experience expresses meaning through the emotions produced by those who lived through the events and consequently are capable of periodic recollection of both the events and the emotions. Every link in the causal chain represents the impact of energy, regardless of its form, causing external (and internal) change. Awareness is our choice. Likewise, unawareness is too. Either way, experiences and the emotions associated with them have impact moving forward.

If this seems like what circus clowns used to call a Chinese fire drill, give yourself a chance to consider my riff on causality. The relationship between health, emotions, and actions demonstrates the mind-body connection, and our awareness allows us to make conscious choices. So am I saying that choices made from awareness is a good thing? You bet I am.

When Marie first came to my Egoscue clinic in Del Mar, California, she made a choice to think of herself as an “overweight, overworked mother” of two children. Her words, not mine. She was thirty-eight years old. Her lower back hurt—big time. A physician had diagnosed the pain as a symptom of a herniated disk. From the way she stood against my office wall, her back flat against its surface, I suspected that she had two herniated disks: one fully herniated, the second just getting started.

I asked her why she had elected to come to see me. She said that a friend had recommended the Egoscue Method because of its reputation for getting fast results. Marie didn’t have time for pain. I explained that her spine had lost most of its lower S-curve due to years of sitting in a chair for hours at a time. Consequently, a vertebra in the spine exerted uneven pressure on the disk and walked (that is, nudged or levered) it out of its proper position until a nerve got in the way.

In the first hour, we managed to eliminate about two-thirds of the pain by engaging pelvic muscles that partially restored the S-curve. In effect, we repositioned the spine and got it off the nerve. I gave her a homework “menu” of postural exercise that would take about forty minutes a day to complete. When she left, I wondered if Marie would stick with it or opt for a much faster treatment—surgery—rather than the more time-consuming process of curing her spinal dysfunction through non-invasive methods.

Three weeks and a couple of telephone calls later, Marie was back and she had made another choice: she was no longer “overweight and overworked.” Well, maybe she could lose a few pounds, but her harassed, hurry-to-be-buried attitude had changed.

“By getting rid of so much of the pain the first day and the rest a few days later, I realized that all I needed to do was restore my balance by getting aligned and my energy levels would zoom upward. I haven’t felt this good in fifteen years.”

Marie was relaxed and all smiles. “The results were almost instant. I can feel the energy flowing and percolating from head to foot when I start doing the E-cises.”^*

I told her she had lost her deer-in-the-headlights look. Marie laughed and said, “Yeah, I was really freaked.” What Marie did was to rediscover cause and effect. We humans are designed to engage our sensory (emotional) mechanisms, which link to electrochemical trace data stored in our cells. This data has been preserved in the form of an indestructible pulse of energy. Think of it this way: you eat a candy bar as an afternoon snack. Regardless of whether you bother to read the ingredients on the wrapper, the sugar, cocoa, various coloring agents, preservatives, and artificial flavorings affect—that is, stimulate—a response that you feel immediately or that your body stores for later. In other words, energy is obtained and used to cause change within the body, or it is stockpiled to make a change happen in the future.

We humans know reserved energy as emotions or feelings. If you fished a discarded candy wrapper out of the trash, even if you hadn’t eaten the candy, you still would have information about the products stored in your body. Similarly, if you fished a discarded event from your memory banks, you’d find stored-up emotions or emotional subcomponents. Yet what you feel is different from what you think. A memory of an incident we experienced is produced by an electrochemical event stored in the cells as energy. When triggered, or remembered, the feeling announces its origin to the brain and the rest of the body as anger, surprise, or any of a score of familiar expressions of emotion-laden energy. We don’t have to think about emotion—it is part of our memory bank, and we feel it. But if you don’t know how you feel, your sensory output and perception go unheeded. Hence, making a choice is impossible (if you do choose a blanked-out emotion).

You exist today because your ancestors knew how they felt, took appropriate action, and then stored the information that allowed them to make a similar choice sometime in the future. If you don’t know how you feel, beyond being assailed by powerful emotions that are pummeling all of your physiological processes, you’re on a tightrope without a safety net. It’s time for you to restore your right to choose how you feel. It is a critical step in pain free living.

* At Egoscue Method clinics, postural therapy comes in the form of “E-cises” that re-engage, realign, and strengthen musculoskeletal system functions.