Pain Free Living

DESPITE ALL THE TESTING AND SOPHISTICATED scientific research associated with today’s advanced medical treatments, the most reliable way for a doctor to promote healing and full recovery from accidents and chronic disease is to rely on the patient’s awareness of how he or she feels.

I know, I know. Feeling has been made to seem pretty wimpy. In reality thousands of internal super-systems preside over this realm of our being. Nothing slips by unnoticed. Our inner monitors never shut down, never take a day off. Unfortunately, thousands of years and much ingeniousness have been devoted to learning how to “mute” the resulting cacophony of constant feedback—starting with the old standby “No news is good news.”

Don’t be so sure. Nonetheless, most of us unwisely settle for contrived distractions and forms of numbed-down stoicism rather than face the incoming daily, hourly, minute-to-minute flow of knowledge that can come from a sophisticated real-time network that is shrugged off as meaningless or only consulted on rare occasions to spare us a little (counterfeit) peace of mind (the origin of our modern penchant for reflexively trusting in experts, an important theme of this book). And there is the opposite extreme that reads the slightest of irritations as a dire, life-threatening disease, a new epidemic; even good news is transformed into a death sentence.

Awareness. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not using the word in any special poetic or spiritual sense. This is totally basic. We can do “awareness.” This island of life that harbors us is full of noises, alluring scents, sharp edges, sweet tastes, and shooting stars. Our awareness is a great—quite possibly the greatest—treasure that we possess. It is a survival tool that took us from a precarious perch at the edge of a dark forest to where we are today.

“How are you?” is a serious question. “Fine, thank you” was the preprogrammed default answer until about a hundred years ago, when medical innovation began to take off. (To be fair, it’s still a preprogrammed answer in polite conversation, but it shouldn’t be if you’re talking to a health-care professional.) Before then, to safeguard their health, sensible people had to rely on the body’s practicality and flexibility. Things were pretty simple. All he or she needed to do was to pay attention, and then, sooner or later, an obvious change would occur: a strong stomach turned queasy, a long-distance walker started getting blisters on her feet, a hunter’s acute hearing faded. In other words, people began to receive warnings featuring symptoms that suggested internal alarms or potentially harmful conditions—spiking temperature, inflamed tissue, aching joints, and the like.

I use the word “symptoms” above in italics because the health crisis we find ourselves in today started with a fundamental error involving the identification of symptoms. A symptom does not cause sickness or chronic disease. It is a calling card, a fingerprint, a signpost. It is an indicator of a problem, not the problem itself. Since I assume you want a cure, not just a treatment, you need to be able to tell me about your symptoms. If you can’t tell me— and far more important, if you can’t tell yourself—how you feel, you risk receiving questionable treatments from your health-care provider. I’m talking about wild pitches that inevitably get wilder and wilder.

Okay, let’s pause for a moment while I convince you or reaffirm that your body is nearly perfect. All you need to do is choose a physiological function: digestion or respiration will do, or climbing a set of stairs. To be truly impressed, study reproduction. Spend a couple of hours in the library or on the Internet doing a little research. You will come away, I hope, with the sense that something with so many moving parts, chemical reactions and interactions, synchronicity, and almost impossibly precise timing doesn’t tend to make mistakes. True, nature is not without a few flaws—cells might zig instead of zag—but it happens relatively rarely, and nowhere near as often as would be suggested by the mass media’s focus on new epidemics, diseases, and doomsday scenarios that have convinced millions of people that their nearly perfect bodies are fragile and genetically prone to break down.^*

Like the brain, our other physiological processes have many alternative pathways to choose from to get around obstacles. Medical science has yet to find the exact causes of the marquee killer diseases, such as the many forms of cancer. With fewer symptomatic treatments, which are often damaging and stressful in their own right, and more attention to changing destructive inputs from outside the body, I expect many of those killers will be conquered, and that it will happen soon.

There is just one more important task on the agenda—getting you to come back to work as CEO of your own health. It is up to you to decide what works, what doesn’t, and why. You, and you alone, are the foremost health expert.

Every human being has an incredibly sophisticated array of sensory receptors, yet the incoming messages rarely get over the threshold of conscious awareness. This is not normal; viewed across humankind’s million-plus years on Earth, it is very definitely abnormal and extremely dangerous. An inverse relationship has formed with the advances in civilization, education, and technological innovation, drowning out and suppressing what was once a robust stream of understandable, actionable, sensory, internal health guidance that even an unschooled Bronze Age farmer was capable of comprehending and acting upon with a reasonably good chance of success.

Here’s the plan: in the first three chapters, my top priorities are to briefly cover what has happened, why, and how you can restore your health awareness. Not a bad way to get started. It puts you in a position to take the steps necessary to reactivate an essential life-support system and resume monitoring the state of your health by receiving clear warnings when there’s danger, or getting positive signals in reaction to beneficial circumstances. In short order, you can stop being dependent on others for health expertise.

Am I suggesting you fire the doctor? No, of course not. Instead, resume being your physician’s working partner and best resource, the primary supplier of reliable information on the state of your own health. The doctor can make an educated guess about what’s going on. You don’t need to guess—you can feel it, and more than ever that’s what it takes to withstand disease, accidents, and premature aging.

Chapter 2 includes a simple exercise that I urge you to do without delay. Drop everything and get with it. You will feel an important change in your body and mind. The door to your perfect health will start to open.

From there we will go on to consider the musculoskeletal system’s role in keeping you on an even keel, fully aware, and energized. I will introduce you to the secret of humankind’s evolutionary success as a species: posture. Sounds quaint, eh? Don’t be fooled. Our posture announces to the world whether we are strong or weak, growing or declining, living or dying. Posture is an early-warning system, the closest thing to a master key to the door to perfect health. It reacts immediately to change, sends out a cost-benefit analysis, and tells you in unmistakable terms whether you’re on the right track or the wrong track. I’ll set out three complete daily conditioning programs that will let you get on the track you decide is right for you by re-engaging, strengthening, and re-aligning your magnificent musculoskeletal system. You get to select which program works best and feels best. Not only is this the means to living pain free without toxic drugs and traumatic surgery, it is the foundation of a long lifetime of good health in general.

In Chapter 3, I’ll share with you my understanding of the health role positive energy plays. Chronic pain is a symptom of correctable energy deprivation, not human frailty. Luckily, so is poor posture. Posture is visible and can be easily realigned from a dysfunctional state to a functional, positive, energy-generating mode. Good posture is not solely a matter of aesthetics or personal beauty. It is “good” simply because it feels good, and in that way it is a crucial element in the health-awareness feedback system that I’ll be discussing.

Also coming up is a smattering of quantum physics, Zen spiritual practices and doctrine, and assorted cutting-edge hypothesizing (like the Law of Attraction, mindfulness, David R. Hawkins’ work on the beneficial power of high wavelength energy, and Bruce H. Lipton’s book The Biology of Belief).

There are five traditional senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Six others are also generally recognized, among them being balance, awareness of time, sensitivity to temperature, and pain. I believe there are many more, each supported by a sensory system that responds to specific physical stimuli. We are consciously aware of only a few. However, if we could assign a click to every incoming stimulus and a clack to the outgoing response, there would be a deafening uproar of traffic. Along with the metabolic process, sensory reception and perception may well be the essential operational cornerstones of human biology.

Today modern science—medical science in this case—has diligently claimed responsibility for all but the most superficial aspects of our health. Only a fully licensed, impressively credentialed expert need reply to such questions as “How do you feel?” Or so it seems. The body is just too complicated for average folks to comprehend. Or so it seems.

I have a feeling that down deep you don’t buy that, and you’re absolutely right not to. The book you are reading is a celebration of our perfect health, and an invitation to retrieve the body’s power to heal, to grow, to live a long, joyful life free of limitations and chronic pain.

You and I and the rest of the human tribe know more about our individual health, how we feel, and why we feel it than all the so-called experts combined. That knowing is a gift, a legacy that has partially allowed humankind to establish a foothold on this remote speck of the cosmos. Relinquishing such a heritage is unthinkable, yet we are under growing pressure to hand it over to those who sincerely believe themselves to be better informed and better equipped. I’m not bashing doctors or knocking pharmaceutical companies; the blame game is a waste of time and energy. My objective is to reestablish the legitimacy of How do you feel? and to once again receive a direct, candid answer—not how the cardiologist or the director of research at Merck thinks you feel—to a question that has more salience than any other you could ask about your health.

Why? Because once you are fully in touch with how you feel, you’ll know the right thing to do. So one of the central themes that we will be exploring is this: your body is smarter than you are.

Whoops! Do we need to slam on the brakes and decide where the body stops and where you start? Let’s not. For now, proceed as though the physical body and the you-mind (a stuffy though useful shorthand for individual consciousness and cognition) are separate entities— they’re not, but taking a shortcut here will save time and trouble.

Anyway, the smart body knows when it is sick, what it takes to get well, and how to live a long and happy life. But the body needs a little help from you. Your job is to pay attention and become aware of how the body is constantly changing as it responds to its environment and, when necessary, take appropriate action to support that response.

Equipped with two eyes, ears, hands, feet, and at least five senses, the you-mind takes care of interacting with the extremely variable external environment. In return, your body keeps you informed about what it needs to maintain internal equilibrium, such as having adequate food, water, sleep, shelter, companionship, fun, and the like. If you are inattentive, don’t care, or prefer to pass the buck to someone else, be prepared to suffer the consequences. Pain is one way the body communicates this serious information. In the end, by ignoring the body’s wisdom you are damaging your health and shortening your life.

You are the only one with total access, literally speaking, to complete inside knowledge on what’s really happening to your physiological processes: your organs, your tissues, your cells. The body keeps you completely informed. Medical doctors can make assumptions, and drug companies can research, test, and sell reasonably effective products; only you have the actual feel for what works and what doesn’t. It is a talent, an inner genius, you were born with.

If you opt out of playing this important role, your health may be in jeopardy. The increasingly complex technology and head-spinning treatment choices might make you feel like you couldn’t possibly be the key part of your own health care.

But you’re the key. All you need is to be reconnected to the power of perfect health that comes from taking action, and making choices based on knowing the answer to a simple four-word question:

If you’ve read any of my four previous books, you may remember that I like to encourage the reader to participate in fun and games. Well, here I go again.

Read the rest of this paragraph, then shut your eyes and follow these instructions. Stand normally. Relax. Let your feet, shoulders, and head go where they want to go (and do go when someone isn’t barking out orders). Keep your feet in place and inhale and exhale a couple of times. Take your time. Notice how your weight is distributed. One leg may be working harder than the other. Is it the right leg? Or is it the left leg? Feel where the weight settles in the feet—is it in the heels? Maybe it’s the inside edge, outside edge, or toward the toes. It’s likely to be in a different spot for each foot. Let two or three minutes go by. Breathe.

Next, open your eyes. Read some more. Did you notice what was going through your mind when you were analyzing the weight distribution? Was there a jumble of ideas, images, and sensations? A little of this and that? Quick, arrhythmic bursts of activity? A sensory jigsaw puzzle with a bunch of missing pieces? At the end of this paragraph, close your eyes again and pay attention to your mental traffic. Give it a minute and reopen your eyes.

Now, I’d like you to distribute your weight evenly. Read this paragraph and close your eyes again. Stand with both feet roughly parallel, pointing straight ahead and about hips-width apart. Now, turn them inward a little, until they are slightly pigeon toed. Easy does it. Carefully swing your torso, shoulders, and head around until you can feel the weight move in your feet.

Did you ever play flashlight tag as a kid? The beam of light moves like a disk, right? Your weight will have the same characteristic: it will focus and slide here and there. Nudge the disks into the balls of your feet. Bob a little at the knees, and tweak your hips. Some people will really have to crank themselves around. It may feel strange, precarious. Believe me, though, when the weight rests over the balls of the feet, your posture is in a balanced position. (Contortions and muscular effort to hold you there are necessary because your musculoskeletal structure is fighting to pop out of the temporary alignment I’ve put you in.) When you get the weight centered, notice how it feels, and notice what your mind is doing. Go ahead, try it.

When we have clients perform the same exercise in one of our Egoscue Method clinics, most of them say that in the first unbalanced position their minds are whirling, jumpy, and chaotic. They feel troubled, uncertain, uneasy. Balanced, however, is a different story. The mind calms down. It loses the jittery quality. There’s more steadiness and clarity.

By changing your posture, you’ve changed your mind. The result is similar to switching channels on a radio or TV. A distant signal wavers and breaks up; adjusted to a closer, stronger frequency, the transmission sharpens and settles down.

You are 100 percent energy. All matter, from rocks to racehorses, is the permutation of energy. Consequently, you are indestructible because energy cannot be destroyed. Forms do change, though. For instance, Shakespeare has been dead for about four hundred years, yet all of his energy is still around. There is a chance, though maybe small, that some of it was incorporated into your corporal being—part of an ear lobe or skin tissue—because matter-energy is infinitely recyclable. Prior to residing within the thumb of the bard’s right hand, matter-energy could have been a freckle on King Tutankhamun’s chin.

No one knows how energy is channeled into a particular form or how to positively distinguish between a genius’ energy and an earthworm’s. In its vast variety, energy is the cosmic equivalent of chicken soup—a delicious cure-all elixir. The energy in the average adult human would explode with the force of thirty large hydrogen bombs (7 by 1018 joules of potential energy, according to Bill Bryson, who I’m trusting to get it right, since a calculation like that is several hydrogen bombs’ worth of intellectual firepower beyond my meager capabilities), but so far we are able to release only a tiny percentage of it in one burst.

Am I saying that your thought process will change along with your posture? Most people who practice the techniques in this book report a calming, clarifying effect, which indicates that that is probably happening. With restored posture, our brains are able to provide a smoother, less hassled ride. By not skidding on icy patches and by avoiding clunking into potholes, our whole physiological state is more tranquil, less stressed, better grounded. In short, we feel better.

So, standing around with your eyes closed playing a form of flashlight tag with your postural weight distribution is a big deal?

What you’ve just done is bridge the gap between mortality and immortality. Yes, that’s right—because we are more than flesh and blood, more than skin and bones. We are energy. Our understanding of physics tells us that energy is indestructible.

The exercise gives us a window on the process that makes all human beings as indestructible as a block of granite. Of course, granite can be ground into sand over the long haul, and eventually the grains of sand are reduced to molecules of matter. Because all matter is energy, those molecules are destined to return to the vast power surge of waves and particles created by the big bang, where they pulse and pummel, push and pull across an infinity of space and time.

If achieving postural balance calms the mind, it is reasonable to assume that it also beneficially affects our other physiological systems—all of them. And that is precisely my assumption and the assumption of this book. On my weekly radio show, I was fond of torturing the listeners by singing bits and pieces of the old gospel song “Them Bones”—“the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone . . . ,” and so on. The musculoskeletal system’s connections extend from head to foot. Its circuitry wires together the whole body and, what’s more, links it to a vast field of high-wavelength energy that radiates from one end of the cosmos to the other (except that most physicists believe the cosmos, or whatever you choose to call it, has no beginning and no end).

Keep in mind that increased mass contributes to resistance, drag, friction, and heat. Heat is a variety of radiation, and radiation affects molecular movement. Also, mass is a function of structural form, and forms vary in the way mass is expressed, from thin and easily penetrated to dense and impermeable. This range is found in the human musculoskeletal system too—in tissues that range from functional and balanced (energy-permeable) to dysfunctional and unbalanced (energy-impermeable).

What our version of flashlight tag reveals is that we are not passive bystanders at the cosmic energy Olympics, but that our mortal bodies are designed to deliberately tap into and draw from the vast supply of energy to fuel our health. Furthermore, we now know how to do it—and it’s easy!

To visualize the role of the musculoskeletal system by using an everyday analogy, think about how your TV set is connected to its power source: cord Il_9781402789014_0036_001

plug

wall outlet Il_9781402789014_0036_003

household wiring Il_9781402789014_0036_004

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electrical grid, and so on. If you were to step on the plug at the end of your TV’s power cord—really tromp on it—the prongs of the plug would probably bend to the point that they’d no longer fit properly into the wall outlet. The TV wouldn’t work. Or the plug might make a loose connection that would cause the set to flicker on and off.

Your musculoskeletal system is like household wiring, a connector of your individual nerves to the universal energy supply. The strength of that connection—the total volume of the incoming flow of energy—depends on postural balance. In other words, energy flow is determined by the way mass is arranged structurally. The more balanced you are, the more energy moves with less friction along the conduit and through the plugs. Those who are fully balanced receive an unrestricted flow of high wavelength energy because there are fewer obstructions in the mind and body. A minor imbalance means that the energy inflow is slightly impeded. But a person with severe imbalance, or someone who is stooped, with his head down, shoulders rounded forward, feet shuffling, and with drastically limited movement, is losing out on almost all of the available high-quality energy.

The plug is barely making contact—his “TV set” is flickering and threatening to go dark.

By being balanced to slightly off-balance, you have a steady flow of almost all the high-wavelength energy needed to lead an active, deeply satisfying life. Those who are badly out of balance are on the brink of shutting down. Their physiological systems, from the innermost organs to the outermost bones, muscles, and joints, are collapsing.

At one time, possibly as recently as seventy to a hundred years ago, most people were in postural balance or close to it. The people in old photographs are more likely to stand with readily apparent correct posture. Those who were imbalanced were still largely intact and capable of rebounding with relatively minor adjustments in their activity levels. Theirs was an environment that required motion. Routine, everyday, musculoskeletal movement brought them closer to balance without much deliberate effort. Today, for a majority of the population of the economically advanced regions of the world, balance is on the wane as the high-tech environment demands less and less motion due to desk jobs and labor-saving technology. At the same time, and not at all coincidentally, there is a growing health crisis. Medical costs are soaring, the news media regularly panics about new epidemics, and severe, chronic pain and lost mobility are becoming commonplace along with increasingly invasive treatments to treat them.

I’m concerned, but not worried—and you shouldn’t worry either. Human health is a well-marked, two-way street that can take us to a long, deeply satisfying life free of chronic pain, limitation, and fear—if we make a relatively simple, straightforward commitment to retaining and sustaining our legacy of postural balance. We can travel in the wrong direction on that two-way street, and we are. Presently, humankind is losing postural balance and underlying health, but what is lost can be found again. I believe we can turn this around quickly once we put our minds—our aware minds—to it. That’s the lesson of the exercise that I’ve shared with you in this chapter. Please try it again, and share it with your family and friends.

The starting place to a quick turnaround is to recognize that the body’s amazing arrangement of muscles, bones, and nerves made an important contribution to our development as a species, continues to define us as individuals, and has a major, major, major influence on our overall health and happiness.