Pain as a Teacher: Listening to Your Body and Mind
For me, chronic pain was the detour out of mainstream medicine into the world of alternative medicine nearly 3 decades ago. And Lydian and I ultimately started writing about pain and pain relief when she developed a similar chronic pain condition after her daughter was born several years ago. Pain relief in conventional medicine, as it turns out, is a confusing mess of addiction and adverse effects from which patients must choose in order to experience relief from their pain.Pain is hard to define because there are many different types of pain. Most would agree that pain is an unpleasant experience, but pain can be emotional or physical and it can also be instructive. A little bit of pain can, in some cases, prevent more pain. Pain can result from actual damage to tissues or it can even result from a perceived feeling of damage. Phantom pain is a type of physical pain that’s felt in a limb that no longer exists due to amputation, for example. Mirrors that are placed specifically to trick the brain into believing that the limb still exists can help the brain process phantom pain more effectively. The problem of phantom limb pain, however, highlights the difficulty in defining what pain is, what causes it, and the tricky nature of treating pain successfully.
Physical pain can be caused by emotional pain as we feel emotions in our bodies. The body is the container that feels a “broken heart” or the suffocating oppression of grief, after all. We think about our emotions with the left-hemisphere of the brain where the logical mind is located (approximately), but the left hemisphere of the brain can become judgmental toward the body in response to chronic pain of any kind (emotional or physical). While the body tries to march on, the left brain may spew toxic thoughts toward the body’s neediness, pain, and exhaustion which in turn, fuels more pain. Pain that is caused by emotions is particularly distressing if this type of pain is judged by society. There’s often plenty of inner judgment in play when a person develops a chronic pain condition. In order to treat the chronic pain permanently, the inner judgment must be adequately addressed in some inspired way that opens up a safe time and a safe space for treatment.
Certain states of emotional pain compel people to engage in self-harm in order to create a physical source of pain that the left, logical hemisphere of the brain can better comprehend. Borderline personality disorder is one of several mental illnesses that is heavily correlated with self-injury to address extremely painful emotional states. There are several mental illnesses that compel sufferers to reconcile pain that seems to be without cause with the justification for that pain through self-injury. These mental illnesses should give readers pause as the crossover between mental and emotional pain with physical pain gives us a clue as to how chronic pain becomes settled into the body. In order to release chronic pain, we have to be willing to understand it even if that means rejecting the norms in society that act to perpetuate our own individual pain. We don’t have to reject society or order to reject certain rules or beliefs that are causing us extreme pain, but if we live in a state of inner emotional torment that’s fueled by physical pain or if we live in a state of physical torment that’s fueled by emotional pain, something has to change. Usually a change in perspective is adequate on the individual level to open a portal through which healing is possible.
In the scientific literature, pain is regarded as a physiological response to some kind of toxic stimuli or disease. Whether pain is emotional or physical, it seems to result from toxic content or poisons in the environment. As such, pain might be viewed as a protective response, especially if it provokes self-care to prevent further damage. Chronic pain that lasts longer than the physical healing required after an injury (usually longer than 3 months) should challenge the patient to look more deeply into the sometimes complex emotional aspects of physical pain. In conventional medicine, physical pain that’s rooted in complex traumas or emotions is regarded as incurable and most doctors look dismissively at patients who experience this type of pain as though such a thing is rare or even in some way “wrong”.
On this site, we focus mostly on the physiology of pain – the physical and emotional aspects of a pain response that causes or maintains the sensation of physical pain. That being said, our experience with so-called physical pain is that chronic pain is often held in place by a society that refuses to validate emotions as an essential and beneficial aspect of being human. Every emotion is felt in the body, but we are rarely encouraged to notice what we feel in terms of emotions in our bodies in the world today. Emotions that go unnoticed and unacknowledged build-up in the body and under certain conditions, emotional build-up can lead to chronic physical pain.
Indeed, after years of working with the sacred indigenous medicines like Ayahuasca or psilocybin, Lydian and I believe that to feel is to heal. It is an inability or unwillingness to feel emotions that cause us to become sick in the first place. Some emotions, after all, are very painful and in the developed world, there is little support for emotional catharsis. We live lives as individuals who are isolated from our families and divided by the current incoherence of the corporations and government systems that have broken the family. We are in the midst of a part of a cycle of human development that’s uncomfortable and not terribly optimistic. But the goal of what we’ve written here is to look at life in its current state and at unrelenting pain as meaningful events that have a purpose and that can, ultimately, lead us away from pain to a state of greater peace and harmony.
Throughout time, many societies have nurtured ways to release emotional build-up and trauma so that chronic physical pain can also be released and healed permanently. Developed nations of the world have no such method of emotional release in the modern world today. Those of us who live in the modern world are taught to separate logic (the left-hemisphere of the brain) from emotion (the right-hemisphere of the brain and the body) and operate without ever bringing them together. If you have a physical disease, you go to a medical doctor. The doctor examines your body. If you have an emotional disease, you go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and these doctors examine your “mind”. Patients rarely acknowledge the irony of treating both emotions and physical symptoms with pills, surgeries, and various high-tech treatments. We treat emotions with pills and we treat physical symptoms with pills, yet we’re taught to believe that certain physical symptoms are “all in our heads”, meaning that they’re emotion-based and therefore irrelevant. We’re taught that we shouldn’t have pain in the body as a result of an emotion even though every emotion that we have is somatic – it involves a sensation in the body. Doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists all chide patients to maintain the split between mind and body at all times and present their symptoms as separate experiences. We might have nausea, but nausea is due to a physical illness and never as a result of feeling out-of-control, for example. So as we expand on the idea of pain and the research that’s been done to explain what pain is and how to treat it using physical treatments and physical manipulations of different substances in the body, we encourage readers to make their peace with the idea that emotional pain is physical pain. Physical pain becomes emotional pain very quickly as well. Our experience has been that ignoring the emotional aspect of physical pain has a poor yield in terms of healing. When pain becomes chronic, it’s best to acknowledge what the body feels as though it were an emotion and simply let the body talk.
Nonetheless, while we acknowledge the role of emotions and trauma in the development of chronic pain…and while we offer important treatments for people to consider as ways to treat both the physical body and the emotional build-up in the body, we provide an array of dietary, and herbal treatment options to consider too. Of special interest are the sacred indigenous medicines that are able to heal both the emotions and the physical body and change lives within hours of starting therapy.
Everything You Never Wanted to Know About the Treatment of Chronic Pain... and How to Avoid Painkillers That Will Eventually Kill You - BUY HERE!!!My Story: Fibromyalgia and Rheumatic Pain
When I was in my early twenties, my husband and I had a stillborn baby. My parents and the church regarded this loss as evidence of my husband’s and my sinfulness. We suffered through the experience alone (but thankfully together and also with Lydian). Then, we moved to a new city. We were in debt and cash poor. Lydian was 2 years old at that time. We moved about 2 months after 9/11 and soon, we couldn’t afford the house we’d purchased. My husband’s business was destroyed by 9/11. So we rented out our house and we moved again into an apartment with Lydian, still just 2 years old.John got a 60-hour per week job and Lydian and I tried to get used to John being gone all the time. His job paid terribly and because I had a degree, I decided to see if I could make more money per hour. I got a job as a social worker. I took Lydian with me whenever possible, but about a year into the job, my boss started asking me to fabricate documents about home visits that I’d never made. One day, I got a fever and I vomited a few times. Within about 24 hours, I couldn’t move without feeling pain. I couldn’t pull the blankets up on my bed without help. I went from running long distances to barely being able to walk within 48 hours.
Back then, I didn’t know what to do. I’d studied to become a medical doctor, but dropped out of my program when the politics of medicine became an issue for me. So at that time, when I got sick, I went to a doctor. The doctor told me that I had fibromyalgia and that it was “untreatable”. I told John my “diagnosis” but I told him that I would never tell anyone else this diagnosis because I didn’t accept it as truth. Instead, I started looking for ways to reduce my pain naturally.
First, I started noticing how coffee and the capuccinos that I’d buy at the gas station would impact my pain levels. I noticed that having electrolyte drinks that contained natural Himalayan sea salt were extremely helpful in reducing my joint pain. I reasoned that hydration was important especially since I’d moved to a higher altitude in the mountains. Changing what I was drinking during the day was the first big change that I made in terms of healing my body. It was also the first step that I took away from conventional medicine toward this other way of looking at healing and medicine that Lydian and I have today. Certainly there’s so much more to learn (I hope so!), but little did I know back then that all of that pain and all of the worry would lead me to a view of medicine that has saved the lives of my loved ones many times over!
In truth, it took many years for me to sort out the chronic pain condition that I’d developed as a result of extremely high stress and also trauma. I had no support from extended family and John was gone most every day of Lydi’s and my life in the early years of her childhood. The stillbirth certainly set me up to be vulnerable to emotional overload. The other stressors that pushed down on me as I tried to raise a baby by myself were the straw that broke this camel’s back. Back then, what could a modern-day doctor possibly do for me that would help me and not hurt me and my family in terms of pain treatment? Even today, doctors have nothing but opioids to offer people with chronic pain and that’s not for lack of research proving that pain-relieving, non-opiate medications exist. Having lived the trajectory of the past 30 years since my first encounter with chronic pain, watching the system promote opiates and downplay the importance and safety profile of medicines like kratom (Mitragyna speciosa), I can see that money and profits are the factors that matter most in conventional medicine.
But that being said, today’s patients are resistant to change. I may, at times, be inclined to demonize conventional medicine and doctors, hospitals, and clinics, but the system has been created by patient-demand. Having worked with clients to help them overcome pain using the cures that exist to work through the mind-body mystery, I can say that many people prefer their chronic pain or illness over self-confrontation. To confront chronic pain and illness and overcome it requires a solid sense of responsibility that you are a part of the root cause. This is something to celebrate because if you’re responsible, then you can change it.
Assigning blame is a waste of precious energy for patients who wish to heal and overcome chronic pain. Take responsibility for the parts that belong to you and ask The Universe or a Higher Power for help in undoing the parts that are not your responsibility. This is the only path that will lead you through the eye of the needle, if you’re a camel.
To put it pragmatically, emotional causes of chronic pain are an important consideration for anyone who is squaring up with fibromyalgia, arthritis, neuropathic pain, or any type of chronic discomfort that seems to have no cause or no cure. But to say that one’s pain is “emotional” is fruitless unless a person has access to methods to release the emotional undercurrents that are causing the pain. In fact, there are methods that have been used for thousands of years to untangle pain and release it permanently, but these methods belong to shamanic medicine, so they’ve been spurned for centuries under the current profit-driven system of corporate medicine. As modern humans, we have to use these shamanic medicines that were created for emotional release and physical healing in a manner that works for a modern mind and body. A lot of the language that we use to talk about medicine tells us whether we should believe in a given treatment or not even before the treatment starts. We all know that belief and biology are interlinked through the so-called “placebo effect” that produces a healing response 70% of the time when patients believe strongly in their treatment. Yet this fact has been labeled a “confounding factor” and rather than studying the placebo effect itself (and maybe naming it something less pejorative like the “belief healing”) as an important resource for healing, we try to tease belief out of the equation entirely. What a tragedy that is for modern humans.
We’ll talk about the sacred indigenous medicines that have allowed us, as humans, to survive for centuries without textbooks, medical schools, graduate degrees, or even science to heal us, but we’ll also talk about the models of pain that science has managed to develop and how certain medicines and treatments work within these models. We talk about the intersection between science and the sacred medicines, but we also talk about the cures for pain that have been developed in a lab (and then covered up by Big Pharma to make sure that addictive drugs remain the standard treatment for chronic pain). We’ll talk about how to change your diet to reduce different types of chronic pain and herbs that can be used safely to manage chronic pain conditions too.
There are several pain conditions that are common in today’s world, but the labels used for those chronic pain conditions are constantly changing and the types of pain that people feel also evolves over time. Every person who’s reading this article will have a very specific pain profile that they’re looking to treat and for this reason, we try to provide enough information about chronic pain research to help people identify the type of pain they need to treat and thus the types of treatments that would be most likely to work to release the pain.
At the time of this writing, low-back pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia and neuropathy are extremely common so we address these chronic pain types in terms of the research, but if you have a different type of chronic pain like phantom limb pain, migraines, or severe headaches, or some other unique type of pain, be aware that the pain pathways in the body generally all lead to the opioid system. There are some types of pain that respond to treatments involving prostaglandins too, but ideally, you’re looking for a pain relieving treatment that will support your general healing to get rid of what’s at the root of your chronic pain. Kappa-opioid agonists, for example, can re-myelinate the nerves which makes it relevant to multiple sclerosis sufferers and anyone who has a disease involving de-myelination of the nerves. On the other hand, medicines like tianeptine that promote increased serotonin uptake can get rid of diabetic neuropathy, but also heal the pancreatic beta-cells that are at the root cause of diabetes as a disease.
Lydian’s Story: Fibromyalgia and Rheumatic Pain
My fibromyalgia evolved over time. I stopped having chronic pain in my body and eventually it changed into cystitis or bladder irritation as well as regular bouts of conjunctivitis in my eyes. A doctor diagnosed me with Reiter’s syndrome at one point and I didn’t broadcast that diagnosis to anyone I knew either. Again, I rejected the diagnosis and continued working to understand my pain from different, alternative perspectives. I sought out alternative medicine practitioners in the U.S. at first. And then, as John and I got on our feet financially, our family would eventually seek out shaman and tribal healers throughout the world. Within a few years, the chronic pain was gone. It had abated slowly, step-by-step until I no longer wrestled with it daily, but I spent a lot of time with alternative healers doing Rolfing, acupuncture, massage, and quite an array of sometimes strange treatments that satisfied not just my need for pain control, but also my curiosity.Unfortunately though, many years later, like her mother before her, Lydian developed fibromyalgia after a very painful and difficult pregnancy combined with serious marital issues. By that time though, she and I had been researching cures for diseases for many years. She knew her pain was caused by emotional trauma, but what we learned from her iteration of fibromyalgia and chronic pain was that it was caused, at least in part, by ancestral trauma too.
This idea that ancestral trauma exists at all or that it can cause chronic pain probably challenges our readers’ belief systems. For this reason, we don’t elaborate on it in depth here, but it deserves mention. Some of our clients choose to think about ancestral trauma as trauma that’s transmitted through the DNA, but we have an energetic view of ancestral trauma as something that involves a deep and enduring relationship that we have with the loved ones in our family tree who have passed before us. Our view is that our lives heal their after-lives. We feel the pain of the ones who came before us who couldn’t resolve their own pain. So when we heal ourselves and overcome our own pain, we heal our entire family, including family members who have already passed on. This idea has been essential for Lydian because she has powerful psychic abilities that, if ignored or diminished by the people in her life, cause her pain.
After years of being unsuccessful in helping people treat physical disease and pain using physical treatments, we started incorporating emotion-based treatments that we’d learned into our model. We used hypnotherapy, guided meditation, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR, brain entrainment, and the sacred indigenous medicines to address physical illness and pain. These things helped us break through some of the resistant health issues in our clients and while my fibromyalgia had long resolved when Lydian developed the same symptoms, this time, we observed a new layer of the issue using the sacred indigenous medicines and she was able to maintain pain control on a day-to-day basis such that she could stand to observe it and not fall prey to depression. Now, when we work with people with chronic disease, we take the stance that chronic pain and chronic health conditions of any kind require a multi-faceted approach that includes acknowledgement of emotions, trauma, and stress.
There is no factory-style approach to medicine that will work to get rid of chronic pain, but what we hope to present here are natural treatments that really work and that give our clients the opportunity to experiment with healing themselves. What works? What doesn’t work? Healing is like a journey which means that an important goal is to travel to interesting destinations that inspire curiosity and interest. Healing should feel safe whenever possible. Risks should be calculated with great care. Pain can obscure things for patients who are chronically afflicted by it. For this reason, if you have someone in your life who cares for your well-being and is willing to read and learn about treatments, it can be helpful to have this person as a resource for discussion and treatment consideration. Lydi and I offer health coaching to provide a sounding board for people who are managing their own pain treatments at home.
Reduce Chronic Pain, Restore Hope: How to Get Started
We recommend that most people with chronic pain conditions start by working with the most powerful, natural treatments for pain so as to restore hope. The first landmark that you’re hoping to reach is pain control. But you may not be able to achieve total pain relief which is, of course, the second most important goal. Beyond pain relief though, is healing the root cause of the pain as the ultimate goal. Ideally, pain relief medications should also have a healing effect on the body.Achieving a sense of control over your pain will give you strength and hope to keep going. But if you have chronic pain because you are emotionally overwhelmed, you need some physical pain to remind you to seek out ways to release and treat this overwhelm. The nature of “overwhelm” may defy words or explanations at first. Our modern society doesn’t ascribe a high value to being able to discuss spiritual or emotional experiences so your goal is to try to understand something that the modern world doesn’t care to understand very well. Your specific version of “overwhelm” may be unique and it may be rooted in ancestral traumas that extend back for centuries and that have been passed down through your family to land squarely on your shoulders. Your overwhelm may be based on trauma from childhood or chronic stress in your daily life.
There are several natural remedies for chronic pain that can provide a lot of pain control and perhaps total pain relief in the early stages of your chronic pain treatment. These include kratom / Mitragyna speciosa, tianeptine, and the Amanita muscaria mushroom among others.
Types of Chronic Pain
There are different types of chronic pain including:- Nociceptive pain
- Nociceptive pain results from actual or potential damage to tissues that are not nerves or nervous system tissues including the skin, muscles, bones, or organs. Burns, sprains, or cuts are examples of wounds that can cause nociceptive pain.
- Neuropathic pain
- Neuropathic pain is a chronic pain condition caused by damage to the nervous system. It is often experienced as burning, shooting, tingling, or electric-shock-like pain.
- Nociplastic pain
- Nociplastic pain is a chronic pain condition that’s caused by altered or amplified signal processing in the central nervous system. This type of pain is caused by a so-called dysfunction in the pain pathways in the nervous system leading to a higher sensitivity to pain. Poor sleep, being female, and trauma are known to play a role in nociplastic pain.
- Inflammatory pain
- Inflammatory pain is caused by or co-occurs with inflammation in the body.
- Mixed pain
- Mixed pain is caused by several different issues. It may include nociceptive, neuropathic, or nociplastic pain.
- Phantom limb pain
- Phantom limb pain is a painful sensation that’s felt in the limb that’s missing as a burning, tingling, or cramping sensation. It occurs after amputation of the limb when the brain interprets nerve signals from the nerve endings in the missing limb, creating the perception that the limb is still present.
- More…
Diet and Chronic Pain
We’re going to discuss pain from various perspectives, but one of the things that you can do to get started toward a less painful life is to eat a pain-reduction diet. In fact, diet can help you gain control over inflammation and certain aspects of chronic pain conditions to overcome underlying disease states that may be causing chronic pain. For example, the ketogenic diet can produce serious healing in those with diabetes which in turn, can reduce neuropathic pain. The Mediterranean diet, on the other hand, contains high levels of plant-based substances that reduce pain naturally for certain pain conditions.Changing your diet to reduce chronic pain and fatigue can produce a major change in your life. There are a variety of diets to choose from, ranging from very simple diet plans to more complex diets. In all cases, be sure to avoid processed and ultra-processed foods as well as refined sugars and heated oils.
Herbal Remedies for Chronic Pain
Kratom / Mitragyna speciosa is helpful to a lot of people with various types of chronic pain conditions. It is a pain-killing herb that also provides mood modulation and improvements in terms of energy levels. Kratom works with the opioid receptors but it is not itself an opiate. Though there is some risk of addiction to kratom, most people do NOT get addicted to this herb. When addiction occurs, it is often on par with something like a coffee or caffeine addiction.Salicin-containing herbs are also important in helping people with chronic pain learn how to cope. The salicin-containing herbs work similarly to aspirin except without the dangerous side-effects. Chronic pain patients need to take salicin-containing herbs for up to 10 days in order to begin experiencing the effects of what these herbs can actually do.
Salvia divinorum is an important pain-relieving herb that re-myelinates nerve tissues. It also treats gastrointestinal pain which is unique and important in terms of pain relief.
Trauma-Informed Therapy for Chronic Pain
Trauma-informed therapy could also be labeled as “stress-release” therapy. This type of therapy always acknowledges that the body carries stress and trauma and that these therapies speak to the body to let it release what no longer serves it. Trauma-informed therapies attempt to get around the logical mind that might discount the role of emotions in a person’s chronic pain condition. For many people, without trauma-informed therapies, it will be difficult to permanently overcome chronic pain.Of all of the trauma-informed therapies that might be beneficial for chronic pain relief, the sacred indigenous medicines like psilocybin, San Pedro, Salvia divinorum, Kambo, Ayahuasca and Iboga are among the most important. These medicines work with and through the mind-body connection to unravel the root cause of the pain through the release of trauma.
Most of the sacred medicines are psychoactive and they produce visionary experiences when taken at a high enough dose. The medicines produce a situation of self-confrontation and an opportunity to release whatever no longer serves the person who is in chronic pain. Sacred medicines like Salvia divinorum produce powerful, paradoxical visions but with the ability to re-myelinate nerves that have de-myelinated as the final result. Anyone with neuropathy or a demyelinating disease like multiple sclerosis could benefit from working with Salvia divinorum.
Relieving Pain, Restoring Hope
Pain can be instructive and in fact, it can save a person’s life, but chronic pain produces a drain on a person’s energy which in turn, makes it hard to choose a path and make healthy decisions that might lead to permanent pain relief. Pain changes the psychology of patients and it requires a mind-body approach to undo it. Lydian and I don’t think about chronic pain as a 2-dimensional thing that can be resolved with a single, magic-bullet medicine or treatment. We might think about the pain as a cellular issue one day and as a whole-body issue or even a spiritual affliction the next. We wrote about pain and pain relief to help people do the same for themselves or for their loved ones. If you are trying to heal your own chronic pain though, be aware that disillusionment can cloud your judgment. Contact us for health coaching and surround yourself with a team of people who support your healing process.When I had to undo my pain without the sacred medicine 20 years ago, I sought out healers who offered me treatments like Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture, hypnotherapy, breathwork, guided meditation, neurofeedback, Rolfing, craniosacral therapy, PEMF therapy, brain entrainment, Eye Movement Desensitivation and Reprocessing / EMDR, and a huge array of alternative treatments not just for my body but also for my mind and my spirit (though I didn’t have the ability to think about healing my spirit back in those days). I used NSAIDs like ibuprofen in a dangerous way that put me at huge risk of having digestive bleeding and often they didn’t work at all to relieve my pain anyway. It was a very slow process of exploration that led me away from my chronic pain condition. At one point, after I the chronic pain subsided enough for me to care about life again, my family and I started traveling abroad for 3 to 6 months of every year and Lydi and I would seek out healers in far-off places to find out how these healers were treating their patients for various diseases and disorders including for chronic pain.
After becoming certified in hypnotherapy, Lydi and I had our “ah-ha” moment, but it didn’t happen as a result of hypnotherapy itself per se. Rather, the “ah-ha” happened when we traveled abroad and started seeing that the healers who were having the most success at treating clients were always producing a trance state in one way or another. These healers were not doing hypnotherapy in the Western sense of things though. They were using the natural human technology, the body, to put the mind into a trance. It was around this time that we moved to Mexico permanently and our hypnotherapy certification, which is a very English-centric practice involving a very specific choice of words to guide people into a trance state, became obsolete. We did an internship with a curandera for several years to learn how to administer temazcales (ceremonial sweat lodge treatments) as medicine and about a year into our studies with her, we started taking weekly doses of Sapito and Hapé / Rapé along with Kambo at least once a month. Temazcal treatment by itself induces a trance state, but the sacred medicines took trance step even further with plant and animal medicines that could heal the body with wisdom…indeed a type of wisdom that the body takes in and can translate into words that our logical mind can understand if we’re open to it. Later, we worked with Ayahuasca and psilocybin as well as San Pedro among other things. The curandera didn’t speak a word of English and Lydi and I were at the beginning of our Spanish studies so our work with her was communicated through gestures mostly and a slow, cursory understanding that happened as we began to understand Spanish. This was important because we learned more through the sacred medicines themselves and we had to take responsibility for the narrative and logic of what we were learning.
The temazcales are trance-inducing mind-body treatments that completely transformed our lives and our health profile. They had a powerful pain-relieving effect, but they also improved our energy levels considerably. When we began working with the sacred medicines consistently on a weekly or sometimes bi-weekly basis, big changes started to happen, but I was really critical of these medicines for a long time. Lydian and I worked with facilitated group treatments under the curandera and we had the opportunity to watch how these treatments changed the trajectory (or failed to do so at times) in other people outside of our family.
Studying the sacred medicines in an academic way like this was interesting for my logical mind and I would think “critically” about these medicines. I would say Lydian had a similar experience with the sacred medicines at this time in our lives though she was younger than me, of course, so her learning took place at a different “octave” than mine (having a lower and higher octave of learning has been useful to us). She thought the sacred medicines were interesting, but their actual utility in terms of healing wasn’t 100% clear to us yet. After all, these medicines clear away trauma in a way that’s permanent such that a person’s unconscious emotional triggers disappear completely. So as our triggers disappeared, we simply felt as though we’d never had them in the first place. So our practice was deceptive, in a way. We had a hard time seeing our own progress as we weren’t really tracking it at first and we didn’t have a model to guide us in terms of what we were doing. We couldn’t get past our own illusions to see how the healing worked for a long time.
It wasn’t until Lydian got married to a young man from Myanmar that we began to understand the real miracle of the sacred medicines. Lydian’s husband was a very traumatized young man at that time and when she first met him he was also addicted to drugs. He never revealed this to her but developed major depression during their first year together outside of Myanmar. In fact, he didn’t know that he was “addicted” to drugs because he didn’t know the word “addiction” in Burmese (there was no word in Burmese that was equivalent to the word “addiction”). The sacred medicines saved us many times over in various ways in terms of her relationship with this man she loved deeply and who also loved her deeply. These medicines have the power to untangle what’s tangled and unlock what’s hidden to reveal how to heal. But in our early days of working with these medicines, we went on trips as a passenger in these sacred vehicles. Later, we learned how to drive the vehicle according to the wisdom from our lineage, the family tree.
Our work with the sacred medicines presupposes that no one is ultimately guilty for their sins and that blame is a waste of energy. Blame is a bad habit that, until we get past it, it sucks our resources into it to our physical and emotional detriment. On the other hand, when you get into one of these sacred vehicles with the intention to find that for which you are responsible in terms of pain-point(s) you wish to resolve in your life or in your body, these medicines can take you somewhere important. The material for which you are to blame, the material for which you are personally responsible, is precisely where your personal power is located. Like a Harry-Potter-horcrux or any powerful, magical tool, what you unpack when you confront self-blame and personal responsibility is your source of power.
I believe now that we’re all here to heal something and that pain is a driving force that propels us to search and keep searching for a way to overcome that which holds us back. Lydi and I have made it our life’s work to seek out ways to heal, not just the mind and the body, but our relationships with other people, especially people in our family tree. As a general rule, we don’t heal our clients. We give our clients the tools they need to heal themselves. This work has shown us that we carry pain for ourselves and as a result of our own individual traumas, but also, people carry pain for loved ones or even their ancestors. Releasing one person’s pain heals the entire family system, but healing the ancestors is powerful work that impacts others who are still alive in the family tree.
I know that a lot of the readers who are reading this now will not engage deeply with this material to make it their mission in life to overcome pain. Rather, for a lot of readers, the goal is just to relieve pain so as to have a life that moves in the direction of their choosing. Our hope is that the medicines that we’ve presented here along with the models of pain will help people slowly, over time, release the pain permanently. Many of the sacred medicines can be microdosed and for those who are not inclined to work with these medicines out of a fear of self-confrontation or due to a strongly held principle against them, microdosing is a middle-ground. Both Lydian and I have overcome chronic pain using two very different strategies ultimately to do it: she had her way and I had mine. It is our belief that if people want to overcome chronic pain, they have to keep exploring new treatments until they find something that works…ideally a medicine that will do no harm (and possibly also provoke a healing response).
For those who wish to work with the sacred medicines hands-on to learn how to “drive the vehicle” (and not just ride through trips as a passenger), Lydi and I offer treatment options in Mexico ([email protected]) to provide the same or similar types of opportunities that we experienced under Karolina, the curandera.
As humans, we’re not supposed to be in pain all the time. Conventional medicine can’t address pain because conventional medicine is a profit-centric system that causes pain. It is a part of a way of approaching humanity and our lives on earth that doesn’t work very well in terms of the environment, family, stability and security, and in terms of pain relief. But those of us who are in pain all the time aren’t in a position to be agents of positive change for our families and for society unless we can be agents of positive change in our own lives. When one person overcomes their pain and heals from chronic pain, they become teachers who can teach other people how to do the same. It’s a meaningful endeavor to explore how to overcome your own pain and the journey you undertake to do it will be unique and filled with a special type of wisdom…your wisdom and the wisdom of your ancestors.
A New Perspective on Pain...
As Lydian and I were writing about pain, we noted that the scientific research focuses on specific pain conditions, some of which are labeled differently than they were 10 or 20 years ago. So a person who was diagnosed with rheumatism or rheumatoid arthritis might receive a diagnosis of fibromyalgia or Reiter’s syndrome today. Or someone who was diagnosed several years ago with chronic fatigue syndrome might generally refer to their chronic state of pain and fatigue as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or ME/CFS. By changing the diagnostic labels on certain diseases, Big Pharma can censor information without directly censoring it. Changing the name of a disease creates resistance in terms of patients being able to find certain types of scientific information to cure their disease. Also, most patients are taught to believe that their chronic pain condition is unique according to the label, the diagnosis, given by a doctor and that the pills or surgeries that will work to treat these pain conditions are specific to the diagnosis. But pain doesn’t actually work that way according to the physiology of our bodies. All of the categories and labels are often a terrible distraction that prevents people from finding treatments that would work to get rid of chronic pain.Some people with diabetic neuropathy may find that they respond very well to fibromyalgia treatments for example and vice versa even though some scientists say that these two disease states are very different physiologically. Are they? Yes and no. It depends. Indeed, there’s a strong and compelling (also fascinating) relationship between out-of-control blood sugar levels and pain in the body. It doesn’t matter if you’re diabetic or if your body just sometimes goes into a state of high blood sugar, perhaps because you eat a lot of refined sugars, or if you’ve been diagnosed with “pre-diabetes” or diabetes of any type (type 1, type 2, type 3). Blood sugar levels are variable for most of us and chronic pain conditions of all kinds can be responsive to treatments like Kudzu / pueraria lobata or Bitter Melon / Momordica charantia to reduce blood sugar levels in order to reduce pain. It doesn’t matter if you’re diabetic, pre-diabetic, or just stressed out in a way that causes your blood sugar to periodically spike. These medicines can be beneficial to almost everyone as herbal remedies for chronic pain.
Though it might be tempting for you to simply look up specific types of chronic pain and treatments recommended for a specific diagnosis, in fact, Lydian and I wrote about pain at AliveNHealthy to help people look at their chronic pain in a new way and to be able to understand chronic pain more comprehensively without the diagnostic labels. So we sometimes talk about ways to treat diabetic neuropathy and low back pain in articles about fibromyalgia, for example. We didn’t just spin the scientific research and compile it without thinking critically about it. Medicine, after all, was meant to be administered as an art-form, but the science can be helpful, if not incredibly clarifying.
Lydian and I are medical intuitives and we work with Guides, but we are also firmly entrenched in the scientific data that either supports or refutes what we’re told in dreams or during sessions with the sacred indigenous medicines in regard to client health. She and I believe that everyone has a guide who can help them with health issues like chronic pain, so we recommend that you read content about pain and pain relief -- like the articles we've written on AliveNHealthy -- before going to bed at night to seed new thoughts into what might be causing your chronic pain, root causes, etc., and what might work best to treat this chronic pain. Record your dreams and talk to someone who understands dreamwork if you are having trouble interpreting them. Lydi and I also acknowledge that once a person develops chronic pain, it can be difficult to tap into intuition as the body is in pain and intuition comes from our physical bodies. Often, trauma is the message that comes in dreams for patients with chronic pain and this material is past-tense and fearful, thus the need for another living human who can watch over the process of healing and always look for hope and pathways through life and death as medicine is the bridge between these states – that being said, the delineating between life and death is often not as black and white as most people think. Many people who have living bodies in today’s world are not technically “alive”.
As such, it can be extremely helpful to have someone who becomes an expert on chronic pain on your behalf, ideally a family member or a very close friend. Chronic pain is often associated with depression or anxiety and other types of emotional disturbances because it’s hard to live in a body that is in chronic pain. You need someone to counsel you through episodes of chronic pain and provide hope and encouragement to get through it. Disillusionment is a part of the process of releasing pain. Our goal here is to provide the reader with ways to cure the underlying cause of chronic pain while simultaneously reducing the chronic pain to manageable levels, or getting rid of the chronic pain daily such that the patient begins to feel a sense of control.
In summary, we wrote the content on this website to put patients in the driver’s seat of their own vehicle so that they can steer the healing journey by being equipped with information. The information that we provide here is valuable. We’ve used it ourselves and our health coaching clients and our guests at Medicinas Sagradas in Mexico have used this information with success. But the real magic happens when a person is equipped with information and then they use their intuition to guide them on the information that feels appropriate to them. Again, many people who have a chronic pain condition are regularly “thrown off course” in terms of that healing journey when pain levels get too high, if they become addicted to opioid drugs, or if they’re afflicted with emotional issues as a result of the chronic pain, it can be hard to get back on a path that feels productive in terms of pain relief (sans the drugs / meds). But loved ones who are able to study the material and then use it intuitively to heal chronic pain in another person can use our artilces to push through all of the noise that exists online to find treatments that actually relieve pain and, over the course time, release the underlying cause.
Healing is always a journey and it is always incredibly meaningful once the journey culminates in success. Such a meaningful journey takes time, but pain does not have to follow you the entire way if sufferers begin to pay attention to themselves rather than using treatments solely to escape from the responsibility to pay attention to their physical bodies and their emotions. When you use treatments that we describe on this website to gain relief from pain, show gratitude to your body and to the Powers That Be according to whatever religion you follow by sprinkling a bit of sacred, wild Tobacco on the ground or burning it, as the ancestors and the guides find the smell of wild tobacco to be incredibly pleasing. Tobacco is one of the oldest offerings on earth that’s been used for centuries to say “Thank You” to the healing forces that exist to help us become beings of Joy rather than beings that are in pain all the time. If you are Christian, burn frankincense resin and myrrh or choose another appropriate offering to the spiritual forces that heal us. The major religions all have sacred offerings that are given to say, “Thank You” when something goes right with the healing process and it’s important that those with chronic pain begin to connect spirit and body through some small ritual when there are moments of success. To give an offering, after all, is like an earmark that can remind you through your own personal experience that you had a good day or a good hour last week such that when your chronic pain flares up, you can remember the moment of the offering and maintain a foothold with your process. When pain flares up, it can be easy to forget that your pain has also gone away at times. A flare-up is disillusioning and it can crush your hope. Give offerings of gratitude, but if you have trouble with the idea that humans have a spirit, give offerings just to remind yourself that you had a good day…like a breadcrumb trail of memories of times when your pain was under control. The goal of pain control is not to ignore the pain and push through it, but to understand it and learn to work with it so that your body can communicate with you more fluently, without becoming tense and pained, and so that you can be guided by your own spiritual beliefs without being bogged down by pain. We are not spirits with bodies. The mind is not separate from the body. The body IS the mind. Our bodies are a manifestation of Spirit. Our bodies are sacred and for those who are in chronic pain, this knowledge is deep in the fiber of our being in that a day without physical pain is a sacred day. In the modern world, we are not taught that medicine is the bridge between life and death but rather that medicine is a way to ignore or overcome death and states of dying. Our articles are very scientific in terms of our orientation, but a pile of scientific data is useless until a human being can animate that data and feel a direction to take with it based on their own personal cosmology. So in closing, we hope our website can help you locate a path toward healing and the release of pain. Give thanks for small successes and have hope. Keep a journal so that you can see your own progress over time. The body was designed to heal itself when given the proper tools, especially when given hope.
