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Screensize: 640 x 480 800 x 600 1024 x 768 1280 x 1024 UserName: Password: Format Mode: Basic  Help  Prompt  Format: Font Andale Mono Arial Arial Black Book Antiqua Century Gothic Comic Sans MS Courier New Georgia Impact Lucida Console Script MT Bold Stencil Tahoma Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana   Size 1 2 3 4 5 6   Color Black Red Yellow Pink Green Orange Purple Blue Beige Brown Teal Navy Maroon LimeGreen Message: * HTML is OFF * Forum Code is ON Smilies [quote][i]Originally posted by moose1[/i] [br]All, Recently Baseball posted some comments about checking in on the board and offering some advice to those who may be new to TMS, and also just giving back a little to this forum. I agree. I'm totally guilty of blowing off the board for the past few months and thought I'd offer my two cents. This place was (and is) an immense source of inspiration and support for people like myself who got their ass kicked by TMS for a LONG time. I’m especially thankful to Dave for working so hard moderating...he does a truly commendable job always and without fail. For people suffering, I have a few suggestions based upon my experience with The Beast. One is that when you examine the possible causes of your anger, you need to be excruciatingly honest with yourself, and this can be very hard. All the really, really ugly stuff needs to be looked at in the bright lights, otherwise it won't work. You have to stop lying to yourself...TMS is doing that for you anyway. That's part of why it took me three years to finally get it to sink in on a subconscious, learning level. And I think it's risky to depend too much on other people to accomplish this. No one knows you like you do...it just takes A LOT of work...and guts...to get to know yourself to the degree that you need in order for the "cure" to take. Once you realize that Yeah, there's some pretty evil crap down there, and then understand that EVERYONE else has the SAME EXACT type of crap down there too, things begin to change. I saw three shrinks during my TMS battle. I learned a few things, but they were all totally useless in helping me to get to know myself in the way I needed to. Only I could do that. Another thing that helped me: One day I sat down and wrote about a half page "time line" of all my symptoms. I noted when this stuff started (roughly), and/or got markedly worse, and what was going on in my life when it did. It's not that I hadn't done this in my head a million times before, but for some reason putting it on paper, looking at it there, THEN thinking about it made me realize that all my symptoms couldn't possibly be anything BUT some kind of anger-based, psychologically-induced lie that my brain was using. Try it. It doesn’t take too long. Another thing was meditation. I’m not here to evangelize about meditation, but I am finding it to be immensely helpful, and I’m still a total novice at it. In fact, the only reason I tried meditation was because I thought that if I sat quietly for a few minutes I might be able to bring a little more concentration to bear on the Sarno stuff...as in thinking about the sources of anger as well as talking to what I now refer to as my "inner bastard", that part of my mind that was responsible for this whole mess in the first place. I didn’t begin meditation to relax or chill out. I just needed to sit still for a few minutes and think. So I would sit for about 10 minutes a day, and for about half that time I would do the TMS stuff and for the other half I would just breathe. They say meditation is simple but not easy. Man, is that an understatement. As a 38 year old American male, I've been trained from birth to never sit still, never shut the hell up, and never, EVER think about why I'm so totally screwed up emotionally. Well I did it anyway and it has paid off. Meditation, practiced diligently and with discipline...even 10 minutes a day...has allowed me to bring focus to the TMS stuff, and a whole lot more. Mindfulness meditation, in a lot of ways, has the same goals as Sarno’s approach: clearing your mind of all the lies and illusions generated by your conscious and unconscious reaction to living in our society, and really looking for some valid, accurate information. Hell knows you ain’t gonna get it from watching TV or listening to your local orthopedist. It's all about accurate thinking, and however you achieve it is beside the point. If meditation didn’t work for me but hanging upside down from a tree branch in my backyard wearing a codpiece did, I would hang upside down from a tree branch in my backyard wearing a codpiece. The means doesn’t matter, only the ends. And once you get just a little glimpse behind that curtain of lies and you see that little nugget of truth sitting there waving at you in the distance, the framework upon which stuff like TMS is built begins to fail and crumble like a house of cards. And I’m not kidding. TMS seems like an omnipotent beast, but the truth is that it’s a gigantic, steaming pile of horse turd on a paper plate, balanced on a toothpick. So, getting to some accurate information and thinking, backed up by experiencing it first hand, is what you need. It’s really hard and you have to do it over and over again from time to time, but it’s worth it. Best of luck. Moose1 [/quote]   Check here to include your profile signature.