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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 n/a[/i] [br]Book title: Get Rid Of The Pain In Your Butt Now! Chapter 6 - Emotional Awareness It is crucial that if your intention is to heal, to have your body be pain free, that you now begin to become aware of your external stressors, internal stressors and when and where you feel physical pain. Start becoming aware of the different emotional stimuli that are going on in your life situations. Go back over your personal Journey of Pain exercise that you completed in Chapter 3. Think back to what was happening in your life when you noted these particular pain sensations. Were there stressful career situations that you were involved in or were you going through a financial or relationship crisis? You may now begin to realize that you are a chronic worrier, a perfectionist, or someone who is driven to compete, succeed and be the best at whatever you do. Take your time with this exercise, really put your heart and soul into it. Make some specific observations about what was happening in your life and in your thought processes that were occurring at the same time you were feeling pain. The benefits of this awareness exercise will begin to be felt in your body immediately. As you begin to realize how you are being emotionally you are beginning to gain valuable wisdom about your bodymind and how it reacts. This emotional understanding and awareness that you are developing by this new insight is the knowledge and information that you will use to completely heal your pain disorder. Realize that how you are being emotionally is not right or wrong---It just is how you are being emotionally. Being aware of how your unique personality interacts within stressful life situations continues the healing process for you. Emotions are energy. Each emotion is a physical experience in your body. These experiences are real physical sensations. Painful sensations are produced when emotional energy is stored, blocked and trapped in our body. This emotional energy can be disguised as anger, jealousy, resentment, greed, worry and other traits unique to your personality. Think back to a time when you were having a very intense, negative emotional experience such as anger. What were your physical sensations? Were you tight and tense in your body or were you relaxed and peaceful? Was your breathing full and deep or short and shallow? What particular physical sensations were you feeling? Did you experience tingling going down your leg or did you have some tightness in your lower back or neck? Really get into this moment and remember what and where you were feeling sensations. What were you thinking about? Were they positive thoughts or negative? Were the thoughts taking you back into your past or were they taking you into an imaginary future event? What emotion do you think is acting out here? Is it resentment, frustration, guilt, jealousy? Identify what physical sensations you are feeling in your body and where you are feeling them. What was your thought process during this experience and what emotions were you generating? Were you denying or avoiding these feelings with an activity or some thought pattern? This is the process of emotional Get Rid Of The Pain In Your Butt NOW! 58 awareness. When you do this you are becoming aware of the dynamics of emotional energy in your bodymind. There are five parts to this awareness. External Life Situation Inner Thought Process Emotion or Feeling Physical Sensation Repression Activity Repression is the action you took instead of feeling the emotion. Meaning if your emotion was anger you may have started screaming at someone. If you were thoroughly feeling frustrated you may have started eating or drinking obsessively. If you were feeling despair you may have decided to dive into your work intensely focusing on a project. Whatever the activity, it’s purpose is enabling you to ignore, deny, resist or repress the emotion instead of experiencing it. Becoming acutely aware of your individual process continues the path of healing your physical pain. This is the part that I don’t like. I don’t want to focus on all this emotional stuff? You must ask yourself, do you really want to heal? Not just have someone fix the problem! Do you really want to get rid of your physical pain for good? Yes, I really do. The healing process continues by becoming aware of who you are being, how you are behaving and why you are reacting the way you do. You are not going to be asked to re-live some dramatic trauma. Just start to observe yourself right now, not in the past, and not imagining some future outcome, just watch yourself now and when you feel painful sensations in your body just observe what you are thinking about and how you are feeling. This is the emotional awareness that is needed to end the pain disorder. When you do this you are learning to be the Observer, (you “watch”, “listen” and “feel” what is happening in your bodymind.) You are learning to recognize that there are physical pain disorders that play a psychological part in your bodymind. People who are not aware of this or choose not to accept this fact will remain in physical pain. This is so crucial that it is worth repeating. You are now aware that there are physical pain disorders that play an emotional energy role in your bodymind. And since you are aware of and accept this fact you are continuing on the healing path and the elimination of pain. The alternative to being aware of your emotional dynamics is to continue in pain, to continue to live your life unconsciously diverting your attention to more thoughts, ideas, and activities like workaholism, judging, drinking, shopping or television. These thought processes and activities become the compulsive way you live your life. You have learned to avoid, resist, deny, and Get Rid Of The Pain In Your Butt NOW! 60 suppress your feelings. This is the dis-ease that we are creating that makes us unbalanced, that causes the blocks, the stuck-ness, that ignites our system to go haywire, to misfire in its communication and result in pain. Psychologists label this avoidance of emotions as a defense mechanism. You can learn to identify them in yourself and stop the repressing patterns. Many people think that the problem is with external stresses---job, spouse, house, and friends, so they change careers, move to a different part of the country or find a new mate. Changing your life situation does not change the emotional dynamics that are causing the physical pain. It is internal stressors or our own unique personalities and how they react to these outside stresses that attribute to the creation of tension. Traits such as perfectionism, conscientiousness, the need to please others, controlling attitudes, and the need to excel and be highly competitive are some of these personal qualities. Quite often this type of personality will put more pressure on them self to perform than others would expect of them. Many people have stressful jobs and life situations, but the individual who then strives to be the best, perform perfectly, impress others and be overly conscientious of how others perceive them while at the same time resisting or denying that this behavior is even taking place within them are generating an enormous amount of internal tension that is becoming stuck, blocked and stored through repression. Read through the following examples of ways that people avoid experiencing their emotions. Some you will recognize as familiar patterns in yourself, others you may recognize as patterns in people that you know. They both offer a perspective that can be applied to help heal. Low Self Worth Feelings of inferiority or low self worth are deeply hidden in many people. These feelings reveal themselves in our behavior and generally invoke action that over compensate for how we truly feel about ourselves. If we feel weak, we act strong, if we feel our life is out of control, we take actions to control other people and situations. The need for many people to be liked and achieve success is a reflection of low self worth. When you feel worthless, you are fearful of your life. This fear continually has you trying to control your life as you think it needs to be. Dr. Sarno found in patients with TMS that they had the feeling that they had to accomplish something significant or live up to some ideal role such as being the best parent, student or employee. Take a moment now to make some notes on your own self worth. Do you try to impress or prove yourself to others? Do you attempt to control other people or situations? What is driving your need to succeed? If you find that you can relate to some of these personality characteristics, take the time now to replay a situation in your life where you exhibited these qualities. When replaying this experience, can you feel painful body sensations? If so, where? What were you thinking about? This type of emotional awareness is the healing path to the elimination of pain. Low self worth is believed by many mental health professionals to be the core cause of anger. Anger Beneath every experience of anger is a large pile of emotional experiences. Anger is absolute frustration that you are not able to arrange your life experiences or others, as you would like to. We get angry for other reasons as well. Anything that makes us anxious will tend to evolve into anger. Anger is always generated when you are resisting what is happening in your life. Most people who have angry outburst think that they are expressing or experiencing their anger. The outburst of slamming doors, yelling and stomping is not experiencing the emotion of anger. These activities are the defense mechanism that is repressing the feeling. Instead of really experiencing the feeling you divert your energy to an angry outburst allowing the emotion (energy) to be stuck, create a blockage or be stored in the tissues of your muscles and nerves. This repressed energy now goes to work dynamically manifesting the biochemical process in your body that results in physical pain. Angry Outburst The process would go something like this example. You are at home working on an important project that is due the following morning. Your children are arguing and you ask them to please stop. The arguing continues and you are beginning to become frustrated. You start thinking about how you cannot focus as intently as you would like and your mind starts to visualize what will happen if you turn in a less than perfect project. “I’ll look like a fool if this is not completed”, “These kids are driving me nuts, why don’t they realize how important this project is to me?” “Ouch, here comes my sciatica pain again.” STOP Let’s take a look at where we are in this example. The emotion that is being created is anger. The accompanying thoughts are “I’ll look like a fool” and “Don’t the kids understand how important this is to me.” The physical sensation is sciatica pain. This is the emotional awareness process. Now we must experience the emotion of anger-really feel it. So what happens next? You shove your project aside and stand up feeling tense, the sciatica running down your leg. You take a quick breath and start yelling, “I told you kids to quit arguing, now stop it or else”. You may stomp off now or slam a door and yell again, right? Something like this? Your definitely upset, tense, thinking angry thoughts, and showing your anger by yelling, stomping and slamming doors. You just experienced your anger, right? WRONG! You did not just feel the emotion of anger. You just experienced an Angry Outburst. You acted out your anger. Instead of experiencing or feeling your emotion of anger you actually repressed the feeling and went to your defense mechanism of acting out the anger by yelling, stomping and slamming doors. This is the emotional dynamic that is causing your pain. You repressed the emotion of anger and acted out the experience instead of feeling the anger. Anger Suppression You may not even experience the angry outburst. You may just internalize the emotion. Consider the following example. Your preparing to run a very important race-you are shooting for a PR-you have some worries about your training and are becoming anxious, as you hope everything will turn out as you want, however, you are also resentful of the challenges that you are contending with in your life situations. You are working overtime at your job because your wife is having an abnormal pregnancy and is not able to work. This means less time to train. You are also losing sleep helping to take care of your other child and you are rearranging your schedule to meet everyone’s needs. What is happening here internally with your emotions? You can’t get angry with your child for being sick. You cannot resent your spouse for her medical condition. You love them both. You are being a good father, husband, and employee. And you are determined to run a perfect race. This example demonstrates that we have feelings of anxiety, frustration, and resentment, leading to anger and then guilt if we were to get angry. There is no question though that we are really frustrated that our life is not going the way we want. And since you are not able to control many of the events—you internalize the feelings. You have learned to repress your emotions entirely and you may be unaware that you are even doing it in many situations. This internalization of feelings both consciously and subconsciously stimulates the “tension”, initiating the biochemical processes that create the physical pain sensations we are experiencing. Take a few moments to reflect on your personal situations and make note of what frustrates you. Do you resent your job? Are you angry at your bank account? Do you try to control people in your life and then become frustrated when you can’t? Have you experienced anger at a situation and then felt guilty about being angry? Do you internalize your feelings as a way of repression? Do you realize that having an angry outburst is not experiencing but actually is the way that you avoid, deny and resist your feelings? When you think about these situations make a note of painful sensations you feel and where they are located in your body. Also, make it a habit to start asking yourself how you feel or what am I feeling? Then be aware of the feedback you receive from asking these questions. Workaholism Workaholism is an activity that is used to flee from your emotions. It has become a drug that can mask the pain of experiencing your feelings. This activity is appealing to you because it allows you to focus on work, something other than what you are feeling inside. A workaholic will move from project to project, job to job, career to career with the habitual fixation to accomplish things. Every project, job or career has the same urgency and importance. They serve the same function—to provide a way to avoid your emotions. Your focus is intently on accomplishing, you have no idea what you are feeling or what anyone around is feeling. You’re aware of others only as a means to help you accomplish more. However, this is only temporary. You may get satisfaction from finishing a project, but soon your compulsion sends you off to accomplish something else. You cannot stop because if you do you would have to feel what is urgently trying to get your attention—your emotions. It is easy to deny workaholism. You can justify your compulsive actions to yourself as just striving to be successful, not lazy or as being a responsible, conscientious provider for your family. Are you using work to avoid your emotions? Is your work more important than family and friends? Do you feel an urgency with every project or job your involved in? Do you know other people who demonstrate workaholic characteristics? Listen and feel your answers to these questions. Try not to dismiss this as a repression activity to easily. Perfectionism Perfectionism is a thought process that your life is not perfect. It is a compulsive mind activity that diverts your attention away from emotions. This avoidance leads to repetitive organizing, constant controlling and other obsessive work task. It is a mind activity that continually judges your circumstances and those around you to be imperfect. It becomes compulsive because the more you judge yourself and others to be imperfect the more imperfections you find. Perfectionism is an ideal example of resisting the present moment. Instead of accepting your life, where you are right now, your mind takes you to an imaginary future- a future where everything is perfect. This perfect future never arrives, as the perfectionism cycle never stops. Neither do your emotions, they continue to be felt as physical pain. The pain continues because you continue to judge yourself and others, you try to control and manipulate circumstances, and you continue to resist the present moment. Being a perfectionist takes tons of energy away from you. You are giving your energy to a false thought process. This is energy that can be used to eliminate pain instead of avoiding emotions. Make a Not Perfect List. Include people, places and things. For example, my husband’s physical appearance; My son’s grades; My job; My financial situation; Notice what physical sensations you feel and where when you really think about these imperfections. Do you know other people who are perfectionist? What unique traits do they display? Ideal Role Playing Playing the role of the Perfect Father, Wife, Entrepreneur, Employee, or Athlete is another thought process that enables you to deny your feelings. By living life through your ideal role you strive to be perfect and control who you are and how others perceive you. You ignore your emotions and demonstrate behavior that you believe this ideal person would use. These roles originate from low self worth. When you feel worthless you are living in fear. To avoid those feelings you create the ideal role. These roles allow you to be safe and secure. If you are playing these roles you do not have to feel your true emotions. The Ideal keeps you insulated from exposing your true feelings to your self and to others. The true emotions that are striving to be expressed in you are easily shielded, because the Ideal would never have these particular feelings. When someone plays the Ideal they are losing a tremendous amount of energy. They are using this energy to appear to be someone that they are not. They are using energy to deny their emotions. What ideal roles have you created? Super Parent? Amazing Business Person? Best Husband? Elite Athlete? Ask your self why you created this ideal role? To be: Powerful? Admired? Respected? Have Control? Hide My Fear? Ask yourself if the Ideal is working? Does it allow you to be: Admired? Powerful? Have Control? Hide Fear? Ask yourself if you are being honest with yourself when playing the ideal role? Are you avoiding your emotions by being this Ideal? Judging Judging other people and things is a mental activity that diverts your attention away from your emotions and onto something external. It is mental activity that is resisting the present moment. When you judge something you are giving that person or thing your energy. Judging others is a way to forget what you are feeling. It is an opportunity to impose your perfections and control over them. Judging is a complex thought process of avoiding characteristics in your self that you do not approve of. You become angry with someone else instead of yourself. You mock someone’s financial position instead of feeling your disappointment about your lack of money. Judging attempts to make you aware of your own issues that are unresolved but the action of judging prevents you from experiencing your emotions. It is a defense against fear and feeling the pain beneath the fear. Massive amounts of energy leave you when you judge something or someone. Remember a time when you judged someone? How they looked or acted? What were your thoughts? What were you saying about them? Is it a possibility that you possess the same characteristic that you were judging in someone else? Can you realize how judging diverts attention away from the present moment and who you are being? Do you see that judging is a way to resist what is happening in your life? Power-Manipulation-Control Striving to control, manipulate or demonstrate power over something or someone is a thought process that enables you to avoid your feelings. Instead of feeling your emotions, you choose to focus your energy on something or someone and you try to change them. When you do this you give your energy away to that person or thing. This type of mental activity depletes you of energy. The pursuit of power through manipulation and control creates tension, stress and anxiety because when you engage in these mental activities you are resisting what is. You are struggling to change some external dynamic. These struggles occur because you feel powerless and out of control. Instead of feeling or experiencing why you feel powerless you attempt to change all of these external things and people so that you can feel in control and powerful. These types of controlling behavior are ways to avoid fear and painful emotions and they require huge amounts of your energy to keep them going. This is energy that you could be using to eliminate your pain disorder. Do you attempt to control others? How do you demonstrate that you are powerful? Think about a time you were in a struggle with a co-worker or member of your family. Were you right and they wrong? Were you attached to the outcome? Did you need to prove you were right? What thoughts were you thinking during this struggle? Were you aware of your own energy/body during this episode? What happens when you withdraw your energy—your intention to control this other person? Waiting and Searching Waiting is a thought process that something or someone in the future is going to save you—make everything OK. Waiting is resisting what is happening now. You are saying that my life today is not OK, so I am going to search for someone or something to make everything OK. You are waiting for the perfect job or you are searching for the perfect mate. This mental process is allowing you to ignore the present moment. This waiting/searching puts your attention and your energy on something external in the future. The thought process is, I’m not OK today, but someday I will have the perfect job and then everything will be good. This dynamic is enabling you to ignore your feelings of low self worth, anger, and fear. You are giving your energy away to some perfect future while you wait and search. This search will never end because you are focusing your attention on something or someone external and in the future to fix your problems, instead of experiencing your emotions. Waiting and Searching is an exhaustive mental exercise that depletes you of energy. Make a list of what you are waiting for; Perfect Job; Financial Security; A New Mate. Are you searching for Fame, Respect or Power? What were your thoughts? Did you feel that the new job would make you feel better? More powerful, be respected, or have control? Was the new mate the answer to your problems? When starting a new search, were you excited and compulsive only then to be depleted once the search was over? Do you remember the physical sensations you were feeling in your body? In addition to these mental processes and emotional dynamics many people use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, shopping and exercise to avoid, ignore, deny and repress emotions. All of these activities can provide some temporary relief. These activities can be enjoyable in moderation. When they are continually used as a means of repression they can become compulsive and addictive. Inner tension is created as you avoid your emotions and put your attention instead on these outside activities. Grapping a drink, cigarette or buying stuff is usually a response to some disturbing feeling that we don’t know how or don’t want to deal with, so we get rid of it with ways that we know will work. Your feelings are striving to be expressed and you continue to disregard them. Your effort to avoid these emotional signals and the infinite flow of these signals to you is the beginning of your compulsions, obsessions and addictions. All obsessive-ness comes from this refusal, denial and avoidance to accept your emotions—that are desperately trying to be experienced. Whatever or whomever the addictive substance is-you are using it as a way to avoid your feelings. It appears to me that I do most of these “mental” processes sometime. So does everyone that I know. This seems normal. You’re right! It is considered normal because almost everyone is suffering from some kind of compulsive identification with thinking. We judge, we like, we dislike, we become angry and have an outburst, we try to control. We resist our life as it is now and go searching for something or someone to save us. This is the disease. We use our mind to go back into our past and dig up some hurt and then seek revenge. We resist what is happening now so we judge and use our mind to go into the future where the perfect job is waiting for us. Our mind creates endless conflicts and problems and then provides us with compulsive thought processes and activities to get rid of them. We resist and try to change what is happening now in the present moment, instead of accepting and experiencing what is occurring within our self. Observe your mind! See for yourself! Can you stop thinking? Can you stop judging? Can you stop the internal dialogue whenever you want? If your answer is no, then your mind is using you! Have you ever listened to the dialogue in your mind? The voice that comments, complains, judges, compares, dislikes, rewinds to the past, and then fast forwards to the future. You’re correct that this seems like normal behavior because almost everyone is doing it. This is what is causing our pain—insane, compulsive, unconscious, toxic, repetitive, energy draining mind activity. We are constantly directing our energy outwards towards external things and other people usually in an attempt to repress our own emotions. So we weaken our bodymind systems with this outward energy draining and then we cause havoc throughout our complex internal communication system by ignoring, denying, and avoiding our feelings. Our internal information signals, (energy) become stuck, stored, blocked and chronically dysfunctional in their ability to communicate properly throughout our system. Blood flow becomes restricted, less oxygen is flowing to our tissue and the result is physical pain, depression, and a feeling of energy-less-ness. As a result we become stuck in this compulsive cycle repeating the same old thought patterns, focusing on our injured bodies, listening to the past conditioning on physical dysfunctions and either waiting or searching for the miracle cure or doctor to fix us. Does this frighten you? Are you intimidated to know that your mind is using you? Or is it a relief to know that this insane, energy draining, unconscious, toxic mind activity is taking place and you can reverse it? Yes it is frightening and yes I think it is a relief to know that this is happening. How do I free myself from this energy draining mental activity? By freeing your self from your mind. By being “present, aware, and conscious”. By realizing that you are not your mind. You are not the perfectionist, judger, controller and ideal role player. These are thought processes that your mind is using to control you! Your mind is using you because you are completely identified with your thoughts, mental processes, and mind activities. Take some time now to digest this information. Let it really sink in. You free yourself from this insane, unconscious, energy draining, pain causing madness and heal your body by being conscious present and aware. [/quote]   Check here to include your profile signature.