Living Pain Free: How to Move and Release Emotions

Do you want to be pain free?  We feel pain in all areas of our lives.  We feel physical pain, most frequently in our necks, backs, hips, joints and belly.  We feel emotional pain that shows up as anything from grief, sadness, anger and shame to anxiety and depression.  We feel mental pain in the form of abusive self talk or ruminating, incessant thoughts.  We feel spiritual pain, wondering where God is, what this is all about, why are we here and who am I?  Can you imagine relieving all of this pain inside of you?  My purpose is to hold people in their pain (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual) until it RELEASES.  The reason we suffer is because we HOLD our pain, instead of going into it and allowing it to move through us without resistance.

What is Suffering?

What is suffering? Suffering is the extended experience of pain or distress over time. Many of my clients come in with pain patterns in their bodies that they just cannot seem to get figured out. They have seen numerous doctors, and no one can find anything wrong. Yet they are in extreme pain? How can this be?

How can someone be in extreme pain with no discoverable findings of a diagnosis of the pain problem?

Because of this equation:

Pain + resistance = suffering

We know what pain is. It’s that annoying, nagging, irritation that just doesn’t go away. That point of pressure that doesn’t leave you alone. The burning, stinging, aching, distracting feeling inside always yelling at you, “OUCH, I AM HERE!”

So what is resistance?

Resistance is tricky. Resistance is the thing that says, “Look! Pain! Pay attention to the pain! Ouch, ouch, ouch!”

Resistance is the contraction or restriction inside of us.  It is the part of us that doesn’t want to deal with reality, that tries to block out anything that hurts or causes pain.  When we have a joint injury, the muscle tissues tighten down around the joint to “protect” it, but it usually ends up causing just as much pain, and even more damage to the body.  We are the same with our emotions.  A very common form of resistance is to “shut down” or withdraw from people when we feel rejected by them.  We go looking for love, then we don’t get it, then we shut ourselves down to protect ourselves from getting hurt again by doing the thing that hurt us in the first place: rejecting being loved.

2 Examples for Resistance

Here is an example of resistance:
A woman is loud, boisterous, and seeks a lot of attention.  When she gets it, she doesn’t like it and doesn’t know what to do with it.  Her internal conversation says, “I am so annoying, people don’t like me.”  Yet, she continues to do loud, attention seeking behavior because that is what she learned works to get the love she needs!  She is reinforcing her story that she is annoying by being annoying to get love!  Instead of facing her internal conversation that is hurting her (which could be anything, for example: I’m not lovable or worthy of love), she is in resistance to this internal conversation.  If she faced it, she would feel the pain of the realization that she thinks she is unlovable or unworthy of love, but then she would be able to change it with that awareness.  Being in resistance to it actually keeps it going.

Here is another example of resistance:
A man learns that the best way to survive in childhood is to hide.  If he hides, he wont get seen, and therefore, wont get in trouble.  As an adult, he could easily slide through a crowd unnoticed.  This is the wallflower, or the man that no one notices.  This man has an internal conversation that no one sees him or hears him, which makes him feel unloved.  Yet, when he walks into a room, he literally disappears because he has skillfully learned how to do this!  The resistance is caused by him feeling that others dont want to see him, and he is unaware that he is skillful at hiding (he has practiced all those years!)

Resistance is very often UNCONSCIOUS, meaning, we are not consciously aware of it!  Yet, it is there to protect us.  It is there to help us avoid painful feelings and memories.

In the case of the woman, she was seeking love, and got it by screaming for it!  In the case of the man, he wanted love, but was afraid of the pain that came from being seen, and so learned how to hide, even when standing right in front of someone.  These protections or resistance provided safety for these people growing up.  Yet, they caused a lot of pain then and still do now. 

The protection says to the woman “be loud” and to the man “hide.”  Yet, the resistance says to the man, “no one loves me because no one sees or hears me,” and the resistance says to the woman, “no one loves me  because I am so loud and annoying.”

It’s kind of funny when you break it down like this!  When you can laugh at your own limitations and resistance is when you are able to set yourself free!

What we resist persists.  If someone resists being loved because it causes too much pain, they will continue to do the unhealthy behavior that doesn’t work in order to avoid the pain that comes with intimacy.  That thing that we are trying to hard to avoid, keeps coming back to haunt us.  We want to STOP feeling pain, so we avoid the pain.  But by avoiding the pain, and not actually dealing with it, we actually keep it going.  This is resistance.  Often, it is followed or accompanied with denial.  We deny the fact that we feel pain.  We imagine or tell ourselves that someone who hurt us is “dead” when they are not.  We ignore the knee pain until we cannot walk.  We deny the fact that we are drinking every day or overeating, gaining weight and becoming sick, until we end up in the hospital from making our bodies toxic.

What we focus on expands.  When you focus on your physical pain patterns, you don’t need to focus on the painful, unconscious or repressed negative emotions and thoughts about yourself.  So, the resistance keeps them hidden, and keeps you distracted by focusing you on your pain.

How You Protect or Distract Yourself from Negative Emotions to Become Pain Free

What if the pain is actually the distraction that is keeping you from feeling your “negative” feelings and emotions?

How would that work?

Here is an example:

I know someone who every time he starts to experience a painful emotion, begins having incredibly challenging, stinging, burning, throbbing, contracting neck pain and tension.  Suddenly, there is an extreme amount of PAIN, but the EMOTION is GONE.  It’s as if the physical pain of the body soaks up the emotional pain.

The physical pain itself becomes such a nuisance and distraction, that he doesn’t actually have to deal with the painful emotions at all!  The only thing he can focus on is the extremely unbearable, uncomfortable pain.  So, instead of saying, “hmmm… which uncomfortable feelings were those that I don’t want to deal with,” he thinks, “I better not forget my cushion for the long car ride,” or “I need to sleep with a pillow under my legs in a specific way” in order to keep the “physical” pain away.

Needless to say, as he processes more and more of the emotional pain and becomes more aware of the unconscious thoughts and feelings, the physical pain lessens.  Wonderfully enough, as this happens, his ability to experience joy and life also increases.

I know another person who gets this same stabbing pain.  He happens to have herniated discs, so if he wanted to blame the pain on “physical symptoms” he easily could!  Instead, he does what I recommend.  He sits with his pain.  He expressed himself.  He communicates his discomfort.  I support him by being present with him and giving him psychic feedback on what I feel in his body.  He goes into it. He allows himself to feel it.  When he does this, and clears it, the pain goes away.

You can do this too!

Why People Get Long-Term Chronic Pain

Cavemen.  

Do you want to know WHY people get LONG TERM (CHRONIC) PAIN? Click To Tweet

How to Stop Moving Creates Physical Pain

For 10 million years, we didn’t have AC, or cars, or WIFI or grocery stores.  We lived in small, mobile communities (of 50-500), and we depended on each other for survival.  When it got freezing cold, we would stop moving.  We would all huddle together in a hut, or a cave.

(Can you imagine huddling together with your relatives in a small space for DAYS at a time?  Think about Christmas and how hard those few days can be!)

In order to actually survive sitting next to your parents and siblings, cousins and other family for days, while you try not to freeze to death, your body does this amazing thing.

It goes into a low grade depression.  Pretty smart.  

That way you don’t kill your sister.  You just don’t have the energy or the motivation to do it.

The reason this happens is because your body is STORING ENERGY to survive the freeze.  There is no food, and there might not be any for a while.  So, your body goes into a low grade depression, and starts looking for high fat, high calorie content foods in order to survive.  Another amazing thing it does to conserve energy is that is STOPS REPAIRING the body.  So, if you had an injury, your body would just wait to repair it.  The only thing your body uses energy for is to shiver to keep warm (as to not die).

How does your body know when it’s freezing and to do this in order to not die?

If you said, “because it’s cold” you are wrong.  It actually has NOTHING to do with your 5 senses (or even your mind) seeing snow, feeling cold, or anything like that.  On a physiological level, the body knows you are freezing to death because you STOPPED MOVING.

Why am I telling you this story?

Because you have pain, or you know someone who has pain, because they STOPPED MOVING.

The body has gone into a protection mode.  It has stopped repairing itself.  For cavemen, even if you broke the MOST PAINFUL and challenging bone in the human body to repair, the femur bone in the leg, it would take 6 weeks to heal it.  6 weeks and you would be pain free.

So, why do people get back pain and neck pain and shoulder and hip pain for more than 6 weeks?  Sometimes, people get pain for YEARS!  WHY?

Well, in our culture, we believe it is because we DID SOMETHING to it.

But no, it takes about 6 weeks for the body to repair itself.

There are very few things in the body that can not be repaired, restored or replaced. Click To Tweet

The body actually replaces EVERY SINGLE CELL IN THE BODY every 7 years.  Most of the cells in the body are repaired daily, if not hourly.

SO WHY DO WE HAVE PAIN FOR YEARS?

It makes no sense logically.

If you didn’t DO anything to hurt it (Like, oh, my back went out because I picked up the cat litter), and you aren’t FREEZING to death in winter anymore, because we have central air/heating, and you aren’t STARVING to death anymore because we have grocery stores… then why do we have pain?

1) We stopped moving.  

We come home, we sit on the couch, we drive to the store, we go to the fridge, the food is there.  We don’t have to HUNT or GATHER.  We don’t have to even walk!  SOME people exercise consciously for an hour a day.  Thank god.  Too many people avoid it completely.  Many of those people still get pain though, why?

This brings me to the second reason why we have chronic pain

How Tension Creates Physical Pain

 2) Tension.

What do I mean by tension?  I mean, any mental stress, mental pressure, or repressed painful emotional state.  I mean, anything that makes you think, “Oh god, that’s coming and I’m not prepared for it.”  Tension has so many different components to it.  It could also mean mental stress from a personality trait, like perfectionism, competition, or high performance.

If you experience an inability to cope with your internal dialogue (or even worse, you have repressed your internal dialogue) this can lead to extreme tension and anxiety.

#1 Anxiety

What is anxiety?

My definition of anxiety is knowing there are feelings, but not knowing which ones you are feeling so you shove them all down below the surface and don’t deal with any of them.  John Sarno’s non-psychological definition is anything that is scary that’s not here yet, or anything you ANTICIPATE could go wrong.  The google definition is “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.”  This is something only humans do (to our knowledge).  To think about what COULD happen before it does.  It’s a pretty cool trick, actually, to be able to logically think out everything that could happen.

The problem is that the brain is wired for the WORST CASE SCENARIO.  Remember, we were cavemen for 10 million years.  So… planning and preparing for the worst case scenario kept you alive.

#2 Stress

Our brains haven’t caught up yet.  The brain is still preparing for the absolute worst case scenario to happen.  When we do this, we are creating stress or tension.

Guess where you hold that stress, tension, anxiety and FEAR about what could possibly happen??

You got it, in the body.

#3 Connection/Interactive With Each Other

So, cavemen actually WALKED all day.  They foraged for food, chased squirrels and rabbits and occasionally plotted, planned and executed killing a mammoth.  When they weren’t doing this, they were PLAYING GAMES with each other.  They were entertaining each other.  There were no TVs or Cell phones or computers.  They interacted with each other.

#4 Genetically Not Naturally Grown Food

(There is a whole other component to this BODY PAIN aspect that I am not even touching in this already long article, and that is that they ate FRESH, LIVE (meaning local, just picked) FOOD most of the time without a way to refrigerate the food, AND they experienced COMMUNITY and LEISURE and PLAY in almost ALL of the time that they weren’t looking for or preparing food.  We, in no way, live like this today.  There is evidence forming to suggest that the lack in our current culture of these things alone could also cause body pain and illness!!)

For the purpose of this article, we are sticking to MOVEMENT and RELEASE OF TENSION as the treatment for healing body pain.

How Heather Experienced This

“You don’t believe it’s true until it happens to you.”

I can attest to these things because I have not only helped numerous people to heal their body pain using emotional release techniques, but I have also experienced it personally myself.

Although I have supported people in getting their fibromyalgia, MS and other disease-caused pain in remission, it wasn’t until I experienced debilitating back pain that I was able to put my own work to the test!

I used a combination of exercise techniques, very gentle movement techniques, massage, hypnosis and emotional release techniques to find and release stored tension (in the form of emotional pain and repressed memories) from my body.

It was nothing short of miraculous.

Although I spent about a total of 5 very painful hours over the course of a few days allowing my body to show me what and where I was holding (with the help of some other very skilled therapists that are trained the way that I am), I was able to CRY, SCREAM, SHAKE, MOVE and release stored pain, fear, tension, anger, rage, regret and shame that I have been holding in my body for over 3 decades.

I didn’t even know that was there!  And, to this day, I cannot understand and I still do not believe that what surfaced actually happened to me, although, when I got up from the work, my back pain was 80% gone!

I had cried and screamed and sniffled and giggled and squirmed and all kinds of strange things.

And when I was done, I was so much better.

The rest of the 20% was a release of actual muscle tension, and being able to wrap my brain around what had happened emotionally and mentally.  Learning new ways of thinking and being with myself absolutely helps to become pain free.  It was also retraining my body to move, as in, not moving to anticipate pain in my back.  That was probably the hardest part.  We very quickly learn what we “can and cannot” do in terms of what “causes” the pain to be set off.  Funny thing is, you actually cannot know.  Someone might not be able to touch the floor, but they can reach their shoelaces?  Makes absolutely no sense.

If you are experiencing pain in your body, please be open to the idea that you are holding repressed emotional pain.

I know this is a hard concept for many.

Most People Think Pain Works Like That

Most people’s thinking goes like this:

• I pulled my back out doing ____ (that thing, lifting the cat littler, moving, exercising, etc).
• I will never do that activity again.  My pain hurts so bad, I can hardly do ANY activity.
• I am going to stop doing activities (at this point, your resistance is protecting you SO WELL that you could theoretically go on in this pain pattern forever, staying perpetually distracted from the actual source of the pain, your negative emotions).
• You stop doing activities because your back hurts.
• You start feeling depressed and you start eating more (remember the low grade depression and high fat, high calorie content foods?)
• You put on 40 pounds, and now you ACTUALLY have physical pain, because you’re carrying around an extra 40 pounds all the time.
• Your mental game weakens even more (insecurity starts, negative self talk about the body, feeling weak, feeling like you cant do things).

At this point, you are being “distracted” or “Attacked” by your resistance from every angle.  ANYTHING and EVERYTHING to keep you from feeling those uncomfortable feelings that started all of this.

(It is now clearly starting to look like that annoying loud girl who doesn’t understand why people don’t love her because she’s annoying, or that wallflower guy who thinks no one sees him or hears him.)

Is it all starting to make sense? Do you understand better what you need to do to get pain free?

It’s very complex.

Yet also very simple.

Work Life Balance Buckets

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #1 The Awareness Bucket – Noticing Your Thoughts, Emotional and Body Pain

The pain body and the astral body, what would it be like for you to have a life of balance, peace and awareness? Work life and home life are in peace and balance. I got to start my life of pretty traumatic, and I’m so lucky because it’s taught me so much.

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #2 How to Change Your Belief System – How You Were Parented – Reparenting with Inner Child Work – Become Your Own Parent

Have you ever wondered how to change your belief system? Have you ever considered how your belief system might be messing up your life? Look around you.  What do you see?  Is everything the way you want it to be?  Is is really?  Do you just convince yourself that you are happy, or are you truly, joyfully happy and self expressed?  Are you truly living in your purpose, and really living life to the fullest?

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #3 Self Love – Learn How to Love Yourself

Self love means more than just “I think I love myself,” or getting my nails done. Self love means wanting to get to the next level of my business, but I cannot get there. It looks like how confident I am. In which ways do I stop myself? In order to gain confidence, a person accesses their self-love and they believe in themselves and feel they have self worth. Then you can access bravery and courage, and start living your life fully, and then achieve what you want in your business.

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #4 All About Self Care and What It Has to Do With Being Your True Self

What the hell is self care really? Self care is not just washing your face every night, folding your clothes, or getting a regular massage. Although self care might include those things, it may not actually be what you need.

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #5 Setting Boundaries for Worthiness

Do you have a hard time setting boundaries? Do you experience people walking all over you? Do you feel that other people use you?

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #6 Relationship with Partner and Others – Give and Receive Love

We aren’t taught in school how to build relationships.  We guess at how to build relationships based on what we learned from our parents, which, as mentioned below, was probably based on conditional, behavior modification!

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #7 The Parenting Bucket

Last week, we went over all the work life balance buckets. The buckets go in order and the parenting bucket is one of them. We start on the bottom. When the bottom fills up, we can move up to the next level. In my coaching practice, we notice our thoughts and our body pain. We work on changing our beliefs, self love and self care.

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #8 How to Increase Your Work Performance by Building Better Relationships at Work and with Others

Work performance suffers when you aren’t confident, don’t believe in yourself, don’t value yourself or don’t have boundaries!  Are you ready to have your work performance be so phenomenal that your employers can’t help but notice how amazing you are and give you a promotion!?

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #9 Better Connecting with God and to the Divine

As we connect to that which is greater than us, or connecting to God, we start to realize how completely interconnected everything is. The more we realize how interconnected everything is, the more we start realizing how our actions have reactions in the world.

10 Buckets for Work Life Balance: #10 Start Thriving and Fulfilling Your Purpose to Pursue Your Calling

“Are you fulfilling your purpose” is a question that keeps people up at night. It’s about as familiar as “who am I?” When we are unsure about who we are, what our gifts are, and crave the fulfillment of using them but aren’t, it can be painful.

Move Your Ass & Feel Your Feelings

Our pain comes from repressed negative emotions that we are unwilling to feel.  We will literally do anything (on a subconscious level) to make sure that we don’t have to deal with those horrible feelings.

The crazy thing is… yes, you might have to deal with those horrible feelings, for a few hours, or maybe even a few weeks or months, if some very painful memories come up.  You might have to get a therapist and find a new way to talk to yourself and live.

But the BODY PAIN will be gone.  And you will actually be dealing with the root.

Body pain is the symptom. If you have it, something deeper is trying to get your attention. Click To Tweet

I cannot tell you how many times a client’s pain will talk to us during a hypnosis session, and will end up telling the client that the REASON THE PAIN IS THERE IS TO PROTECT THEM.

Our pain is trying to protect us.  It’s crazy making, but it’s true.

If you’re ready to actually face yourself, please reach out to me.  I am here to support your healing process.  It is your work.  I don’t do any miracles.  I just simply hold the space for you to do some challenging, deep, soulful, emotional healing work for yourself.  Please contact me if you have seen doctors who cannot diagnose you and you are still in pain.

READ MORE FROM ME

Over the years, I have been a serial learner and practitioner, taking in information about psychology, religion, spirituality, science, medicine, quantum physics, relationships, parenting, and overall, general happiness and work-life balance.  I’ve been fascinated in what it takes to and have created my life of pure joy, happiness, balance and peace. It is my mission to spread what I have learned and practiced to you in ways that are simple, easy to understand AND implement.  I have served people in achieving realignment in their bodies, relationships and purpose for over 20 years.  If you liked this article, and you want to read more, please visit one of the links below:

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• Breakthrough: If you are struggling with the issues from this article, please schedule a free consultation.

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