The Body Doesn't Lie
Read The Body Doesn't Lie Online
Authors: Vicky Vlachonis
Tags: #Health & Fitness, #Pain Management, #Healing, #Medical, #Allied Health Services, #Massage Therapy
To my mum, Jenny,
for her love and light,
and for showing me the path.
And to my husband, Jerry,
for walking the path with me
Contents
Part One: The Power of Positive Feedback
3
How the Positive Feedback Program Works
Part Two: The Positive Feedback Program
Part Three: The Positive Feedback Tools
7
The Positive Feedback Meal Plan
8
The Positive Feedback Recipes
9
The Positive Feedback Remedies
Appendix A: The Positive Feedback Questionnaire
Appendix B: The Positive Feedback Resources
Appendix C: The Positive Feedback Shopping List
Deep into the third trimester of my first pregnancy, I drove out to my friend Stella’s house in the English countryside for a weekend away. I opened the door to find that she had arranged a surprise baby shower, complete with my best friends from high school and college. Everyone had flown in to be there for me, and to celebrate Apple’s impending birth. Overwhelmed with joy, exhaustion, and hormones, I burst into tears.
As part of the celebration, Stella treated us to manicures and pedicures, and arranged for an osteopath from London to come out and give us treatments. That’s when I first met Vicky, a blonde Greek woman who looked like a modern-day version of Hera.
My friends were all jet-lagged, and I was third-trimester, dear-god-when-will-this-end tired, but we were giggly and teary, and so happy to be together. Maybe it was the emotions of the day, or the fact that the women in the surrounding rooms were so foundational in my life, but when Vicky led me away for my treatment, I felt safe enough to let it all go. After weeks of suffering from unrelenting back pain and anxiety about the birth, her hands lifted it all away, leaving me feeling light and at peace. I felt ready for the baby.
When Apple finally signaled that she was ready to come, I was so determined to give birth naturally that I labored for seventy-two hours before finally submitting to an emergency C-section. Battered and raw, I knew I needed some care—but my first thoughts were for Apple, who had been through the same epic struggle. In England, cranial osteopathy is increasingly administered to newborns immediately after birth, and so I called Vicky, and asked her to come and tend to my defenseless little newborn. Watching Vicky soothe and care for little Apple endeared her to me for life.
In the intervening decade, Vicky has treated my entire family, curing our aches, pains, and physical ailments (a strain here, a sprain there, a lost voice, a chronic cough)—all while instilling in us that physical and emotional pain are often one in the same. As I explain a malady, she’ll always ask: “What is your pain trying to teach you?” Under Vicky’s care, my pain has taught me a lot.
When I’m in a session with her, I’ll tell her about the week’s events. As I recount an upsetting phone call, or a memory of my dad that’s making me sad, she’ll press a point on my neck or my back or my foot, and I can feel both the ache and the sadness start to melt away. As an osteopath, she understands that a pain in the back is rarely just a pain in the back—it may also be a dysfunction in the ovary or the gut, the thyroid or the liver. And, perhaps more important, she understands that the pain almost always connects to the heart. She’s taught me that fear can kick into your muscles and body, and that those are the moments when you need musculoskeletal support, the ice, and the strapping most—along with a cleansing cry on the table, followed by a good belly laugh.
More often than not, I spend my days bouncing from one meeting to the next after the morning school run, calling on all my mental resources to make the right decisions for my family, my businesses, and my career. This is always followed by time with Apple and Moses, where I need to be fully present, ensuring that they get the very best from me. By the end of the week, I’m utterly spent—and in need of VV love. In those moments, her voice, hands, and healing energy can pull me back from the edge of exhaustion.
Over the years, she has become an integral part of how my family functions: If I am out of town, she comes over to treat the kids and send them off to slumber with her magic hands; she stops by when everyone else is at the beach, just to pull me back into my body and help me quiet my mind. Like any over-tapped mother, my brain can rapidly cycle away from me—Vicky helps me remember that I have all the answers I need, and that everything is OK. More important, she’s taught me to face the pain, feel it, and then let it go.
Because my house often functions as a midway station for those in life transitions, Vicky has treated almost everyone I care about. When friends come to hide from the world, to stay and heal from upset or heartbreak, I try to give them a quiet and soft place to land. I feed them good food, pull the blackout shades, and tuck them into a cozy bed. When they’re ready to pull their head out from under the pillow, Vicky comes to help. We call her the Pain Gangster, Vickser the Fixer, Clicky Vicky—but whether she’s carefully placing her acupuncture needles or working out a trigger point, she goes beyond the hurt to find the truth. Sure, there’s always the superficial relief, but these sessions are really about the deeper work. Vicky will ask: Is this friend happy in her relationship? Does she need to slow down? Does she need to take her life in a different direction? Does she need to spend more time with her kids, giving them hot baths and tickling them to sleep? Over the years, Vicky has taught me that the answers to such questions are in the pain.
Ultimately,
the body doesn’t lie
. When you hurt, you cannot hide: The truth will always push to the surface like a piece of shrapnel. At one point in my life, I had panic attacks, and an ovarian cyst, and issues with my thyroid, which all manifested through pain in other parts of my body. I’d been running fast, to put distance between myself and parts of my life I didn’t want to face, and Vicky made me slow to a jog until I came to understand that some emotions can never be outrun. I had to stop, turn, and face them, so I could work through the issues, and find some peace.
My career has been full and rewarding, but ultimately, my family means everything to me. Vicky has helped me become a better mother: She’s taught me how to connect with my kids through touch and positive visualization, empowering them to build up their little blossoming self-image in the same way her mom did for her in Greece. In her sessions, Vicky also harnesses the best from Eastern healers, connecting the acupuncture points and meridians Chinese medicine located over two thousand years ago with the latest discoveries about the science behind nutrition, endocrinology, and neuroscience. You’ll find all of these worlds in this book, woven together into a simple, easy-to-follow plan for relinquishing the pain.
I love this book because I can hear Vicky’s voice on every page—her kindness and her compassion, her strength and her wisdom. She speaks to me just like this, ladling out a mixture of love and brutal truth. The program in these pages details the same recommendations and homework Vicky administers in her sessions, and the same crucial steps: Reflect, Release, and Radiate. This book contains the exercises, meditations, and techniques we’ve done together, which together form everything you need to heal yourself. There are also some great little tricks, too, like a trigger-point massage for the bottom of your big toe, which releases the toxic anger from your liver. It doesn’t matter what kind of trauma you’ve endured, or the amount of heartache, hurt, or toxic energy locked up in your muscles or organs—Vicky will show you how to face the pain and then let it go, so you can feel free and unencumbered again.
P
ain is good.
It might be surprising to hear an osteopath, a healer whose mission it is to relieve pain, say such a thing. But I believe that pain is a messenger and one of our most powerful teachers.
Pain is opportunity. Pain is potential.
Everyone has felt pain. Maybe you feel the lingering pain of old injury, or maybe your pain is the by-product of regular wear and tear on your body, a sign of getting older. Perhaps you feel a burning pain in your lower back, a tightness in your neck, a soreness in your shoulder. Pain can be the aching knees that keep you from running, or the carpal tunnel syndrome that makes typing up those annual reports an absolute nightmare. Pain can keep you popping Advil to stay two steps ahead of chronic headaches or crippling menstrual cramps.
Pain is a signal, a warning from the body that something is not quite right. You might think you got that kink in your neck from the car accident you were involved in last year, or the slow burn in your lower back from sitting all day in front of the computer. But if you look into that pain, truly
see
it, you will slowly uncover something even bigger: the truth about your life, your relationships, your work, your state of mind.
You see,
the body doesn’t lie.
Your body is talking to you. Those aches and pains you feel are often the outer signals of inner pains you’re not addressing. All pain, every single kind, is both physical and emotional. And all pain, when you learn how to face it, understand it, and let it go, can help clear your path to a better life.
While Eastern medicine has tapped into the mind-body connection for thousands of years, recently Western experts have proven that the mind and body are not just “connected”—they are one and the same. Scientists at the University of Michigan did functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on the brains of forty people and found that, whether people were burned by hot water or looked at photos of people who’d broken up with them, their brains showed an identical pattern: Two parts of the brain—the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula—registered physical pain.
1
The exact same brain patterns
occurred whether the test subjects felt a burn against their skin or felt emotional pain—the brain simply did not know the difference.
For decades, osteopaths and other medical professionals have noticed that people who suffer major traumas become more likely to develop chronic pain and inflammatory conditions such as fibromyalgia. Many of these pains are the result of a good process gone bad: When you experience an acute injury to your tissues, caused by an accident or a trauma, or by an invading pathogen, your body releases a flood of cytokines. These natural chemicals bring immune cells to the site of the pain and trigger your inflammatory response, drawing fluid from the blood vessels to cause swelling. White blood cells zoom to the area to help speed healing. Overall, a very efficient and smart system. Our bodies are truly miraculous that way.
Of course, this protective response against foreign invaders is meant to
protect
your body, not hurt it. But if those cytokines are triggered too often—whether through stress, a poor-quality diet, undiagnosed food sensitivities, not enough sleep, or, yes, even emotional trauma—the inflammation can become chronic. This chronic inflammation is thought to play a key role in, if not be the root source of, many dangerous conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and even autoimmune conditions. If you don’t slow down to take care of yourself, don’t take the time to fully process and release trauma, the pain that started long ago from a broken leg or a minor infection may linger for years, age your body, damage your genes, prevent you from taking pleasure in things you once loved to do—and possibly even shorten your life.
As scary as that sounds, you have another alternative—and it’s the only way to permanently release any kind of pain: You must turn and face your pain, seek to understand it, and then learn to let it go.
I’m not going to lie—you’ll need courage to do this. None of us want to feel pain; we want to get rid of it. Right now, immediately. But when we don’t take the moment to listen to pain’s message and learn from it, we risk prolonging that pain and making it much worse. What you need is a plan that helps you feel safe while you dare to mine your pain—a program that can be your life raft when your emotional seas get stormy and can ferry you to the other, pain-free shore. That’s what the Positive Feedback plan can be for you: an unsinkable vessel to a pain-free, healthier, and happier life.
