The Body Doesn't Lie (11 page)

• Structure (focus on somatic symptoms via endorphin-boosting grooming, massage, self-healing trigger points, and other self-care)
  
• Function (focus on diet that includes nourishing, anti-inflammatory foods)
  
• Motion (focus on healing exercise that improves circulation and speeds lymphatic drainage)
  
• Emotion (focus on nurturing positive thoughts, feelings, and relationships)
  

You have to commit to implementing the Positive Feedback program in a systematic way, every day of your life. It almost doesn’t matter what you focus on first, be it positive affirmations, healthy foods, a commitment to rest, or hydration and exercise—each of these habits strengthens your cells, your instincts, and your body’s natural responses.

If you’re just at the beginning of your healthy living journey, consider focusing on one category a day. As you progress and work toward four categories in a day, you’ll see even more dramatic results. Following the program in a committed way ensures that your reactions will become more and more positive, because you’ll develop habits and tools you can use to ensure that health will become your primary instinct.

Monica, a thirty-four-year-old marketing director and self-professed “perfection freak,” describes her experience with the Positive Feedback program this way: “The thing I love about this program is that it takes away my perfectionism. I know I don’t have to do everything perfectly. Every choice has the power to push me back into the positive.” She knows that if she’s been in Positive Feedback for a while, a glass of champagne or a late night isn’t going to throw her back into Negative Feedback. But it does make her realize that each of those choices could be a trigger and could compound with others. She knows she could lose a lot of ground unless she sticks with the program. “But the best part is, I don’t
want
to go negative,” she says. “I know how good it feels to be in the positive, and how effortless it can be to stay there if I just keep focusing on that feeling, how wonderful and powerful I feel when I’m in the positive. Truly, I never want to leave again.”

Once you see how the three steps work—the Reflect * Release * Radiate sequence—you can use those steps both as the structure for living and also as a decision-making technique. You’ll learn to automatically apply the three steps to every challenge you face, every moment of pain you experience, every worry or moment of uncertainty you have—because you’ll learn that these three steps, taken in this order, have the power to help you face any situation and come out the other end feeling stronger.

Let’s take a quick look at how the program works. Then, in the three chapters of part 2, we’ll consider the program in depth.

Adaptive Response is the mechanism behind both vaccination and homeopathy: When exposed to a very small amount of a harmful antigen, your body not only repels the invading force, but also learns from the experience and grows stronger by developing antibodies that protect you from subsequent exposure. Going forward, anytime your body is exposed to that bacteria or virus again, these antibodies will prevent it from taking hold. In other words, your body has responded in an “adaptive” way—a healthy, positive, protective way.

Exposed to stresses every day—some good, some bad—your body tries to tap into this Adaptive Response constantly; in so doing, it’s trying to grow stronger. If you pay attention to the structure, function, motion,
and
emotion of your body—if you feed your body well, take care of it, allow for ample activity and rest, face and express your emotions—then when you’re exposed to a new stress, your body can make the most of it. Your body will turn that stress into a learning experience for itself, a “teachable moment,” accessing your body’s innate healing instinct.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates’s timeless maxim reminds us that we need to constantly be looking at how we’re moving through this world, keeping tabs on our thoughts and feelings, in order to give our experience any meaning at all. When you’re in pain, you can be confounded by the effort it takes to simply get through the day. You might think, “I don’t have time to deal with that pain: I have to get the kids to school, meet this work deadline, get Mom to the doctor’s office.” The list goes on and on. In a lifestyle of stalwart soldiering on, it takes strength to take a moment to stop and look at where you are, to
consciously
be in your body, to check in with your soul:
I am here. I am breathing. I feel anxious, but I can do this. What am I doing right now? Am I where I want to be?

Developing the ability to check in with yourself may be the most powerful habit you learn in this program. Truly becoming in tune with yourself, your emotions, the feelings in your body as they are today is the first step toward any meaningful change. Simple awareness all by itself has the power to shift you into Positive Feedback, before you “do” anything else. All meditative practices start with awareness as the first step—in fact, it’s the core of mindfulness meditation, one of most thoroughly researched and scientifically affirmed approaches.

Mindfulness trains us to be present in the moment. In focusing attention on the moment, you don’t have to commit to a lifelong plan—or even a weeklong one. You just have to make a good choice
right now.
This skill immediately starts to transform your life by maximizing the beauty and stillness that can occur moment to moment. A nice walk. The feel of the sunshine. The taste of an apple. The smile of a friend. We learn to stop and appreciate these details through reflection. These are gifts from God—they feed our bodies and souls way more than any junk food or glass of wine ever could.

The Reflect phase, outlined in chapter 4, also helps to reverse our sympathetic nervous system overload. Our brains are so focused on the go-do-be culture of achievement and progress that we don’t give our bodies the time they need to rest and recuperate. When we consciously make reflection part of our daily lives, we build up our parasympathetic nervous system. By focusing on awareness of the body, we develop a top-down orientation, from brain to body, that helps us relax thoroughly, ratchet down the heightened stress and anxiety, and decompress faster and more easily. Practiced regularly, reflection helps tone the PNS and reduce our blood pressure and stress hormones on a daily basis. This reduction in stress and anxiety then helps our bodies with the next two phases of the program—it helps us
release
toxins and eventually
radiate
our internal health to the world.

Rather than spending time wallowing in negative emotions, however, you should focus much of your reflection on reconnecting with your
physical
self. Most of us have spent years dissociating from our body. Now is the time to become reacquainted. In chapter 4, I introduce you to a body scan approach that will immediately bring you into the present moment with your body. This practice allows you to develop a “volume knob” for controlling your own brain’s alpha rhythms. A study published in the
Frontiers of Human Neuroscience
found that meditation helps a person gain control of the alpha rhythms in the somatosensory cortex, a portion of the left frontal cortex that has a tremendous influence over negative thoughts and chronic pain.
¹
Alpha waves are continually processing pain, so until you’re able to control them, you may be unable to maintain attention on other tasks. But when you meditate on a consistent basis, you can improve your ability to focus and to regulate your emotional reactivity. By simultaneously tuning in to specific parts of your body, and tuning out negative thoughts and other aches or pains, you develop the coordination of your alpha rhythms and the ability to control your thinking at will. One study in the
Journal of Neuroscience
found that mindfulness meditation can lower pain levels by up to 57 percent.
²

Several different activities (which I’ll present in chapter 4) allow you to take a snapshot of where you are, capturing information to gain awareness of your body’s current health status. These pieces of information can help you determine which areas you need to focus on during your Release stage. Many of my patients find that simply gathering the information is itself a therapeutic exercise. We don’t give ourselves enough time to check in with our bodies and our minds on a regular basis. Giving ourselves permission to be “selfish” like this is a huge step forward for many of my patients—and I suspect it might be for you, too.

Being able to reflect will always help you—both by providing recognition of the way things truly are and by delivering you from denial. This practice also builds the mental and emotional foundation for the next elements of the program—the Release stage and the Radiate stage.

Release is the primary goal of many of my patients. They want to be released from pain, released from old hurts and traumas, released from pressure that keeps them from being happy. Many people come to osteopaths thinking that a click of the neck and a quick massage will do away with all the stress and anxieties that have built up over the past months (or years). But there is no amount of spinal manipulation that can equal your ability to release your own toxins. (For example, by this point in the program, you will have reestablished your commitment to a full night of quality rest, which has allowed your brain to release more toxins in seven days than I could ever do in seven treatments!)

Following guidelines given in chapter 5, you can learn a very simple but incredibly powerful technique for releasing self-healing trigger points. Using the same biomechanical mechanism at work in acupuncture, manipulation of these specific points will help you release your pain quickly. You can break the momentum of the Negative Feedback cycle long enough to give your body and brain a chance to let go and release in other ways as well. Freed from the most acute pain, you will be empowered with the space to explore ways that you can move your body and mind toward a healthier, more integrated, more fulfilling life. We’ll talk through how you can forgive others for the pain they’ve caused you—and, more important, how you can forgive yourself and move on from ways that you’ve disappointed yourself. I’ll walk you through the Release Meal Plan, a delicious cleansing regimen that taps into nature’s most powerful anti-inflammatory foods to reverse the chronic inflammation that traps you in Negative Feedback.

Even though this is not specifically a weight loss plan, some people lose up to ten pounds during their initial Release week, and even more as they incorporate Release principles into their daily life. My client Reena found that steering clear of sugar for a week helped her break her addiction to sweet chai and introduced her to the cleansing wonders of nettle tea. Just that one change in her diet cut her chances of developing diabetes in half. Studies have shown that drinking large amounts of sugar-sweetened beverages can not only increase the risk of gaining weight but also of developing Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and gout.
³
Over a couple of months, that one shift helped Reena remove fifteen pounds she’d been dragging around since graduate school six years earlier.

Psychological Antidotes

Rick Hanson, also the founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, has developed a series of psychological antidotes for psychologists and therapists to teach to patients (and use themselves!) when they are combating negative emotions and habits. These antidotes, listed in table 2, are great suggestions for anyone adopting the Positive Feedback program, because they give a focus point for affirmations and meditations.

When we spend too much time being ruled by our amygdala and our sympathetic nervous system, we remain locked in a negative outlook that perpetuates the triggering of stress hormones and clouds our perception of other people’s intentions. Meditation, as noted earlier, offers multiple health benefits. Among those benefits: It has been found to decrease gray matter in the amygdala and increase gray matter in the hippocampus
⁴
—which is especially helpful in chronically nervous or stressed people, because severe stressful experiences can decrease hippocampal mass by up to 25 percent, depending on the severity of the experience.
⁵

Table 2.
Psychological Antidotes to Common Emotional States

Adapted from Rick Hanson, “Mindfulness in Clinical Practice,” paper delivered at the Northern California Psychiatric Society’s Integrative Psychiatry Conference, Berkeley, CA, Sept. 10, 2011.

Are you concerned that a more controlled approach to food and cooking might leave you feeling miserable? Researchers at the University of Chicago suggest just the opposite. They found that the psychic effects of taking this kind of control can actually make you happier.
⁶
The fact that you no longer have to struggle with yourself about what you
should
do—now that you’re automatically making the right choices—simplifies your life and makes you feel proud. We could call this the framework effect: Having an explicit program to hang on to and return to can quiet down the anxiety that extra choices provoke. I’ll provide plenty of tips and suggestions in chapter 5 to help make the transition to anti-inflammatory foods satisfying and simple, and I’ll offer meal plans and recipes in part 3.