The Body Doesn't Lie (12 page)
Read The Body Doesn't Lie Online
Authors: Vicky Vlachonis
Tags: #Health & Fitness, #Pain Management, #Healing, #Medical, #Allied Health Services, #Massage Therapy
I’ll also guide you through some meditation and imagery that allows you to let go of the negative self-talk that plagues every person in Negative Feedback mode. These harsh words are what I think of as the “evil eye”—the negative specters of danger or worry that can cloud your psyche, even when you’re not aware of them. Your continued meditation practice will start to increase the power of your brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC), the area of your brain that helps you stay on task and modulate your emotions. If you tend to be absentminded or short-tempered, it can be a sign that your prefrontal cortex isn’t as healthy as it could be. Not only does this PFC weakness lead to emotional reactivity; in addition, by not helping to temper your sympathetic nervous system, your weak PFC may speed your aging. However, once you’ve been doing your Positive Feedback program for a week or two, you may find that you’re becoming less emotionally reactive, less impulsive, and more focused. That’s a sign that you’ve begun to take possession of that magic moment between stimulus and reaction—that moment that is the portal to the Adaptive Response. If you can choose to remain neutral and nonreactive in those split seconds, you’ll more easily make the choices that keep you in the positive.
The Radiate phase involves discovering the full realization of who you were meant to be: your dreams, your passions. With your pain out of the way, important life goals begin to light you from within. Now that you’ve made it through the cleansing action of the vegetable-focused Release program, your palate is ready for more fruits, lean meats and goat’s-milk yogurt (and other proteins), and occasional grains. Rather than start a vigorous exercise program just for vanity’s sake, one that might throw you back into an inflammatory state, work on developing an individualized fitness approach that helps strengthen your ever-broadening sense of connection with the world.
Maybe you’ll take up overnight backpacking; maybe you’ll schedule a long-distance biking trip; maybe you’ll sign up for a trip to Machu Picchu or a 5K run to benefit a charity you feel strongly about. No matter what kind of exercise you select, you’ll reap the benefits of exercise’s ability to increase your body’s supply of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). This miracle protein not only creates new brain cells and increases brain volume but also helps regulate blood sugar and encourage cardiovascular health, particularly by helping to further strengthen your parasympathetic nervous system.
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Once you get to the Radiate stage, you will spend much more of your time consciously basking in the beauty of your life, sinking deep into it. Training yourself to really key into the experience will help to counteract any negative conditioning you’ve experienced. Drawing on the skills you developed in the Reflect stage, you’ll be mindful of shifts in your mood and take care to thoroughly drench yourself in the neurochemical bliss that’s triggered by happy moments. The neurotransmitters that are released with success and happiness—endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine—will help you develop the inner strength, self-confidence, resilience, and determination to go out and achieve other goals.
As you become more mindful of how you feel, you develop your ability for meta-cognition—in other words, for thinking about how you think. You’re able to be reflective and self-aware in every moment, without it feeling awkward or navel-gazey. True self-awareness, no longer being divorced from your feelings, will allow you to feel and experience new pain right away, before it can take root in your body. You will start to see what patterns make your body and your mind feel stronger, cleaner, healthier—and which ones leave you feeling trapped in the negative. You’ll be living in the positive and thriving.
A Positive Feedback Profile
Jennifer, a thirty-five-year-old woman, came to me complaining of lower back pain. Immediately it was clear that she was stuck in the negative. She had been jumping from relationship to relationship, always hoping for the right guy to marry, but having no luck. The morning she came to see me, she had developed an itchy rash all over her body.
“Do you think my body is allergic to Steve?” she asked, referring to her most recent sexual partner. As she told me about this particular womanizer, a man who apparently just wanted to drink and take drugs, I realized how toxic he was for her.
The body doesn’t lie.
Jennifer was a beautiful, intelligent woman, but she wasn’t working or using her talents in a productive way. She told me that she’d always been close to her older sister, Suzanne. Now, though, she felt left out of her sister’s life. Suzanne had kids and a thriving career, and Jennifer felt like she had nothing. “My sister tells me I just have to grow up, cleanse my system, and move ahead.”
As we talked, the full picture began to emerge—and all Jennifer’s concerns found themselves centered on her lower back pain (see table 3). We walked through the Reflect exercises, and discussed how she would create her Body Timeline, Body Family Tree, and Time Audit. We discussed the fact that lower back pain was often a signal of someone or something going wrong in a person’s life. I advised her to follow the full Positive Feedback program for three weeks, and asked her to focus on her relationship with Suzanne. I knew that Jennifer needed to heal that connection in order to help herself make forward progress as well.
Take a look in table 4 at the specific tasks we devised for her—and notice how each phase helped her move out of her “stuckness” and into the next phase.
You can see from Jennifer’s plan that she didn’t incorporate every single exercise from the Positive Feedback program. What she did was select the exercises or changes that she believed would have the greatest impact on her life, and she followed through on those. The Positive Feedback plan helped her create the structure she needed to give her safe passage out of the woods of her pain and into the promise of one less loser lover, two adoring nieces, and a more fulfilling, more mature future.
Table 3.
A Symptom-Source Case Study
SITE OF JENNIFER’S PAIN | PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS | EMOTIONAL SOURCE |
T1, T2 (thoracic spine) L2, L3 (lumbar spine) | Shortness of breath, panic attacks, depression, low energy, lower back pain, insomnia | Fear of life, loss of power, anger, blocked sexual chakra |
Table 4.
An Individualized Positive Feedback Prescription
JENNIFER’S POSITIVE FEEDBACK PRESCRIPTION | JENNIFER’S REPORT |
Need to REFLECT: | “As I reflected using these tools, I realized that I’m afraid I’m no longer my sister’s top priority—but I completely understand, too. Her family needs her; I need to focus on healing myself instead of waiting for her to rescue me. I need to get out of my bad relationship and take a break from men for a while so I can focus on myself.” |
Need to RELEASE: | “I realized that I had to release my toxic food habits—no more diet soda and white pasta for me—and the contrast once I got started was shocking. As I included more fish and vegetables in my diet, my energy level soared; I no longer felt like a weeping pile of aimless mush in the afternoon. I stayed clear-headed without all the coffee and soda, and slept better than I had in years.” |
Need to RADIATE: | “I realized that, because of my dependence on Suzanne, I’d been resenting her kids. I resolved to have a better relationship with them. In my new role as Auntie Cici, I researched different day trips for us to do (which also gave Suzanne some much-needed time alone). The kids and I created a ritual of visiting a restaurant and then trying to recreate our favorite meal together at home the next day. I also started waking up early to do yoga or go walking along the beach at sunrise—my daily reminder to radiate!” |
You’ll also become more compassionate to the suffering of others, a proven remedy for loneliness and isolation. One Harvard study found that eight weeks of meditation training was all it took for people to become 35 percent more compassionate to the suffering of others.
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By getting out of your own way and reawakening to the beauty in the world, you’ll be able to find your way out of the fog of negativity faster and more easily. You’ll have built a map for yourself, a way out of the woods of your pain.
Your newfound compassion and honesty with yourself will allow you to form true connections with others, and those connections themselves can be therapeutic.
Finally, the master skill that you’ll develop in the Radiate phase is the strength to be courageous about taking risks in your own life, to—as author Susan Jeffers puts it—“feel the fear and do it anyway.”
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Research has proven, both in animal studies and with humans, that when we’re faced with fear, if we can steel our resolve and just “get on with it,” we can break down conditioned responses that would otherwise hold us back. Conquering our fears helps us develop a sense of “agency” that translates into other fields. Simply put, we have the ability to survive and even thrive, no matter what occurs.
Yes, this is my ultimate dream: You will let go of any remaining fears that have held you back and, armed with your own confidence and your ability to grit your teeth through your anxiety, you will find that there’s nothing you can’t do. You will feel stronger and more alive, and you will radiate strength and beauty.
No matter what kind of pain you’re in right now, when you start the Positive Feedback plan, you’ll be able to restore your innate Adaptive Response, rebuild your body’s foundation, and claim the life you were always meant to live. All it takes is the determination to spend a little bit of time on yourself each day. This small commitment to focus on your own self-care can help you learn to nurture and protect your inner self.
Even if you get off track, Positive Feedback is always there for you. At any time, and every time. The program will never be “too hard”—Positive Feedback begins the very moment you do the Morning Glory ritual. Once you get into that positive cycle, the momentum of the Reflect * Release * Radiate sequence has a way of carrying you to the next stage of health, and the next, and the next. So let’s get started on that transformation already!
I encourage you to read all the way through the next three chapters to get a good sense of what’s to come. And although you can follow most of the program using supplies already available around your house, you may need to gather some additional materials (such as a bag of lemons for your daily lemon water, or a dry brush to use in your Morning Glory routine starting in the Release phase). In appendix C, I’ve also shared a shopping list of foods for the Release week. Wait until the day before you start that phase to shop for those foods, so you can have your produce at its peak of freshness.
I would also suggest that you choose a notebook or small three-ring binder to keep with you throughout the program, to capture your observations during your Reflect exercises (Body Timeline, Body Family Tree, Time Audit, etc.) and to collect notes about foods to avoid or new products you’d like to try. (In appendix B, you’ll find a collection of foods and personal care products that I love and try to use every day.) Some people find it helpful to copy into a notebook the words of meditations that they find particularly meaningful or helpful. Alternatively, you could record them with your phone or a handheld recorder and play them for yourself until you remember them by heart.
Please note: I heartily encourage you to improvise. If the italicized words in any meditation don’t work for you, create your own. You can use your notebook to write out the scripts for your own personal meditations and visualizations to help you stay consistent from one week to the next. Just the act of writing down a meditation will be therapeutic on its own. Personally, I like to take five minutes at the end of every day to write a simple paragraph in my journal, to remind me of the beautiful things that happened that day. You might consider using your Positive Feedback notebook for that purpose as well, so you can look back and trace how your state of mind shifts while you’re following the three steps.
Over the next three weeks, this progressive system of self-care strategies and rituals will help you
reflect
on your life,
release
what’s polluting you and causing you pain, and
radiate
into a more beautiful and satisfying way of living. The structure of this plan will help you make immediate, pain-relieving changes to your self-talk, eating habits, exercise regimen, and morning routine. Some of these changes will be easy to implement; some will be more challenging. I firmly believe that you will get out of this program every ounce of work you put into it.
Your new life is right around the corner. Let’s see what’s in store for you in the first week of the Positive Feedback program: the Reflect phase.
