Your Yellow Brick Road Life

In our healing journey we have all searched for, and found, various wizards with an  assortment of elixers to eliminate our pain. And yet, after many therapies, meds, surgeries, even replacement parts, our pain persists. What if you've had the power to heal yourself all along. Find out how.

Transcript

      Your Yellow Brick Road Life

“You’ve always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.”

– Glenda the Good Witch, The Wizard of Oz

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new episode of Healing Your Own Pain. Today’s podcast is called: “Your Yellow Brick Road Life.” My name is Greg, I’m an expert level MFR therapist and owner of Glen Ellyn Myofascial Release, an in-person and on-line treatment center for pain relief, injury rehabilitation and physical and emotional healing.

The inescapable fact of being alive in a human body is, you will have pain. And here’s another truth I often remind myself and my clients: pain is not a mistake; you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s natural. It’s normal. It’s a part of life. We are analogue beings living in a digital world. Meaning, your online digital avatar has no pain, because it’s not alive. But your real analog body does. It comes with being alive. There is no way to immunize yourself from pain. Pain is even an intrinsic part of joy. You can’t have one without the other.

Can you remember a time when, as a young child, you got hurt, fell, or got struck by something and it really was painful. Or maybe your own child got hurt and came running to you. And somehow, the moment you felt mom’s embrace, the pain magically lessened. Or your own child’s pain did. How does that happen? No medical intervention. No medications, not even ice. Or this; Have you ever been in the shower and gotten soap or shampoo in your eyes, causing a burning sensation? You reach for a nearby towel and, if you’re paying attention, you notice the pain starts to recede, or in some cases completely goes away before the towel reaches your eyes. What gives? 

Well, several things are happening that affect our experience of pain. Research on young children receiving parental hugs both before and after otherwise painful vaccination injections had a significant reduction in pain levels compared to a control group where children received no hugs or touching beforehand. When children are held, the skin-to-skin contact by a parent releases oxytocin in the brain, the feel-good hormone that reduces physical and emotional pain in both the child and the parent’s bodies. Both the pain and stress levels are reduced. With the shower example, other research shows that up to 60% of pain reduction is due your expectation of it, whether a drug, therapy, or medical intervention. Remember, your internal drugstore, located in the hypothalamus and pituitary glands of the brain, can be activated by your expectation as much as any medication you may be taking.

OK, so what does all this have to do with The Yellow Brick Road Life? Well, it’s all about the power of belief, and expectation. Because all of us are on a life path, what Joseph Campbell calls the hero or heroines journey. Like Dorothy, we all, in some way, were looking beyond our dull, black and white wasteland where maybe we were ignored, put down or unseen. Maybe the only positive thing in our lives, our Toto, was threatened or taken away. Something catapulted us on our journey. And so, over the rainbow we went. On the way we found friends, teachers, guides, gurus, and healers. Someone we believed and came to expect, might have the answer for us. And in our search, we learned, we grew, made mistakes, and had victories. 

Dorothy’s whole story in The Wizard of Oz is dream. And in dreams all the characters are parts of us. So, it’s her wit, her heart, and her courage that she’s seeking. Why, because like Dorothy, we don’t believe we have them. But clearly, the Scarecrow is the wisest of the band of friends, The Tin Man has the open heart, and in the journey the cowardly lion will find his courage. That’s what the journey is for.  We think the answer, the treasure is always out there, never imagining we carry our gift with us. But it takes some effort to find it. It doesn’t just drop in our laps. I especially like the example of the giant California sequoia trees which grow from seeds no larger than a flake of oatmeal. But in order germinate they need to lie beneath a blanket of snow to soften, followed by an intense fire to burst open. This tiniest of seeds has in its DNA the code to explode into the largest tree on earth. It’s the same with all growth. Everything we want is already inside, but the seeds won’t crack open until we’re tested, until some fire pushes us forward.  Yeah sure, we think, that may be fine for the sequoias, but that’s not me, can’t be me. We think, like Dorothy, we are the small and meek. And since we don’t believe it, don’t expect it, we go looking for the shaman who will give it to us.

And, as Dorothy found, we don’t find what’s inside us by being the innocent, people-pleasing  good girl or boy. In Oz she unwittingly kills off that childish part of herself by destroying the first wicked witch. She’s definitely not in Kansas anymore. Life is starting to get real. But she is warned there are more obstacles to come, and it will take everything she’s got to survive. What she finds is she already has everything she’s seeking. Her courage is automatic and instinctive when she stands up to and slaps a lion, not for herself, but to protect Toto.  And it’s the love to save her friend Scarecrow that kills the last evil. What she learned was she didn’t have to journey beyond “her own back yard”, herself, to find her power, “her hearts desire.”

All the while she mistakenly thought the Wizard would have the answer. And yet, the Dorothy that returns with the broom in hand is not the person who set out on the journey. But it took the journey, the ordeal to find her wisdom, heart and courage. It’s the same with all adventures. The prize everyone’s looking for, whether it’s the witch’s broom, Harry’s Horcruxes, or Frodo’s rings. They’re not really all that important. It’s the device that drives the adventure, the journey of growth until we find, like Dorothy, we had the power all along.

In my MFR work with clients, what I’m really doing is leading back to themselves. The secret lies in your own body. You’ve been to all the experts who had the therapy, the medicine, the replacement parts that were supposed to cure your pain, and yet, here it is still. I can help you explore the treasure map of your body back to the source where, once felt, your pain, like Dorothy’s witch, will melt away. 

And another way I empower clients, is to teach them, if they wish, to self-treat with a few simple tools so that anytime of the day or night, when pain strikes, and you’re a week away from your next treatment, you can help themselves. When, like the mother-child healing bond, you begin to trust your own power to heal yourself, it can, and it will happen.

If this interests you, or you just want to find out more how MFR works, you can contact me at my website at www.glenellynmfr.com. And as always, my friends, I wish you well on your healing journey.