Coming Back To The Body - Its a Life and Death Decision

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Transcript

Comin Back To The Body – It’s a Life or Death Decision

Hello everyone and thanks for joining me for a new episode of Healing Your Own Pain. Today’s podcast is called:

Coming Back to The Body – It’s a Life or Death Decision.

My name is Greg, I’m an expert level myofascial Release Therapist, owner of Glen Ellyn Myofascial Release; an in-person and online treatment center specializing in pain relief, injury rehabilitation and physical and emotional healing.

When we inhabit a body, we call it being alive. When we leave the body, we call it being dead.

So, you might be thinking: “Welcome Captain Obvious!” Or, “Yeah soooooo?”

What I have found in working with clients and doing my own work is it’s not as simple as that.

Most, if not all of us, by the time we reach adulthood, have suffered some serious physical and/or emotional wound or traumas.  And it is finally being recognized by mainstream medicine that these traumas can and do get lodged in the body and can eventually cause illness and disease. The body keeps the score of everything that has happened to us; even those events or injuries we may not remember get locked in the body and are called “tissue memory”. Often, by merely touching a particular spot on the body a spontaneous memory, feeling, even smell can erupt seemingly out of nowhere. Some current situation (walking alone on a dark street, driving at night on a 2-lane highway) can make us feel anxious, even cause anxiety or panic attacks. When that happens, without thinking, we pull the escape hatch, and exit the body.  The situation is similar enough to the much earlier event that the subconscious, sensing danger, sends out a red alert and we literally vacate the body much like we did at the time of the original trauma in order to survive the event. That means we are not here in the present. We have time traveled to our distant past and we react as though that long past threat is still here. Body secreting cortisol, muscles tightening preparing for an onslaught that never comes.

The unique work that Barnes’ style MFR Therapy brings is the recognition that if we can bring a patient back to the body and fully feel the unfinished emotion buried inside that physical pain or restriction, patients not only gain freedom of movement, freedom from pain, but begin to free themselves from the pain of their past.  We were nothing less than the walking dead, imprisoned in an endless time loop repeating the past. But in the body, we have come back to life, and are free to make our own choices unburdened by the weight of the past that was slowly, silently killing us. I want to mention if you’ve had MFR and this hasn’t happened to you that’s normal. It takes time and a skilled therapist. But you should feel the solidity of presence that being back, centered in the body will give you.

The unfortunate thing is, most of us don’t know we’ve vacated the body. It feels “normal” by now. Yet on the treatment table you can feel it. Body tissue that feels like dead meat, no life in it, with the energy in the head and near, but outside the body. My work as a therapist is to help people come back to the body. Because It’s the only place where healing can take place. That’s why drugs don’t heal, great as they may be at reducing symptoms. At best they mask symptoms, at worst, they make the problem more acute.

What I’ve learned as a therapist and patient with my own health challenges is, if I can help bring the patient back in their body, the body will do the rest. Because that’s what our bodies know how to do. It doesn’t need our help. It just needs us to be there. Notice how exquisitely the body functions without our doing anything: respiration, blood circulation, digestion, even our hair grows without our knowledge or help 24/7. When we’re not in it, the body hardens, stiffens like a scar around a wound. Stay out longer the restriction tightens more and grows, disease can set in, stay out long enough, the body, mimicking death, can actually die.

When we allow ourselves to reconnect with the body it feels familiar in a good way, like an unexpected rainbow or sunset that takes your breath away. You stop thinking and are left with a feeling sense of wonder and awe. You can only appreciate it, even notice it when you drop out of your head, out of your devices and sink back in the body like a familiar armchair you haven’t sat in in years. It’s like coming home.

That’s why the most effective therapy, any therapy or physical practice, meditation, even spiritual practice that we can do is one that brings us back to the body, brings us home.

If you’re interested in authentic healing or recovery or just want to experience the simple joy of resting back in the body – and not just feeling, but coming alive again, please contact me by email or call me. Together we CAN live again.

Thanks for listening my friends. And, as always, I wish you well in your healing journey.