Pain Is Not Your Enemy: "What three violent attacks, severe injuries and PTSD taught me..."

This week, Rita is joined by Chana Studley. 

Chana recovered from 3 violent attacks, severe injuries, and 10 years of debilitating PTSD in the UK to go and win an Academy Award. She has turned her experience and insights into three best-selling novels, and now speaks at conferences around the world to help people recover from chronic physical issues.

Join us as we discuss three key principles: mind, thought, and consciousness, illustrating how they can transform pain, anxiety, and negative thought patterns into well-being and resilience. 

Rita is a health and fitness coach who specialises in helping women over 40 to be healthy and wealthy, through weight loss and/or business coaching. Find out more here 👉 https://thehealthandfitnesscoach.com

New episodes of The Healthy and Wealthy podcast are released every Tuesday 🧡

Watch the full episodes on YouTube

Transcript

So on today's episode of the health collective podcast, we're talking with chronic Dudley, who has recovered from three violent attacks, severe injuries and 10 years of debilitating PTSD. Before going on to win an Academy Award. She has turned her experience and insights into best selling novels. And she now speaks with us today on how she made that turnaround in her life. Some of the key points that really stand out for me, talking to her about the mind body connection, and how actually all of our thoughts and feelings are fleeting moments and as long as we can understand how to allow them to move on without being caught. We don't need to be suffering through the chronic pain again, hopefully to enjoy today's episode.

welcome to today's episode of the health collective podcast. As I've already said, we are joined by the wonderful China sadly, and she is here today to talk about her own experiences, but also some advice and guidance that she can help all of you on in terms of your bodies, whether it be chronic pain, whether it be your minds, and how we process certain feelings and thought processes, but equally, various different things that may have happened in your past that are still holding you back from achieving the future that you desire. So first of all, a massive thank you, and welcome to the show.
Thank you. It's so nice to be here.
So what I'd love to do is you've got quite an interesting background, I think, would be one word. So I'd love if you wouldn't mind sharing some of what led you to this point and some of the pivotal moments in your life that have led you here and why you focus on the areas that you do today.
Sure. So just a quick little bit of background. I grew up in England, and I went to Manchester University where I studied textiles. So I thought my career was going to be in something creative. I knew it was going to be something using my hands, I have gifts with my hands. And I moved down to London afterwards and started working in the theatre. So I kind of had two careers because I was working in the entertainment business. And I also trained as a coach back in in Manchester. So I kind of had these two careers one has been going in the entertainment business, which took me from West End Theatre in London, doing museums, to then studying movies. And I had a 20 year career doing special effects in movies, which then took me to California. So I lived in Los Angeles for about 16 years. But in between those projects, I was always doing coaching and counselling with people because not every movie has the kind of special effects I was doing. I was known for making copies of real animals. I did animatronics, I worked for Jim Henson's Creature Shop a lot of the time. So we're doing very sophisticated puppets. And then in between those movies, I would work with different organisations doing counselling with people with trauma, and addictions and relationship problems, all kinds of things. So it really kept my feet on the ground. You know, one minute I'm working with Eddie Murphy, or John Travolta and then then a couple of days later, I'll be you know, at the Boys and Girls Club helping kids with their homework. It was, it was, it was actually a really great break thing. So that continued for probably 2025, almost 30 years. And one thing I've left out is that in my early 20s, I was mugged three times. I suffered a lot of trauma in my early 20s. And I had some severe injuries. My skull was fractured. The first one my neck was broken, C two and C three were cracked through. And I in the second one my eye was slammed on the ground by three men who tapped me out of nowhere and I have three herniated discs in my back. So whilst I was working on movies and coaching people and doing all these fun things, I would have these massive pain flare ups I was I had a walking stick by the time I was 27 years old. I was you know, I would sometimes these flare ups would bend me sideways and forward. I would describe myself as Audrey Hepburn on one side and Marilyn Monroe on the other side. I mean, my body would get that twisted, and I was actually rushed to hospital several times paralysed not being able to move my body from my chest down, which is quite frightening. Thank God it was temporary, but you know when it's happening, you don't know that. So I was continuously battling this body that was always letting me down and it wasn't just the muscular stuff and the pain in my back and legs. I had IBS I had chronic allergies, asthma, you know, like so many different mind body. Things were going on. Only I never understood what it was about. I just thought You know, this specialists that specialist homoeopathy journaling writing, you know, I just kept trying all kinds of self helpy things to fix it, and then, you know, traditional medical stuff, alternative medical stuff until about seven or eight years ago, when I came across a new paradigm in psychology, which I'm so happy to tell you guys about. And all my pain went away. All my asthma, my IBS, everything went away. And so I got very curious about the connection between the mind and the body. I started doing research and writing books. And so that kind of brings me to where I am now. Hey, so there's a lot of
curiosity about your story. And, you know, he mentioned names like Murphy and Travolta and, you know, that sparks a lot of almost this sort of fairy tale ideal. The word Hollywood evokes a feeling in people of light and airy, and everything's, you know, hunky dory and fantastic. And then actually ascribe it those traumas, which was huge, especially the female being attacked by a male I think this is unfortunately in today's society. Something that's been normalised Oh, of course, he hurt me. Of course, he lifted you know, we have these internalisation is now that it's almost accepted. That explains the physical trauma of being with walkingstick. Talk to me a little bit about the asthma, the IBS, these are not explained directly by being mugged. So what was the indirect link between the other health conditions and the physical trauma that you might have heard?
That's a great question. It's very perceptive of you. I'm very impressed. Well, at the beginning, when they were happening, I didn't make the connection, obviously, so as I got to understand how the mind works, and what I've learned is that we are always feeling or thinking, we live in a thought created world 100% of the time. So I see all of those physical things, whether it was the back pain, the IBS, the allergies, the asthma, they were all signals, they were the way my body was trying to get my attention. Now, I when I would tell an osteopath or a chiropractor, or the my doctor about, you know what was going on. And then I give them medical history, they'd say, Oh, well, you know, the reason your arm is numb is because the nerves for your arm coming out of your neck where your neck was broken, or, well, you have these allergies because there's something wrong with your sinuses. And I've since learned that. In fact, I learned this from Dr. Sarno. I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. seiner. But after all, my pain went away, someone suggested I read his books. And I got an incredible amount of insights just from reading his books, in the OT injuries heal. So like you said, all the structural stuff, those injuries had healed, but I was still having pain from them. So the difference between the allergies and the IBS and chronic pain that actually I don't see a difference now, like when they were originally happening, there was a structural reason for it, you know, if you're, if you've got three herniated discs, they're gonna heal. But my allergies went on for 50 years from when I was a small child until a few months ago, and I felt sorry a few years ago, and I'm actually allergic to olive trees. And right now I'm sitting in Jerusalem, I'm in the Middle East, you can't go for more than two metres without bumping into an olive tree. And I'm not sneezing after a lifetime of it. And I think all of it is because my thinking slowed down whilst I was going through life, not feeling safe. And I don't necessarily mean danger, either because I got over the PTSD stuff a long time ago, but not feeling safe in terms of, you know, making a mistake, being perfect, got to do the right thing, you know, like my job, like, it was very competitive working in Hollywood. So, you know, as soon as I didn't want to do it, you know, there was 20 people to take my job, you know, so I was always, you know, had to do it perfectly can't make a mistake. So all of that information is kind of sending danger messages to the brain. I've learned now that the brain kind of doesn't speak English, doesn't speak French or Spanish or Hebrew or anything else. It has to rely on my five senses for information. So if the information it's getting from my sensing the world is wrong, something's wrong, something's gonna go wrong, then that interprets that as danger puts me into fight or flight and sets off all these other physical reactions. Now why some people get allergies and some people get migraines and some people get IBS and other people get you know, foot pain. I asked a medical doctor that once who specialises in mind body chronic pain, he said we don't know. And to be quite honest, I don't think it really matters in terms of understanding it. All I need to know as my body is screaming at me, my body screamed at me for years, and I didn't understand. But then once I started seeing that my thinking was going way too fast, and I was scaring myself with my own thinking, then the pain kind of disappeared, the IBS disappeared, because it wasn't needed anymore. It's
interesting, the way that you describe it. And one of the things that we talk about a lot, is how the body is just trying to send us a message. Pain is actually not the enemy pain is exceptionally useful, whether that's pain in the sense of being afraid, being angry, physical pain, whether it's guilt, rejection, these are all feelings that most of us try and either distract from or numb ourselves from, rather than hearing the fact that there is a message that we need to listen to telling us to usually change either our behaviour or our belief, one to one of the two. So what was it that happened in your life that triggered the realisation that these were messages? What was it that led because a lot of women, people will go through their life never knowing that that's a message. So what happened that taught you to listen?
Yeah, well, I think it was come across this, this new paradigm in psychology that I mentioned earlier, it's called the three principles. And I had been in the self help, you know, personal transformational world for 30 years. And I tried everything Course in Miracles, I have a diploma in Enneagram, diagnostics, you know, I've done a tonne of meditation. You know, in California, there was everything you could possibly think of, you know, doing silent retreats in Santa Barbara, and now we're off listening to Marianne Williamson. And, you know, people are registering around their wrists and their writing and journaling. And, you know, there was plenty, and I prided myself on being a searching kind of person, I realised now that I wasn't very good at it, because I searched for 30 years, I've stopped searching, because you see all of those techniques and methods and modalities, they were all. They were all pointing at a misunderstanding. And the misunderstanding is that there's something wrong with my thinking, Now, I had got to the place where I realised the problem wasn't out there. You know, for years, I was trying to fix the boyfriend, the job, you know, like, the, you know, the politics, you name it, if only they would behave, then I'd be okay. Right, lose a few pounds, get a better job, whatever it was, you know, we all have things that we think is going to make it better. And I got to the place where I realised that that's not where the problem is, the problem was in my thinking, so I got very expert at, like thought hygiene, right? wasn't allowed any, you know, if you have a negative thought, you know, Here's a technique or tool to get rid of that get rid of that, which is exhausting. So the real pivot for me was when I had this massive insight, when I realised, from this new teachers that I found, while I learned that thought, is always moving. Thought is a spiritual energy. And I have no idea what I'm saying right now I usually start moving my hands around, we talked about spiritual energy, because who knows what that is. But it's this kind of Formless spiritual energy that we are blessed with. And as it comes through my mind, my little screen of consciousness, it takes a form. Now that form might be a thinkI thought, like do the laundry or No, I don't want to walk the dog, you know, those thinking thoughts. We have millions of them all day long. It can also take the form of sounds like if you can hear something, there might not be any words, but it's still coming through that spiritual energy, I'm experiencing it. Sight and also sensations and then when I realised pain has no substance, you know, there's tonnes of research to back this up, like, you know, phantom limb pain is the classic example. You know, if someone had doesn't have, you know, an arm or a foot, and they're still experiencing itchiness or pain, or you know, something in that limb that's missing. Clearly, the pain isn't happening in the hand. It's happening in the brain. So everything has this kind of, I want to say special effect, which is how people often ask me, how did I go from doing special effects in movies to do coaching people with chronic pain? Well, our brain has the most brilliant special effects department better than anything on me and Steven Spielberg could come up with and so when I saw that if every thought I've ever had has moved on every broken heart, every frustration, every anxious thought, every joy, the good thoughts as well. It's constantly moving, then I don't actually have to do anything to feel better. I just need to be aware. And so when I become aware, like sometimes it's like a physical thing like if, you know, I often ask my clients, where can you feel that anxiety and they usually go like this or you know, their gut or their chest or throat. Like what if you knew that was the wisdom of your body telling you to stop telling you to slow down telling you, you're looking in the wrong direction. So my, I can still get the twinge every now and again, but it's just a message. It's like tapping me on the shoulder telling me to stop and slow down, it doesn't turn into anything anymore. I don't get flare ups anymore. And the other way I can tell is by how it feels, you know, negative thinking feels heavy, it feels intense, or urgent sometimes. So the minute I get an urgent thought, or a heaviness to my thinking, that's another little tap on the shoulder saying, Hey, what's up? What are you up to? Where you going with that? And then as soon as I become aware of it, it just, it's moved on. And you come back to your innate well being, everybody has innate well being underneath all that stinking thinking. So this
new this paradigm that you've sort of been describing and understanding how you work with women, you mentioned, there were sort of three principles, three sort of keys behind that. So if you were to sort of summarise what those three principles look like, how you would, let's say, Take someone and work through the three principles with them, what might that look like to someone because for coaching, counselling therapy, for most people, being aware of the difference is not something that we do most days, you know, therapy is a very traditional form. Counselling is very traditional form. And my belief is always that therapy is very looked back and allow you to just look back, whereas coaching is looked back that use that to move forward. So what would these three sort of principles look like in practice?
Well, the, the man who put these ideas together is named Sidney banks, he was Scottish. But he ended up in Vancouver, in the 70s. And he called them principles because they are that like, if you look up the word principle in the dictionary, it will say like a fact that's true throughout the universe. So if you were to boil down everything from Freudian analysis to NLP, CBT, DBT, EMDR, EFT, BBC, ITV, whatever acronym you want to come up with, you will come back to mind, thought and consciousness. Because without those you like, if even if someone wanted to argue with me that this is not true, they'd have to use their mind thought and consciousness to do that. Right. So when I'm working with clients, that the work is very much conversational. And we talk a lot in analogies and metaphors, because that's the language of the of the Spirit, you know, it's just the best way and I'm not a big fan of taking my clients back into the past, because a the past doesn't exist. And there's no healing there. In fact, going back to the past fear, that's when you're gonna get that heavy feeling and that intensity, and then my body's gonna start screaming at me. So I don't do that. Right. It's we're not in denial. I'm very clear about the things that happened to me. But looking at them from a better frame of mind, then they're not going to give me that intensity. So the analogy I would use to really answer your question is, I came up with this woman, I was trying to explain this to a friend of mine, who is a caterer. So it's a food analogy, which works for most women. All right. So imagine you had a bakery. Right? And you're in England, you're in London.
Not in London, but yes, in the UK, but be in restaurants. I used to be a chef. Okay. Yeah. So I'm keen to hear this analogy,
right. So let's say you had a bakery in I don't know in Manchester, right. And you, you would probably need to order the same basic ingredients over and over flour, egg, sugar, oil, salt, right. And with those basic ingredients, you could make Victoria sponge and Eccles cakes and bakewell tart and all the wonderful things that you know, like English bakers would make right crumpets right now, if you were a Mexican Baker, you would need to order flour and sugar also and you'd be making tortillas here in Jerusalem. They're ordering flour, eggs, sugar or salt and they're making colour and babka and arugula and all these wonderful things we have here. If you're in France, you're making ghettos and crepes and you're ordering flour, egg, New York, you're making donuts. and bagels with the same basic ingredients. So there are millions of baker's all the way around the world. And with those basic ingredients, they're making billions of different baked goods. So mindful and consciousness are the basic ingredients of how we experience everything. So even if your therapist is taking into the past, and you're feeling miserable, you're doing that with mind, thought and consciousness, the same as if you're sitting on the beach, thinking about a fantastic project you're going to do when you get home, it always comes down to mind, thought and consciousness. And what I found is, now that I understand how experience is created, I don't need all those tools and techniques anymore. Because if I understand that thought is always moving, then using a technique to understand it is like, imagine thoughts are like trains. It's like dragging the train back into the station to work out how to make it leave, well, already left. So I don't get frightened if I have a funky thought or a criminal thought or an inappropriate thought, because we will do we will get a funky thought, right? It's just part of being human. But so what it's going to move on, it's not who I am, it doesn't mean anything about me, unless I think it does. And that usually happens when I'm in a low mood. So that would be consciousness, my consciousness is going up and down all the time, it's normal and natural to go up and down. So if I were to tell you about those muggings, that happened to me, from a low mood, I'm crying, you're crying, it's gonna be a disaster. Whereas in a better state of mind, I can tell you in quite gory detail, the things that happened to me in front of a crowd of 1000 people at a conference, and it's not gonna affect me, I'm not in denial, because my perspective is coming from understanding, possibly even compassion. Because when any human being in a better mood is going to be more open minded, more flexible, more, forgive, we are forgiveness, I don't need a technique for forgiveness, when I'm in a good mood. In fact, it doesn't even matter that somebody you know, hurt me, I'm just I couldn't understand they were having a hard time. Right. Now that might be sound very idealistic, but But I to be honest, we all got up and down. And so when I know that my thinking, my, my, my moods, rather, are a reflection of my thinking, they're letting me know like, the pain is letting me know I'm in a real stinky thought. My mood also is letting me know that I used to be terrified at my moods. And now I see that if I'm in a funky mood, it means the quality of my thinking is heading towards, you know, the basement. And I probably have no business listening to it. All right.
The way that you talk about the consciousness is by suppose the difference between having an angry thought and being an angry person, when we allow the thoughts to start to dictate our identity. I am the kind of person who's always afraid I am the kind of person who always is rejected, rather than we all have thoughts of fear, we all have a thought where we will feel a certain way that thought will be in a certain frame. But it's not allowing that to dictate our consciousness, as it were, that was your word.
Yeah, I mean, that's one way of saying I mean, the other point I would want to make is that everybody has innate well being like, nobody is garbage. Nobody is rubbish, right. So when we feel that we are worthless, or we messed up again, or you know that, that that life is too scary and anxious, then I can see now that that's just the thought I'm feeling in that moment. It's not who I am. Like, for example, like, I know, I've got some candlesticks here on my mantelpiece, right. So those candlesticks can get dusty and dirty. Now, if I didn't understand dust and dirt, I think I have to go buy a new set. I'd have to keep going by candlesticks all the time. But hey, you can clean them, right? The shiny silver stuff or gold, whatever it is, is underneath. Like, that's why like, clouds are a really good analogy for this, like thoughts are like clouds, they're constantly passing. And we are the blue sky. And even if there is the worst rainstorm, and like thunder and lightning, we have terrible storms here in the winter, because we're up a mountain and I lived in Manchester for many years when I was in university, and, you know, it's, I learned all about rain there. There's all different kinds of rain and Manchester. Right? Now, if you didn't understand weather cycles, you might think that you know, this is the only one lightning and storms but when you understand that storms always pass and it's going to move on. You don't have to order blue sky from Amazon, the blue sky Is there it doesn't didn't go away, we are the blue sky. So even if we get caught up in our thinking, which we all can, if I can hang on to that grounding, that I know it's going to pass that whatever I'm thinking is not me. It's just an illusion I just bought into for a few minutes or days or weeks or decades. If you think about my teens, then I know I can come out the other side of it, which brings hope, which makes it move even faster. And you come back to your innate well being really quickly, like that. And that's resilience. Everybody has resilience. Sometimes we don't think we do when we're thinking or feeling or thinking. So if the thoughts
are the clouds that are moving past, consciousness is our perception of the clouds, essentially, we perceive that cloud to always be there, therefore, we're always Yeah. So our consciousness is our perception of the cloud. Because these are all quite esoteric words, that you know, what the three principles? So that leaves us with the last principle, which is the right, so it's a difference between the mind as opposed to the consciousness and the thought.
Right, I'm loving your questions. So. So, mind, when I first came across these ideas, I wondered, like why said, why he called it mind because, like you said, they're very esoteric thing. So when you call it, you know, wisdom, or grace, or, you know, essence or something like that. And then I realised he kept, he would always talk about universal mind, these are universal principles, right. And Universal Intelligence. So what he was pointing to was that source of everything. Now, some people call that God, some people call it higher power, other people can call it wisdom, intelligence of the universe, it really doesn't matter what you call it. As long as I started to see that there was some loving source that was taking care of me that even in the times, when I felt like, I'd wake up, I mean, in the depths of my PTSD, I had PTSD for like, 10 years. And I'd wake up and I'd cry for hours, and I still didn't have a reason to get out of bed. And even in those worst times, I was taken care of whether you call it a guardian angel, or or you just call it, Fate doesn't really matter what you call it, you know? It, there's something taking care of us, unless I don't think there is. And that's usually when I've got caught up, I think, and I kind of feel disconnected. But when I know that I can never be disconnected, in fact, that these are we kind of given them different names, but they're, they're not separate things. They're all kind of merge. You know, there's a universal loving intelligence that is already making my heartbeat, and digesting my lunch and giving me my neurons in my brain are working. So I could speak and talk to you guys. Right? There's some kind of intelligence in that system. And what I've noticed by talking to a lot of people with anxiety for many years now, whether it's health anxiety, or just general anxiety, social anxiety, that's different. driving anxiety, is all different kinds of names for versions. What if I knew it's all the same thing? What if I knew it's just a misunderstanding of how this all works? And then we get frightened. And I forgotten that there's some loving intelligence that's there to take care of me. So it's not a religious thing. I remember talking to a guy once who was a physicist, and we started talking about physics and how, you know, I can remember from high school physics class that you know, everything's made of atoms. And when atoms move very fast, they appear solid, so my phone looks solid, I can tap it, but it's actually made up of a billion zillion atoms spinning around very fast. And that's kind of what happens with our thinking, when our thinking starts getting really fast, which is what anxiety is, problems seem very real. It's an illusion. Because when they get a, you know, those superduper magnetic microscopes and they like, you know, look at something solid, and they see there's atoms and then inside an atom inside, inside inside an atom. Apparently there is nothing, it's just energy. And so when our thinking slows down, we just come back to love and innate well being and that's who we really are.
Well, on that note, I think that's a fantastic sort of beautiful ending for today's episode. And it's been really fascinating hearing your take on how the mind body connection works and actually the mind being ours but almost part of something that is more universal, the mind your mind. Is my mind my mind is somebody else's. And that mind is there as part of, as you say, really, religions are institutions that take belief systems. So whatever your belief system is listening to this, it's about understanding that your energy is connected. And it is taken care of that it is safe. And it's been fascinating listening to your story from Hollywood to here. If people wanted to talk to you more, or find out anything more about what you do, what's the best way for them to get in contact with you?
Yeah, thank you. So I'm on Facebook. You can find me on Facebook. I have a group has about 3000 people in it. So just find me unfriend me and I can put you in the Facebook group. I have a website, it's my name on a steadily ch a n a s t UD le y.com. I have three books out. First one is called the myth of low self esteem. That one's kind of about trauma and set mostly in the UK. A little bit in Australian and New York. The second one is called painless. That one's there. All novels are all like adventure stories. Because I find it's really good to have characters do the suffering and the searching and the happy ending. And, you know, so you can follow along with the characters. So painless is set mostly in Australia, a little bit in New York and LA. And then the most recent one is called very well. And that one's about hormones. Because you know, so many of us have had hormone difficulties from PMDD, which is a diagnosis to postpartum depression, perimenopause, menopause, when you understand what's happening, like with most things, the severity of the symptoms can go away. So the latest one is about a woman suffering menopause and her two daughters. So they're all on Amazon. And I have a membership group where I have, you know, videos and coaching and stuff. So if you go to my website, all of the information about this stuff is on the website.
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much to her for joining us today. And thank you to everyone for listening. And I really look forward to seeing you on the next episode of health collective podcast and in the meantime, have a fabulous day,