Emotional Recovery from Pain

Pain stabs you in the emotions as well as the physical body.  When suffering long periods of chronic pain, emotions are on edge at best.  At worst, you are the vilest person in the universe.  Care should be taken when suffering chronic pain to not allow your emotions to overcome you.  The anxiety, anger, and other associated emotions will make the pain worse.

What happens if you don’t collapse the motions and allow them to take over?  I think that Dr. Joe Dispenza, “What the Bleep” fame, describes it best with what he calls a shortened refractory period.  An emotional refractory period is the time it takes to free yourself of an emotion.  If you don’t shorten the refractory period for anger as an example, others may say you are in an angry mood.  If you allow the anger to continue, they will say you have a temperament.  If you continue in anger, it becomes a personality trait and you are off to anger management. 

I had my own issues after several decades of illness and chronic pain.  It took a long time, but I finally got there through prayer.  After I discovered what was happening with allopathic medicine, I became very angry.  How could an engineer figure out what supplements to take without a medical professional or dietician urging a recommended approach that would work?  I was in severe pain from degenerative disc disease and was about to die from central sleep apnea that had been improperly diagnosed as obstructive sleep apnea.  It was so bad that I would find myself holding my breath when fully awake.  Of course, the proper supplements allowed me to recover from all the diseases.  You can just imagine the negative emotions during this period that had to be overcome.

Whatever method you use, prayer or meditation, the feeling of the emotion is unavoidable.  The triggers in the environment will set it off when you least expect it. The key is to collapse the emotion as quickly as possible.  I found that when anger set off, I would first try to move into the thought of love, joy, and peace.  This typically led to forgiveness.  From there, I would allow the anger emotion to further collapse into sadness which I held for as brief a period as possible.  I would then translate the sadness into empathy and passion for all the hurting people.  This in turn would stimulate me to act.  To do more research or to write.  Obviously the writing of this blog was very helpful.  The other side of this process is to hold the positive emotions, love, joy, peace, hope, faith, and optimism, as long as possible.

This does not happen overnight, but can happen very quickly practice.  As you continue to practice, you will find your refractory period continue to shorten.  The key is to make the feeling of a negative emotion just a brief stimulus to turn into a positive emotion and action.  Do not act on negative emotions which you can see from this blog I have done many times.  This was not helpful as who wants to read an angry writer.  If you have to talk about it, do it with a professional, your minister, or a close friend.  Don’t wear out your friend.

You may want to borrow from the emerging field of neuroscience and set a trigger for positive emotions.  It may be a bell, a snap of the fingers, a closing of the eyes while turning the head slowly from side to side or moving your eyes from side to side, slowly rubbing your palms with the tips of your fingers, a word that you say softly to yourself, or any other trigger that is convenient to you.  Obviously, you don’t want to appear ridiculous when around others.  Mark Robert Waldman describes the states of being with the following hierarchy: Reality, (perceptual) instinctual, habitual, (subjective) intentional, creative, (spiritual) self-reflective, transformational.  As you release your trigger, you can go up this ladder very quickly from brief prayer/meditation to awareness or mindfulness and a new reality.

Whatever your emotion, whatever you goal, whatever your illness, seek love, joy, and peace first – Dr. Alex Lloyd.  Pray and meditate that you will be filled with truth and light. The pain is unavoidable, but don’t make yourself and everyone around you miserable.  In Spirit and truth – Pandemic Survivor

Thinking the Genetic Possibility of Health

I was very intrigued when listening this week to a recorded presentation by Dr. Joe Dispenza  and Bruce Lipton Ph. D.  If you don’t recognize these guys, they are specialist in conveying the understanding that you are what you think.  Another way to say this is they are specialist in epigenetics.  The name of the recording is “Get Your Shift Together”.

I have many times discussed epigenetic action on the genes.  This recording is an ‘eye opener’ in how our biology is transformed by our thinking.  I have said that it is essential to get correct vitamins and minerals in the correct amounts.  However, this is only part of the necessity of our biology for healing.  As we all know, the placebo effect is very real.  Our thinking and interaction with our environment is responsible for this effect.

As I now understand epigenetic action, it may be that the thinking is the largest part of creating who we are and our health from our gene maps.  That’s right; genes don’t cause action, but are only directions for our biological processes.  As discussed in the presentation, another way to describe genes is to think about them as blueprints.  You cannot simply throw a set of blueprints on the ground and have a building spring forth.  It is the interpretation and action of craftsmen that the building takes shape.  There will be as many different types of buildings as there are interpretations and actions.

A gene can have as many as 30,000 expressions depending on the inputs of our environment.  Now consider that there are 23,000 genes, then, we can expect at least 690,000,000 outcomes.  But it does not stop there.  It is the combination of those 690 million outcomes that makes you – you.  This gives us a number of unique individuals so large that you cannot even imagine.  That is 690 million expressions taken 23 thousand at a time.  I tried 690 million factorial to find the odds of being one type and stopped my Windows calculator after five minutes.  Fifty two playing cards taken five at a time give approximately 2.6 million combinations.  One in a million does not even come close to your uniqueness or your possibility.

Your thinking drives your emotions and the emotions release hormones that allows genes to express themselves into you as a unique individual.  If you have an emotion and you hold onto it for several days you may say you are in a mood.  If you continue to hold onto that emotion you may say that you have reached a state.  If you continue after that it becomes a personality trait. Typically we get into trouble by holding onto foul moods that eventually turn into a chronic disease.  You have to decide if you want to make yourself sick by hanging onto foul emotions.

It is important to have a physical environment that is beneficial to your desired being.  However, all of the vitamins and minerals or medicine for that matter in the world cannot overcome your thinking.  They can help you think better and remove some physical pain, but it is up to you to decide if you truly want to make a contribution to the world.  The key is to think of beneficial things while giving up judgment and ill will. Consider Galatians chapter 5.

There two things that I have learned as a Christians that many have not or refuse to accept.  First from the first sentence in the Bible – “In the beginning, God….”.  Second, there can be no forgiveness without the shedding of blood from Hebrews chapter eleven.  Jesus has shed all of the blood that is necessary to be shed for forgiveness.  If you don’t forgive, then it is on you.  Our Lord said it best when he was healing the two blind men: “According to your faith (or belief) let it be done to you..”  Mt. 9:29, NIV.  I have heard this discussed many times as to whether you have to have belief or faith to be healed.  I now know that this is indeed the case as Christianity and quantum physics begin to arrive at the same conclusion.  You are what you think and you define that by the truth of your self-observation.  – Pandemic Survivor