This is my new blog, and starts with a personal story, not the one I usually tell about recovering from CFS/ME, (more on that on https://www.generatingchange.co.uk/about). Instead I tell a story that precedes that. It is the tale of my unintentional journey in and out of back discomfort. I am one of many people in the UK (well over 1 in 4 of the population) that is/was affected by chronic pain.
When I was 19 years old I was on my first trip abroad. I was travelling with my backpack. It contained over 1 week's worth of clothes, a tent, books and spare pairs of shoes. I picked up my bag to put it on a train rack above my head, and I twisted. Searing hot pain shot through my back and legs, and I have had bouts of chronic pain ever since.
At first I was cross, I couldn't believe I had done such a silly thing. What's more nobody around me seemed to realise how painful it was.
I wanted to go back and reverse time and change what I had done. However given that reality was as it was, I thought there was nothing I could do except take pain killers and put up with it. And that is what I did. I pushed on through and got on with life. I put up with the fact that often it was difficult or very painful to put on socks and shoes. I put up with taking time out for bedrest. And I put up with often being grumpy and irritable as I did everyday stuff that hurt.
It was only after many years that I started to question that belief that there was nothing I could do. I noticed actually that there were things that I did that made my level of comfort worse. I noticed that there were things that I was doing that made it better.
I had for example put in tai chi to build my muscle strength and changed the way I did things - for example not carrying things that were heavy on one side. Later I did the Lightning Process for CFS/ME and put in changes and took improving my level of comfort to quite another level. I learned for example to quickly increase my level of calm and relax my body,
For me key to creating change was starting to address things I did that didn't help. These were things I said, did and thought. One was a pattern of behaviour that usually started the little statement "it'll be fine". This was often the prelude to not following my own learnings about lifting heavy stuff. It was often a thing I said before doing something really daft like trying to carry a chest of drawers up a flight of stairs. Sometimes it was fine, often it wasn't and I'd struggle for days or weeks with discomfort.
I am still a person who from time to time periodically does back issues, but I am much more comfortable now. I train people how to use the mind-body link to improve their health, including making huge changes with the lightning process. I include training people how to spot and put in the practical how tos that make things better.
Creating change with the mind-body link is the subject of this blog. Putting in place practical how tos to make things better is the subject of the second part of this post.
and there's alot more information here: https://www.generatingchange.co.uk/blog
and the first stage of the lightning process for chronic pain is just £4.99 this week (second week Sept ). https://www.philparker.org/product/part-1-lightning-process-pain-tinnitus-fibromyalgia/
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