The Body Doesn't Lie (19 page)

As we went over her Body Timeline, a few things jumped out at me. For one thing, she’d been very trim and “healthy” her whole life—she’d never smoked and had maintained a steady body weight since high school (partially by drinking four cans of diet soda a day). She worked hard to take care of herself. But since marrying her husband, she’d had several accidents: She fell off her bike. She broke a toe. She sprained a wrist. What was happening?

When we looked at her Time Audit, I was astonished at how much time she spent exercising and taking care of her home. She rose at four forty-five every morning to go to the gym for two hours, then returned home to get the kids ready for school, worked a full day in her home office, oversaw homework, and then did three or four hours of housework. Sometimes she wouldn’t get to bed until after midnight—a tough bedtime for someone who gets up well before dawn!

I could see the toll this lifestyle was taking on her. In addition to the chronic pain, her blood tests showed that she was trending toward anemia. Her hair was getting thin, and under her expertly applied makeup, I could see dark circles under her eyes.

I asked her to redo her Time Audit, but this time to use the Release the Time-Wasters exercise (which we’ll look at later in this chapter) as part of her Release work. Together we worked on revising her audit. With the schedule changed on paper, the housework and gym time were greatly reduced. Kerry reluctantly promised to honor those revisions and spend more time with her daughters and girlfriends and outside among nature. She would hike more and fold laundry less.

Okay, I said, now it’s time to make this ideal Time Audit happen. But I could tell, from her reluctance to commit, that something more was happening with those late-night chores. I decided to dig in as to why she was working so hard. I asked her if she could let some of that stuff slip a bit. She shook her head.

“He’d never let me,” she said, looking down.

Hmmm. “How about the gym—could you skip that a few days a week, and just take a walk? You could use some more sleep.”

“That’s our deal,” she said, shaking her head. A tear slipped out of one huge brown eye, and then many more followed. I waited until her tears stopped and she started talking.

What the Time Audit allowed Kerry to release was something she’d been holding deep inside for far too long: She confessed that her husband was very controlling, trying to dictate every step of her life, including the insistence that she maintain a perfect size-2 body at all costs. He had paid for her to redo her teeth, routinely selected her hairstyle and color, chose her clothes, and even insisted that she get a facelift at forty-two. This same unreasonable standard of perfection was imposed upon their home, which demanded dozens of hours of labor a week to maintain to his satisfaction. Kerry confessed that they hadn’t had sex in a year, but she was starting to be attracted to men at the gym.

Every week Kerry came in to see me for a treatment, but more important, she was sticking to the program and getting physically and emotionally stronger. I saw a gradual loosening of her shoulders, a fading of those black circles, a brightening of her eyes. As she released her addiction to diet soda, got more sleep, and stopped working her body so hard, the inflammation that had kept her joints in pain started to recede. Her movements became more fluid, her smile easier and more genuine. Before too long, she declared that she wanted out of her marriage.

Six months later, she was a free woman. She and her ex had worked out a custody-sharing agreement, and she suddenly had three or four days a week all to herself—heavenly space to explore all her long-neglected interests. Kerry found a beautiful house that she wanted to refurbish—but in her own time. She confessed to me with a giggle that she left piles of laundry around the house now—just because she could. She wasn’t quite sure what the next chapter of her life would hold—she was starting to explore that in her Radiate work—but for now, she was quite happy to be released, in every sense of the word.

When patients come into my office, I can use any number of treatments to help them release the pain quickly. With acupuncture needles, I can either work on the nerves locally, to release trigger points, or remotely, by placing the needles close to specific segments of the spinal cord where the nerves reach into the central nervous system. Whichever method I use, these needles trigger multiple effects within the body, one of which is to release beneficial hormones (such as feel-good endorphins and the cuddle hormone, oxytocin) into the cerebral spinal fluid and blood supply. These natural chemicals help reduce inflammation, lower blood pressure, stimulate positive brain waves, relax the nerves, and more.

All of these effects are also available to you in your own home. The reaction to dry brushing or meditation or trigger-point self-massage may not be as immediately dramatic as an acupuncture treatment, but these self-care options are available to you at any time—
you
are in control of where and when and how often you use them. You don’t have to find a practitioner or spend hundreds of dollars; you can experience release using materials found in your own home. And when you combine several of these self-care choices into your full Positive Feedback program, the results will last
much
longer. These biochemical changes compound one another, rebuilding your body’s Adaptive Response and bringing you back into the positive.

Perhaps the most important element of the Release stage is to
believe
you have this power to heal yourself. You don’t need to be an osteopath to make release happen. To be honest, when I’m preparing for a session, I don’t think about the science: I think about releasing energy.

Here’s my pretreatment ritual: I say a prayer before the session. I light a candle, which my patients can see when they enter the treatment room. But I also place a glass of water underneath the treatment table, which they
can’t
see—that’s just for me. I believe that the water can absorb some of the negative energy flowing out of their body. I use my intuition to guide me in releasing their pain. Some of it passes through me as well: During the session, as I feel the energy flowing through their tissues and into my hands, I often find myself yawning or burping! It’s as if the pain and bad energy had transformed into gas, and my body was releasing it, getting it out in any way possible.

Now . . . does that sound a little “out there”? Possibly a little crazy? Perhaps. But here’s the thing: These methods of release work for me and, more important, for my patients. Whether the methods are scientifically verifiable is absolutely immaterial. Because I believe that the energy is being released, my brain tells my body it can be calm and stay loose. I can be present with my patients and help them release their pain without feeling like I have to keep up my boundaries and barriers. This relaxed openness makes me a better healer, and it also makes me a stronger person.

In my heart, I have faith that these rituals tap into an all-powerful protective spirit, and that spirit prevents me from getting drawn into bad energy. But, devil’s advocate: Let’s just say I’m wrong and somewhere out in the universe is proof that there is
no
all-powerful protective spirit. That wouldn’t make any difference in how powerful these methods are for me! Call it the placebo effect (as noted earlier), call it divine intervention, call it fate—using the candle and the water as protection for my soul works for me simply
because
I believe in it.

This tranquil faith works in tandem with scientifically verifiable approaches to help me release my patients. This combination of science and belief also keeps my body in a positive state, letting me stay strong enough to protect myself from harmful influences of all kinds. This approach is my personal recipe for positive release. Because I’ve experienced it so many times to great effect, my faith grows ever stronger—which makes the effects even stronger. Behold, the Positive Feedback loop in action!

You don’t need to believe in a higher power for the Positive Feedback plan to work. All you need is faith in your own power to heal yourself. If you’re ready to move into the positive, I have a very simple program to do the elemental work to cleanse and release the toxins from your structure, function, motion, and emotion. Let’s look at each of these areas, one at a time, and discuss strategies you can use to release the negativity in each.

We’ve talked a lot about the traumas that remain locked in your tissues for years if they’re not released. These don’t have to be
major
traumas, either—they can be the childhood memory of an insult muttered under a mean girl’s breath, a constant low-grade worry about losing your job, or simply the chronic stress of your everyday life. Repeated triggering of your sympathetic nervous system and the resulting cascade of stress hormones leave an indelible trace of inflammation in your body. NIH researchers found that these stresses can change us down to a genetic level! Researchers studied fifty women, half of them caring for people with Alzheimer’s disease, and found that the telomeres of the most stressed women were shorter, leaving the genes more exposed to damage. In effect, their genes were older than their actual age. The genes of the women who reacted most dramatically to minor stresses—such as making a speech or figuring out a tough math problem—seemed older than the genes of those who had a more muted stress response. The caregivers’ stress response was most pronounced. The researchers concluded that it was their chronic, unrelenting responsibility that primed their stress response and made them more reactive.
¹
When your SNS is triggered by worry and overwork too often, you more easily move from alert to alarm at any moment. Those who don’t react so strongly spend more time in a composed, relaxed state—and have “younger,” more protected genes as a result.

Despite our culture’s emphasis on productivity, deep rest and the ability to relax shouldn’t be seen as simply a welcome escape or an indulgence. Indeed, the ability to relax is essential for baseline health. Without that time to release our responsibilities and our troubles, our nervous system never has a chance to reset to normal levels and we stay in the red zone, ready to “blow” at any moment.

Trying to shift this habit from keyed up to calmed down is the core of the Positive Feedback plan. Negative thoughts trigger the stress response just as much as negative situations do. That stress response creates muscle tension in your face and body, which in turn creates more negative thinking. But actively relaxing your facial and body muscles coaxes your brain in the opposite direction. Not only does your body feel more relaxed, but your heart rate slows down and your levels of cortisol and other stress hormones start to even out. In particular, the slowing of your breath helps your entire body to relax and calm down. If you can do only one thing to help yourself release, focus on your breathing—slowing it down, paying attention to the way each breath comes in and goes out of your body, allowing yourself to “hit the bottom” of your lungs, all to trigger your parasympathetic reflex. In this way, you take what’s normally an automatic biological response and turn it into walking meditation.

But you’re
not
restricted to just one Release technique. Let’s look at a few other means of helping your body release pent-up muscular tension and trauma in the structure of your body.

While I would like nothing more than to be able to give a hands-on treatment to you one-on-one, I’ll instead share a self-help method that
you
can use to tap into your body’s internal healing mechanisms and Release your pain
with your own hands:
self-healing trigger points, shown in the front and back illustrations of figure 14. These are the same trigger points that I use in my massage, acupuncture, and cranial sacral treatments with patients. Using a very specific technique (described below) at these trigger points, you’ll be able to press the
PAUSE
button on Negative Feedback, momentarily break the cycle of your pain, and allow yourself the space and the rest to step back and look at what your pain is trying to tell you.

At these trigger points, your fingers can take the place of, say, an acupuncture needle. Points A through N on the front of the body are the easiest to access by yourself. Back-body points A through O are best accessed by another person. Ask a friend to swap treatments with you. If you can’t find a willing taker, go ahead and try to reach those points yourself—but don’t contort yourself to the point that you undermine your own relaxation. Table 6 describes which trigger point have which effects and, in some cases, offers supplemental instructions.

Important: Trigger-point release is
not
massage; thus your hands should not be spread out. Instead, release the trigger point with your thumb. (This also works with localized tender spots that are more irritable than normal.). To release correctly, apply gentle pressure with your thumb, holding it flat, and moving it slowly in a circular motion. Unless otherwise stated in the chart, continue that motion for five seconds and release. Repeat until you feel that the resistance is gone (that is, when you notice that the muscle isn’t as tight and your thumb can go deeper, generally about five times); then gently move toward another area of muscle tightness or resistance close by.

Try to incorporate trigger-point release into your day when you first wake up, before you go to sleep, and anytime during the day that you need release. These points not only help you give yourself immediate pain relief, they also help you make the connection that
you
are the most powerful healing force in your life;
you
are your own best doctor, your own most intuitive osteopath. All the healing power you could ever need is right in your own body. These trigger points help you access that power quickly and effectively so that you can focus your attention and efforts on reflecting on and releasing the true source of your pain. (To identify which self-healing trigger points are best to release specific pains and illnesses, check out chapter 9, “The Positive Feedback Remedies.”)