Impacting Body Systems By Suppression

Humans are peculiar in how they treat themselves.  We often negate the power we have inside of us to heal our mind and body.  We too easily give our power up to others, rather than going in and doing the hard work to heal.

Yes, I know - It isn't easy to heal.  It is pretty tough work and very hard.  Whether it is mental struggles, child sexual abuse, or physical illness - it just is not an easy moment in our life.

Please know, I'm not going to say that all medical procedures or healing paths you are on don't work.  No way!  There are many core truths within each path that help us get to the next point.  The only thing is, we tend to stop on the bench along the path and forget to get back up again on the healing journey.  If you don't do this, well - I do!

I was not going to settle...

I still remember back to the days I was paralyzed from Conversion Disorder.  I could have stopped on the bench and said "that's it" and no one would have thought badly of me.  Yet, I knew that I was not going to settle for where I was.  I was not going to accept the condition I had.  I was not going to accept that I could not walk, move and barely talk.

One of the biggest problems I see in how we heal our mind and body is pursuing things that suppress one body system over another.  They keep us hiding from the true nature of what is going on.  The fear that arises when we hit these horrendous moments of what seems like an impossible dilemma is enough to take the strongest person down in a heartbeat.  I know - I've been there!

Fear and numbness...

Fear and numbness in our mind and body keep us from seeing more.  They suppress our body systems and draw us toward the things that suppress our body systems.  When we suppress things in our body, other body systems are impacted.  When you impact other areas, then you start flipping the wrong light switches within the body.

Of course, it requires great courage to go deep into what is happening and find the awareness that we need, but in the end - it is your ticket out of hell.  The things that just numb the pain and or illness further are not as healing as we try to make them out to be.  They are more there to disconnect us from what is going on, which is not even close to being a healing moment.

Impacting body systems by suppression of symptoms and conditions in our life is the norm in healing these days.  Yes, I did those things too and they helped me get to the point where I started to see there is more.  So, don't discount their effectiveness, but don't get lost in them either.

Healing our mind and body is much more than 99% of the world understands.  I wish it was a lower percentage, but I really am saddened by how I see humans attempt to numb and disconnect themselves these days.  It is not health.  It is not healing.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Pursuing Symptoms In Healing

One thing we do in healing that is misguided is trying to heal the wrong things.  I don't mean to make it sound like a mistake, even if it is.  I mean that we focus and pursue healing symptoms more than we do in healing the entire mind, body, and spirit.

Every licensing year in the massage world here in Florida, I see the "new" modalities and classes come through.  Everyone out there is promising relief from pain, relief from this situation or that situation.  Use this electrical stimulation device and get rid of the pain.  Use this technique and alleviate the pain.  Provide pain relief with this modality.

While there's some truth and benefit to all of those things, many of them are so misguided.  Sometimes they offer a placebo effect all the time proving to you that the system works.  They get so caught up in their own paradigms of what is going on that they miss the bigger picture.

It meant painful discoveries...

Take, for instance, if I would have focused only on the symptoms of Conversion Disorder that I was experiencing, I would have not made it very far.  No, I had no clue how to heal my life, but it was in that never ending questioning that I found ways to heal.  The symptoms of paralysis, seizures and a numbed body were not where I needed to focus to heal.  I had to go to the core of those issues and yes, it meant some painful discoveries.

Another instance of when this applies is when I had a full body rash.  I could have focused on the symptoms only but little progress would have been made.  While I was trying to find anything that helped alleviate the itching of the rash, I knew that something was kicking it up.  Through deep work into the mind and body, I soon discovered what was fueling the rash.  No, it wasn't easy to go into this space of healing, but without it, I would still be fighting the symptoms.

Stress to a Physical Stressor

One time I was working with a client, doing to their office and doing weekly chair massage.  One of the ladies would often complain how torqued her back felt and how painful it was.  I would work on the symptoms while I was there and often alleviate it.  However, the next week I went back, it would be as if I had done nothing.  I soon discovered that the way she had her computer positioned on her desk was twisting her back.  When you apply the stress of the day to a physical stressor such as this, you're going to get pain.  If I would have just focused on the symptoms of pain in her back and not observing what was behind it, I would have missed the healing part.

There are times of course that you have to focus on the symptoms because you or others need relief.  We need to know that we can get out of that pain.  Sometimes, it is just a moment of "please take the pain away".  Unfortunately, if we're just treating symptoms, we're going to miss the bigger picture of healing.

I kept asking the questions...

I would have never made it out of Conversion Disorder and paralysis if I would have not kept asking the questions that I needed or searching for what could help.  I looked for ways that would physically help me and make a difference, noticing that they helped me heal to my core.

Sometimes we just get caught up in the symptoms as we so badly want them to go away, but more often than not, this does very little for us.  It numbs us.  It helps us disconnect from it, but it doesn't go to the core issue of what is causing it.

Medications and medical procedures don't always do what we think they are doing.  I knew a lady that had 52 surgeries in 48 years.  No one stopped to think about the overall big picture.  They were treating the symptoms.  When she started on healing her core mind and body, it is then that her body started to heal and surgeries and medications were no longer needed.

I know this probably sounds too easy to be true.  I know some will read it and say, "but you don't understand my condition" and "you don't know what I have to live with".  To that, I can only say, no I don't.  I just know what I've seen in my own life and that of many others and I will urge and prod you to go deeper, dig further, and work toward healing the symptoms, not necessarily treating the symptoms.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Healing VS Symptom Relief

In this video, Jim Fazio of Integrative Bodywork sits down with Dr. Paul Canali of Evolutionary Healing Institute to discuss the topic of actual healing versus symptom relief.  All too often we focus on symptoms rather than true and complete healing.

Dr Canali understands that as you go through healing, you begin to learn how to interact with the pain and suffering you are experiencing.  It is a whole new body knowledge that takes us beyond just treating symptoms and finding temporary relief from symptoms.

As Dr. Canali notes, you hear people say that if it wasn't for what they had been through, they would have never become who they are at this moment.  When you're in the middle of the turmoil, despair, and agony, you just want it to go away, but as you heal deeper, you find that there is more to your suffering than you realized.  It is a deeper progression of healing.

To see the interview, watch the VIDEO or click the video image above.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Focusing On Symptoms

It is a common error we all make.  It is part of the human experience.  I know, because I did it for years.  We get lost in focusing on symptoms, rather than seeing what is right before our eyes.  After all, the easy road is just focusing on symptoms.

You may be thinking, is this writer nuts?  What else would I do but focus on my symptoms?  While this is a good question and will get you thinking in a positive direction, it can be quite confusing.

Symptoms are just outward manifestations of something going on in your physical body.  It is like if you hit your thumb with a hammer, the pain you feel in your thumb isn't the cause.  It is the hammer hitting it that is the cause.

Unfortunately we often look at the pain felt in the thumb as being the sole cause of whatever is happening and we stop looking any further from that point.  Yes, you may need to deal with real issues such as in the case of the hammer, a broken or throbbing thumb.  It all depends of course, upon how hard you hit it.

However, the more important part of healing is not focusing on the symptom, but what happened that caused that to show up.  What was going on in your life?  What experiences had happened before this?

Let's say you wake up and your back is sore or your neck is stiff.  Often we like to say that we "woke up on the wrong side of the bed" or "we slept wrong" or something to that effect.  Unfortunately, there is more to the picture than we see.  Focusing on the symptom may get us to the point of applying heat or ice to ease the discomfort, but if we don't look to the root cause, sooner or later the ice and heat may not help in the way that we need it to help.

In order for this approach to work, you have to be very honest with yourself.  You can't even hide from those things you might not consciously recall in that moment.  You can't hide from the things you have tried to bury all these years if you want this to work.  It won't help to hide from things that you really don't consider to be important or much of a factor.  It is easy to minimize things and that's a human trait we all have. 

Let me give another example in case this isn't clear.  Many years ago I worked with farmers.  At times the animals would get sick.  Immediately some farmers would want to give the animals medication and while that might have been necessary in the moment, you had to stand back and look at the whole picture.

Sometimes we gave medications initially to get the animals feeling better and keep them from dying, but then we took steps to solve why they were getting sick.  If you didn't see the whole picture and just focused on the symptoms (i.e. the animals getting sick), you would end up treating the animals over and over again.  Sometimes some simple change to the cause of the sickness was enough to get completely past what was happening.

When we focus on symptoms, we lose the ability to see the root cause.  Sometimes the root cause is not apparent and there are times when it takes a long time to see the root cause.  However, we must not quit searching for the source or even how to discover the source of the symptoms.  It is the source that matters, not the symptoms.

When I was going through Conversion Disorder, I could have gotten lost in all the symptoms including the seizures, fatigue, and paralysis that I was going through at that point.  Fortunately I had some smart doctors that helped me focus on getting better, not on what was happening to me.  I'm equally as grateful that I didn't get lost in the symptoms and I learned to look forward to understanding the source, not get blinded by the symptoms.

I'm not going to tell you that the source of what you are going through will show up tomorrow or the next day or even the next month.  In my case, it took many months before some of those things began to emerge and even more time to clearly see the entire picture.

I did not get lost in the symptoms.  Instead, I kept trying to understand how to reclaim my life and discover more of myself then I knew was in existence.  I pushed back the paradigms of all that I thought I knew, and quit clinging on to the things that had not gotten me far in life.  After all, if what I was doing had not worked up until this point, then I finally realized that I had to let it go. 

It was in that embrace of all that I did not know, searching for the root cause, that I began to heal and find myself.  If I would have stayed focused on all the symptoms, I would have never made it.  It is a futile exercise that drains you of your energy required to heal.  Yes, I understand it is human nature, but in order to heal, it requires us to step our game up a few notches.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Stress As Physical Symptoms

From the talk I'm giving on Sep 12, 2012 at Southern Technical College, this is a quote from the book The Divided Mind, by Dr. John Sarno

Everyone is under pressure or stress of some kind or another, and we all have both internal and external reactions to these pressures, and then physical symptoms manifest in response to these feelings.  (The Divided Mind By Dr. John Sarno)

Tense Muscles - Symptoms Of Stress, Part 1

This is Part 1 of 9 Part Series - Tweaked Or Tense Muscles

Have you ever had one of those muscle spasms that about sends you through the roof or muscles that are so tense and painful. Hello – welcome to stressville! Tense and tight muscles are messages from your body. Your body is trying to get your attention about something. According to the Yahoo Health article, the person quoted on this suggests that this is just a part of the fight or flight response which is really not needed in our lives anymore. I would suggest that this is a very narrow view and is missing relevant pieces of information.

The fight or flight situation is our response to stress. If our nervous system is so overload and overworked where we cannot process stress coming at us, then we will go into the fight or flight response. Fight or flight is part of our nervous system and our biology. It is there to warn us when we are in danger but when the danger passes, we should be able to move beyond this and let go of it.

When the danger (or stress or trauma) is so intense that we it overloads our circuits, the excess energy has to go somewhere. It finds a home within us and within our muscles, our cells and our overall biology. Until we go deep into these danger points, we will continue to live with this pain and the tight or tweaked muscles. While we can find moments of peaceful relaxation doing all kinds of movements and exercises, we do not truly discharge these things until we go in and release them from ourselves. The good news is that it is possible to release and discharge this stuff from our bodies.

By consciously connecting and allowing ourselves to go into the fears that are locked up within these painful areas of our body, we can choose to let go of all of it. When we do that, we free ourselves from this and it recaptures so much stored energy (potentiation). As we go into these things, we not only get immediate changes in our body, but it sets us up to go further into ourselves and become more connected with ourselves. We are much greater than we believe and we have much more power over our biology than many of us think.


Symptoms Of Stress: (9 Part Series)
Part 1. Tweaked and Tense Muscles
Part 2. Eye Twitching
Part 3. Ragged Cuticles
Part 4. Cavities
Part 5. Rashes & Itching
Part 6. Nausea
Part 7. Sleep
Part 8. Forgetfulness
Part 9. Confusion



*For more articles, check out the Mind Body Thoughts Blog

Symptoms Of Stress

On health.yahoo.com, there was a very good article on 9 Surprising Symptoms of Stress. Please feel free to read the article and I’m going to take each of these points on different days and discuss it further than they have. This will be a 9 part series on the Mind Body Thoughts Blog so keep checking back for all parts of the series.


Article Link:
http://health.yahoo.com/featured/95/9-surprising-symptoms-of-stress/print/





Symptoms Of Stress:
Part 1. Tweaked and Tense Muscles
Part 2. Eye Twitching
Part 3. Ragged Cuticles
Part 4. Cavities
Part 5. Rashes & Itching
Part 6. Nausea
Part 7. Sleep
Part 8. Forgetfulness
Part 9. Confusion





*For more articles, check out the Mind Body Thoughts Blog

The Reconnection by Dr. Eric Pearl

This has been a wonderful book that I've been reading. While I don't necessarily agree with all the premises that he makes in his book, he has a lot of wonderful insights that are not necessarily part of the general knowledge base in our society. Dr. Pearl went through a major transformation in his life which he details in the first half of the book and is interesting to read and understand. I'm sure there is a lot he didn't share and for my inquiring mind, I would have like to see more about how he actually developed that which he does. If you are interested in healing work of any kind or learning more about healing takes place, this is a good book to read. If nothing else, it will broaden your horizons and understanding about things which may seem foreign to you at this moment.

I feel like I need to make the point as well that this is just not about healing but the human evolution and growth in life. It is a spiritual path but note that I did not say a religious path. It is about becoming more aware of one's self and the role we play in the collective society of humankind.

Anyway, here's a few quotes from the book that I really liked.

1) Pg 109: When most people think about "healing," they focus on the notion of someone suffering from an ailment or injury who "gets better." But what does it mean to "get better?" Better than what? Better than they were at some moment in their past? Better than someone else is?

2) Pg 109: Healing as we often tend to think of it, may well be about the alleviation of symptoms, diseases, infirmities, and other noticeable hindrances to full functioning. Healing is also the restoration of the person to spiritual wholeness. In essence, healing is this: the release or removal of a block or interference that has kept us separate from the perfection of the universe. Yet healing is about our evolution, and also includes the evolutionary restructuring of our DNA and our reconnection to the universe on a new level.

3) Pg 132: Never is fear so insidious as when it cloaks itself in the guise of love. Fear is the only thing standing between you and anyone, you and anything.

4) Pg 133: We cannot come from love while we reinforce the concept of fear. As a culture we decorate our fears with rituals, and then we fool ourselves into thinking that these rituals are expressions of love. We diminish prayer when we use it for protection, for what are we using prayer and these other rituals to protect us from? Nothing more than the amorphous nature of our fears. We spend so much time protecting ourselves from something that doesn't exist, its no great wonder that we have so little time left over for what does.

5) Pg 209: If nothing seems to be happening during a session, it's either because you're trying too hard or the patient is.

6) Pg 209: People often ask if it's possible to use these energies for healing yourself. Of course it is. Self healing is very simple. Almost too simple. Just like distance healing, if you try to make it more complex, it will be less effective.

7) Pg 217: So don't interpret, don't analyzed. Just be. And know that you carry the gift of healing - in whatever form that may take.

8) Pg 219: People ask me if everyone has the ability to carry these frequencies and become a healer. My answer is, "Yes. Everyone can reach this level but eyes are blind. It is only a few who dare to open their eyes and often those who do are blinded by what they see."

For more information on Dr. Eric Pearl, www.TheReconnection.com