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For the holidays we gave our eight-year-old daughter a set of indoor monkey bars. That meant I spent a day with my arms above my head, screwing eye bolts into her bedroom ceiling. She can now get from the doorway to her bed without setting foot on the floor, which is useful because she tells me it’s made out of molten lava.
At bedtime I reached out to turn on a faucet and suddenly my mid-back locked up. It was incredibly painful and I felt unable to move without worsening it. I made the mistake of bending down to touch my toes, thinking it would help, but was then frozen in that position.
I’ve treated this same condition in countless patients. Often this type of back spasm is crippling for at least a few days – meaning missed work or travel – followed by a lingering stiffness and pain for a week or more. Frequently the locked area, even as it begins to release, is prone to getting retriggered if we move or sleep the wrong way.
Luckily, I knew what to do. I started locating and massaging effective acupuncture points on my hands and arms that began to release the locked up muscles. Meanwhile, I used certain visualizations and breathing techniques that facilitated the loosening of my back. Eventually I could move enough to lie on a small ball to put pressure on the muscle spasm while continuing with the breathing, visualization, and self-acupressure. I went to bed about an hour later than I intended, but with my back feeling 80% better. The next day I released the rest of the tension.
Several times throughout the process I thought, “This would be so much worse if I didn’t know how to do this.” I would have to find a practitioner and wait for an appointment. But what kind of practitioner, and which one? What if they weren’t available during the holidays? Would I have to be immobile during our holiday party? Would I be reliant on pharmaceutical painkillers? Would I be in a daze? Would I find it hard to get off them?
This conundrum is why I created an online course called Live Pain Free. It started with the advice I found myself giving hundreds of pain patients in my office over the years – and the realization that I didn’t have time to explain everything I wanted to teach them. Little by little, the course grew to include virtually all of the techniques and lifestyle modifications I have found useful for self-treatment of pain. It’s more comprehensive than anything else I’ve found.
Are there other things like it? Yes, of course. There are plenty of books and courses that teach pain relief techniques, some of them very useful. But most feature a single approach to pain, and I’ve never found a single method that works for all – or even most – pain. Even for a given individual, some things work one day and not the next. This is because there are many “ingredients” in pain, especially long-term pain – our history, psychology, lifestyle, body mechanics, etc. – so we need a blend of multiple approaches.
During the years I spent crafting this course, I discovered that beyond helping people to make their pain go away, much of what I wish to share deals with releasing ways of thinking that are restrictive and keep us trapped in discomfort. Although pain management is the issue that often leads people to look deeper, the ultimate resolution may be something so much more than mere physical relief: liberation from our resistance to life, the opportunity to accept and live in the present moment, the recognition of patterns that have held us back, and more.
The feeling of gratitude I had the other night – I want that for everyone. If you deal with frequent pain, if you would like to help a loved one with their pain, or you just like the idea of being prepared and knowing a wide range of strategies – some based in modern science others in Eastern medicine – check out Live Pain Free.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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The other day a friend took out a cigarette and started smoking it in front of me. It was a bit of a surprise, and it made me reflect on how much less I encounter smoking than ever before in my life. Rates of smoking among adults in the U.S. have fallen from 42% in 1965 to 13.7% in 2018. Smoking in kids has fallen from 27.5% in 1991 to 8.8% in 2017. Both trends reflect a decline of about 68%. At the same time, smokers have greatly reduced the number of cigarettes they consume in a day.
This is great news, and I’d like to help the remaining smokers give it up. I used to run a successful program to help people quit, and I’d like to share the approaches that worked well for the participants. Clients would get acupuncture and herbs to help with the cravings; we would do some digging and releasing to clear the underlying psychological patterns associated with smoking; and finally I would tell them this:
“You are not forbidden to smoke. Don’t feed the inner conflict by saying to yourself, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this.’ If there’s a shouldn’t within you, then there’s also “but I am doing it,” and from that, it follows that you’re bad, you’re wrong, you’re breaking the rules, you’re a failure, you deserve to be punished, etc. It perpetuates a whole mess of negative thoughts, guilt, and shame which are arguably as bad for you as the smoking itself.”
If they felt like having a cigarette, I would tell them to do six things.
Number one: Use empowering language. Instead of telling yourself, “I can’t have this cigarette,” which feels like you’re being constrained by an outside force, use verbiage that implies your choice and power in the matter, such as: “I don’t smoke anymore. I just don’t put that stuff in my body. I’m not a smoker anymore. I choose to only breathe clean air now.” And rather than telling other people, “I’m trying to quit,” which gives you an out, tell them, “I quit!” Or, if that feels too big, “I’m in the process of quitting.”
Number two: Take a minute to slow and deepen your breathing. Much of the appeal of smoking is that smokers routinely take time to step outside and do some deep breathing. Aside from the smoke inhalation part, this is a great stress management practice, so we don’t want to take that away.
Draw your inhale the whole way down to your lower belly, imagining you’re filling up the bowl of your pelvis with it. Then make your exhale very long, getting all the air out. Do this several times. (If it’s helpful at first, you can hold your fingers to your lips as if drawing through a cigarette.) If the desire for a cigarette remains, continue on.
Number three: Connect to the want-a-cigarette feeling. How do you know it’s time to smoke? Most of the time you’re barely aware of the feeling; you just respond to it unconsciously and have a smoke. This step is about making conscious the connection between the craving feeling and the act of smoking.
Drop into your body and tune in to what’s coming up. Don’t try to define it; just feel what it feels like. What exactly is the feeling? Where is it concentrated? What can it tell you about yourself?
You may tend to regard it as a yearning, but what’s beneath the yearning? The yearning is a response to something deeper. There’s some form of discomfort there and smoking is the thing you do to get the feeling to go away. But there are other ways to release it. The feeling is just a feeling; it’s not going to harm you, and it doesn’t mean you have to smoke.
There are many approaches to dealing with the feeling. A good place to start is by simply allowing the feeling to be here without resisting it. Can you feel the feeling fully? Can you invite it to be experienced by your whole self? Can you breathe into it? And can you open yourself and allow it to leave?
Just follow the prompts above and see what happens. Don’t judge yourself if the feeling doesn’t go away. If the desire for a cigarette remains, continue on.
Number four: Uncouple the act of smoking from any other activity. We don’t want smoking to be linked to anything else, especially things you do all the time. So, if you tend to have a cigarette while on the phone, a cigarette after sex, a cigarette after eating, or a cigarette while driving, choose another time to smoke. You’re going to keep eating, having sex, and driving, so we want to clear the association with smoking. Before smoking, do everything reasonable to remove yourself from other activities and positive environments.
Number five: Talk to your body. If you still want to smoke, take out a cigarette, become aware of our lungs, your heart, and your whole body. Then ask inwardly, “Do you want this?” or “How do you feel about this?” Then listen and feel for a response. If the desire for a cigarette remains, continue on.
Number six: Give all your attention to the act of smoking. Be alone, tune out everything else, and smoke that cigarette. Be completely present to the act. At whatever point the urge to smoke has dissipated, stop and stub it out. When you’re immersed in it, this point tends to come well before the end of the cigarette. And even if you do smoke the whole thing, it will tend to satisfy you for much longer than if you smoked it mindlessly. While my hope for people is that they’ll quit entirely, cutting down from ten to three is a great and worthwhile accomplishment.
If you’re a smoker I’d love to hear about your experience with these simple steps. And if you know someone else who could benefit from this article, please pass it along.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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A few years ago, my wife and I were at a school meeting and the teacher, a seasoned elder, was telling the parents about the various challenges our kids were facing. As we concluded she said, “You’ve got great kids. The thing is . . .” She paused and seemed hesitant, and then set her jaw and continued, “Look, I don’t mean to offend anyone, and I hope you’ll take this the right way because it’s important. Your kids lack grit.” As she scanned our faces, I think she wanted to say that many of us adults lacked grit too.
We still have certain hardships today, but because life is undoubtedly easier for most people, it’s quite possible to live a normal lifespan with very little grit. Although this grit deficiency is widespread among modern people, the upside is that we generally have higher emotional intelligence than our ancestors did.
There’s a big difference between managing intense emotions because we’re emotionally intelligent versus being unaffected by emotions because we don’t feel them. Grit often goes along with emotional suppression, which was probably a more common coping mechanism in previous generations, in part because we just didn’t talk about our feelings much. The downside was a narrowed experience of life and lots of dysfunctional relationships.
My point is that what we call “grit” often comes at a high price. But grit and emotional intelligence aren’t mutually exclusive qualities. We can be tough without being shut down emotionally. In fact, the better we understand our emotional landscape, the more resilient we are, the healthier our supportive relationships are, and the less daunting it is to step out of our comfort zone.
The cultivation of both grit and emotional intelligence requires a willingness to be uncomfortable. When you think of a person with grit perhaps you imagine them sleeping on the ground, plodding through snow in order to deliver the mail, getting thrown off a horse and climbing back on, or having to use non-organic soymilk in their latte. (Soymilk is almost synonymous with grit, am I right? 😉)
We’d be best served with a combination of both qualities. Grit without emotional intelligence implies a person who can be tough and tenacious, but won’t get to fully experience the journey and rewards of whatever they invest their grit into pursuing. As for emotional intelligence without grit, a person may fully understand what they’re feeling but be unable to stand up to their emotions when they threaten to take over, nor to stand up and say what needs to be said in order to clear the air, maintain integrity, and honor their boundaries.
One silver lining of this pandemic is that I've seen more emotionally intelligent grit in people than ever. It takes grit to make do with shortages of food and toilet paper, to find ways to get our kids educated when schools are closed, to figure out how to make ends meet when our jobs and businesses disappear, and to change our behaviors to reduce the spread of a contagious disease. The emotional intelligence aspect is not letting our fear be the driver, instead being guided in all our adaptations by homing in on what's most important. For instance: family, community, service, vibrant health, kindness, and ecology. It
means honoring the choice that mere survival isn’t enough.
This brings us to the crux of emotionally intelligent grit, which is that having a higher purpose is essential. Without it, we adapt without heart. To me, a high purpose always implies an intention that goes beyond personal gain. It inspires the willingness to be uncomfortable as we develop and maintain these muscles, and the world is made better by this sacrifice.
Be well, and not too comfortable,
Peter
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For the holidays we gave our eight-year-old daughter a set of indoor monkey bars. That meant I spent a day with my arms above my head, screwing eye bolts into her bedroom ceiling. She can now get from the doorway to her bed without setting foot on the floor, which is useful because she tells me it’s made out of molten lava.
At bedtime I reached out to turn on a faucet and suddenly my mid-back locked up. It was incredibly painful and I felt unable to move without worsening it. I made the mistake of bending down to touch my toes, thinking it would help, but was then frozen in that position.
I’ve treated this same condition in countless patients. Often this type of back spasm is crippling for at least a few days – meaning missed work or travel – followed by a lingering stiffness and pain for a week or more. Frequently the locked area, even as it begins to release, is prone to getting retriggered if we move or sleep the wrong way.
Luckily, I knew what to do. I started locating and massaging effective acupuncture points on my hands and arms that began to release the locked up muscles. Meanwhile, I used certain visualizations and breathing techniques that facilitated the loosening of my back. Eventually I could move enough to lie on a small ball to put pressure on the muscle spasm while continuing with the breathing, visualization, and self-acupressure. I went to bed about an hour later than I intended, but with my back feeling 80% better. The next day I released the rest of the tension.
Several times throughout the process I thought, “This would be so much worse if I didn’t know how to do this.” I would have to find a practitioner and wait for an appointment. But what kind of practitioner, and which one? What if they weren’t available during the holidays? Would I have to be immobile during our holiday party? Would I be reliant on pharmaceutical painkillers? Would I be in a daze? Would I find it hard to get off them?
This conundrum is why I created an online course called Live Pain Free. It started with the advice I found myself giving hundreds of pain patients in my office over the years – and the realization that I didn’t have time to explain everything I wanted to teach them. Little by little, the course grew to include virtually all of the techniques and lifestyle modifications I have found useful for self-treatment of pain. It’s more comprehensive than anything else I’ve found.
Are there other things like it? Yes, of course. There are plenty of books and courses that teach pain relief techniques, some of them very useful. But most feature a single approach to pain, and I’ve never found a single method that works for all – or even most – pain. Even for a given individual, some things work one day and not the next. This is because there are many “ingredients” in pain, especially long-term pain – our history, psychology, lifestyle, body mechanics, etc. – so we need a blend of multiple approaches.
During the years I spent crafting this course, I discovered that beyond helping people to make their pain go away, much of what I wish to share deals with releasing ways of thinking that are restrictive and keep us trapped in discomfort. Although pain management is the issue that often leads people to look deeper, the ultimate resolution may be something so much more than mere physical relief: liberation from our resistance to life, the opportunity to accept and live in the present moment, the recognition of patterns that have held us back, and more.
The feeling of gratitude I had the other night – I want that for everyone. If you deal with frequent pain, if you would like to help a loved one with their pain, or you just like the idea of being prepared and knowing a wide range of strategies – some based in modern science others in Eastern medicine – check out Live Pain Free.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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I have been dealing with neck pain for weeks and chiropractor just hasn’t helped. I’ll try this! Thank you!
You’re welcome. I hope it’s helpful!
Well done, as usual, Peter. Your exaggerated emotion and verbiage helped me better understand; “We would never go to the gym to work one specific muscle, alone, with no reprieve, for one hour solid.”
I look forward to your teachings and almost read, without comment due to time constrictions…but want you to know: Your work and time taken in offering these videos is helpful and brings about a more peaceful world.
Thank you Peter, info very helpful. I like the idea of rolling a ball near the rhomboid muscles.
Peace
Denise Patnod (;
You’re welcome, Denise. Yes, it’s a great and important area to work, with multiple layers of muscle – not just for the rhomboids, which produce pretty localized pain, but also trapezius, levator scapula, serratus posterior superior, etc…
Be well,
Peter
Thank you, Susan! I appreciate your kind words.
Thank you! I look forward to trying all of your recommendations!
You’re welcome, Kathy
Thank you. I look forward to trying all of your recommendations!
Thank you, Peter! Loved the acupressure points discussion and the lacrosse ball massage recommendation. Very helpful and spot on for the neck pain.
You’re welcome, Angela!
Wow! I’m really amazed. It really worked. I found the one point that took away my neck pain instantaneously. Thank you!
I’m so glad to hear it!
Thank you! I’ll share with my students! As a functional movement educator, I often use TuneUp yoga balls or the Franklin Method to facilitate release in the scapula and neck. Often, the neck is recruited to act as the abs or for the back body if those areas are weak. I use body rolling to help students release tight patterns and then support them to re-activate the muscles that should be used for their tasks. Since it’s spring, folks are getting out to garden. They often hinge at the neck! Ouch!
Thanks, Alexa. Yes, one of the other places I’ll often check is the psoas – part of the overall curling/flexion of the whole body from postural stress – and it’s amazing when the psoas released and then the neck is instantly better.
Wow those acupressure points in the hand really help! Thank you!
You’re welcome, Michelle. Glad to hear it.
Wow!! Those acupressure points are amazing!! Thank you! I suffer from scapula pain frequently. I think I’ll order a lacrosse ball stat.
Question: I recently had fusion surgery at l4 l5 and my low back pain is nearly gone entirely. However, now I get hip pain, specifically when I lie on either side. The pain is only on the left side and is deep. It seems to originate on the outer hip/high thigh area and radiate inward toward the groin. My Dr. thinks it’s bursitis, but I’d really like some suggestions. I gained a lot of weight with the surgery and am wondering how much of this could be related to that.
Thank you for what you do!!
Bergen
Hi Bergen. I’m glad the points helped. It’s hard to know what’s going on with your hip without seeing you. When the pain radiates toward the groin, it IS somewhat more likely to be coming from the joint itself, rather than the surrounding muscles. Bursitis would be better than arthritis, though. It just means the bursa is inflamed, which can be alleviated with acupuncture, massage, dietary supplements, and certain forms of physical therapy. Arthritis (osteoarthritis) would mean the cartilage is worn away in that joint, which is a harder thing to fix. There are also some muscles in the lower back, abdomen, and thigh that can refer pain to this area. The first muscles that come to mind are the psoas, rectus abdominis, and the thigh adductors (the muscles of the inner thigh) such as adductor magnus and adductor longus and brevis. You can look these muscles up, along with the words “trigger point” and see the common pain patterns they produce. They may be something a good massage therapist or acupuncturist could address rather quickly. You might also check out my online course, Live Pain Free, for some additional ideas.
Be well.
This was extremely helpful. I will try it and let you know how well it works.
Thanks, Sue. I hope it works.
Wow… I would like to know.. would the pain be found on the top of hand only or could be more on palm side? ( like inside.) I get headaces that start from base of neck, and shoulders, regularly. And sometimes sharp shooting like pains. May happen if IHoick up my water, or reach.for a.door, and it hurts. Numbness through put arms to fingers. So as I was trying these pressure points, I instantly found on the first area that it sent chills but it hurt, I rolled my neck as you suggested, but the sensations or painful side felt as if it more on palm side! Am I doing this wrong?
And what causes the needles and “sleepy feet and hands?” Over the years it has got so much more intense! Very uncomfortable!
Hi Stacy.
It’s possible to find effective pressure points on the palm side of the area that I described. If they’re tender, try pressing on them – if they work, great!
If you’re spontaneously experiencing numbness in this area, it indicates something else. It could be due to muscle tension in the forearm, but given the neck and shoulder involvement, I’d guess it’s more likely related to that region. It could be due to a disc/vertebra problem in the neck, though more commonly, it’s due to muscular tension in the neck / chest / shoulder region. Sometimes individual muscles, such as the scalenes, can cause a pain pattern like what you describe. Other times, it’s a condition known as “thoracic outlet syndrome” – where a bundle of nerves (and probably nearby blood vessels) are being compressed by one or more structures in the neck/shoulder/chest. Most commonly this is due, again, to the scalenes muscles at the front/side of the neck, though it could also occur from tension in a chest muscle called pectoralis minor, or a muscle under the collar bone called subclavius. It’s worth getting evaluated by a skilled massage therapist, an acupuncturist who specializes in physical medicine, or some other clever & open-minded structurally-oriented healthcare provider (perhaps an osteopath, physical therapist, or chiropractor). Good luck and be well,
Peter
Thankyou peter ive had neck pain for years due to a horse riding accident i will try this
Peter, thank you! Tender spots all around. My neck has been an issue for a long time. This seems to really help.