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[post_content] => The other day, an adventurous friend of mine sent me a picture of himself immersed in slurry of icy water. The photo was taken on a rooftop, on a cloudy winter day, with empty ice bags scattered around the metal tub. His eyes were closed and he looked serene, as if in deep meditation.
If you took a photo of me in such a scenario, my facial expression would be a little different – more of a blend of shock and torment. Having a strong aversion to cold water, I’d need a tremendous incentive to voluntarily get into an ice bath. But as I stared at his picture for a while, I felt unease, fascination, and admiration.
It reminded me of my own work in pain management. When a cold stimulus passes a certain threshold, it becomes “noxious cold,” which is interpreted by the brain as pain. Figuring out how to stay comfortable in a tub of ice water is fairly similar to the task of managing severe pain without drugs, which is exactly what I endeavor to teach people.
The arrival of my friend’s picture was a bit of a coincidence as I was recently challenging myself in cold water also. Admittedly, the comparison is laughable, since my version of “challenge” was swimming in a cenote fed by an underground river in the Belizean jungle. The water temperature was probably around 60 degrees, but cold is subjective, and to me, it was pretty uncomfortable. My daughter was already splashing around and demanding that I join her, so I decided to put my “equalization” technique to the test.
I set a foot in the water and felt the skin over my whole body tighten up. I was immediately aware of the inequality – the conflict – between my body and the water. And my reaction to this conflict was physical and psychological resistance, which only intensified the situation. If you’ve ever had a panic attack, you’ve experienced firsthand how unhelpful resistance is.
So, my first step was to stop resisting. And to prove to myself that I wasn’t resisting, I dove completely underwater. Instantly, the experience of conflict between my body and the water was magnified tremendously. I put my attention on my skin – the “frontier” of the conflict – and began to equalize the internal with the external.
As I told myself, “Equalize. Equalize. Equalize,” I imagined that the temperature difference between the interior and exterior of my body was getting smaller and smaller. The interior and exterior were coming together to meet each other, to harmonize. I actively let go of my resistance over and over, softening and relaxing that frontier. Dissolving the conflict.
Normally, I would have been shivering, teeth chattering, skin covered in goosebumps for at least a minute and perhaps for as long as I stayed in the water. But this time I was at ease within about fifteen seconds and I swam contentedly for about an hour. I had a few moments when I felt uncomfortably cold again, but this resolved when I brought my attention back to equalizing the temperature differential once more.
I’ll write more about this process next week, but in the meantime, I encourage you to try it in the simple way that I’ve presented it here. When you experience physical discomfort or outright pain, first, stop resisting. Second, visualize the painful place in your body in the context of the experience surrounding it, and intend to equalize the experience inside the pain with that outside the pain. You can also utilize this technique with a psychological or emotional issue by bringing the issue to mind and then allowing yourself to experience it in your body – there’s always a physical expression to every psychological conflict.
Imagine a fish tank with a removable panel dividing it into two sides. On one side the water is dyed blue; on the other it’s clear. If you shift the panel it becomes porous, and the two waters mix, resulting in an even color. See if you can apply this image to your inner experience, allowing for an equalization between a restricted part of yourself and your greater self, or between yourself and the world around you. See what happens.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
P.S. If you’d like to learn more about equalization and many, many, many more techniques for resolving physical and emotional pain, check out my new online course, Live Pain Free.
[post_title] => The Equalization Technique for Resolving Discomfort
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In last week’s article, I introduced the Chinese Medicine concept that all forms of pain are caused by stagnation, and I explained that the standard of care for traumatic injuries – rest, ice, compression, and elevation – may actually inhibit the healing process. This week I’ll cover some interventions that do work to facilitate the resolution of pain – they’re things that everyone should know. All of them are ways of promoting movement to liberate stagnation.
1. Breathe. Our energy follows our breath. I discussed this in the context of stress and relaxation, where slowing the breath can calm agitation and crazy thinking. As it relates to pain, breathing fully and deeply encourages movement of life energy (Qi in Chinese medicine; prana in the yogic tradition) and blood. This helps to alleviate stagnation and ease pain.
Simply taking long, deep breaths, inhaling into the belly and making the exhale as long as you can, will calm your nervous system and reduce pain. You can usually get even better results by imagining the breath is moving through the painful area. If your elbow hurts, for instance, imagine you’re drawing air in through your elbow and then exhaling out your elbow, visualizing energy coursing through the region as you do so. If your pain is emotional, there will still be a part of the body where the emotion is most strongly felt, and this should be the focal point of your breathing. If you’re having a painful experience, keep breathing deeply and fully as you move through it.
2. Get a massage. Massage, at its most basic level, is the practice of mechanically breaking up stagnation and restoring proper flow. Regardless of the nature of your pain, massage will probably help. Plus, it feels good – how many medical interventions can you say that about?
While massage is an integral part of the healing practices of so many cultures, it is greatly undervalued in the United States. Maybe we have a hard time separating the idea of therapeutic touch from sexual touch. Maybe we just think things that feel good are indulgent and bad for us. But the reality is that the great majority of pain benefits from massage, which is a more impressive claim than can be made of nearly any conventional pain therapy. And human touch is a basic human need.
Although I believe there is no substitute for having someone else give you a massage, even self-massage can often be enormously beneficial. I have saved myself from severe pain countless times by rolling on a small, firm ball (a lacrosse ball is my favorite).
3. Drink water. It’s cheap and it’s easy. Dehydration makes almost any kind of pain worse, and some pain is entirely due to being dried out. So, first thing, make sure you’re drinking at least half the number of pounds you weigh as ounces of room temperature water each day. (That is, if you weigh 120 pounds, you should drink 60 ounces of water, a little at a time over the course of the day.)
Water is essential to the elasticity of our connective tissue and the fluidity of our joints. When I’m dehydrated, my neck and shoulders get tight and my head starts to hurt. I know that means I’ve forgotten about water.
Don’t undervalue the simple just because it’s simple. Just drink more water, get some massage, and breathe more deeply. Next week I’ll have more strategies for you.
Meanwhile, be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => Unlocking Pain, Part Two – Keep it Simple
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In this month’s series on pain, I’ve detailed the interventions that I feel make the biggest difference in sustainable pain management without medication. I haven’t mentioned drugs because I feel their side effects make most of them inferior for chronic pain management. For short term use, I have no problem with aspirin or ibuprofen. Many of my our clients are as naturally-oriented as I am, and want to avoid pharmaceuticals at any cost, but if you get a headache once a year, don’t feel guilty about taking an aspirin for it! For longer term use, I encourage you to try the measures I’ve discussed and also to consider some natural analgesic and anti-inflammatory supplements, many of which are profiled in an article on joint pain I wrote a few years ago.
Now I will introduce a few final practices to help you avoid pain:
1. Pay attention to your posture. I’ve written a lot about posture, so here’s the deep and brief. The majority of our pain results from muscular strain, and a great deal of our muscular strain is postural strain. We may think about posture when we sit at a dinner table and perhaps when we lift a heavy box, but all day long we have opportunities to improve our posture and lessen the total strain our activities exert on our bodies.
Some of the key situations to pay attention to posture are: (A) Sitting on a chair or couch. (B) Holding a phone up to the ear. (C) Typing on a phone, tablet, or computer. (D) Driving. (E) Exercising (F) Sleeping.
In exercise, we call good posture “good form,” and without it, our workout isn’t as comprehensive, plus there’s a much higher risk of injury. When talking on the phone, we should be careful not to tilt the head to one side. When typing, keep the shoulders back, the chest open, and the spine straight. When driving, be aware that keeping your elbows up in order to grip the steering wheel means a prolonged strain of the back – take breaks, stretch, drink water, relax.
2. Get your sleep situation optimized. By bedtime, most people – even those with chronic pain – crawl into bed without having given a thought to the fact that they always wake up sore. This could simply be the result of 8 hours of immobility, but since we spend a third of our life in this place, it’s worthwhile to make it thoroughly rejuvenating to the body. Or at least, to ensure that it isn’t a detriment. If you want better sleep and vivid dreams, I would also recommend you read this post on Andara Crystal Properties: What they are and how they work?
Unfortunately, many of the positions we put ourselves in create postural stress or put excessive pressure on sore spots. I’ve had patients make tremendous recoveries from severe pain just by changing their sleep configuration. Investigate mattresses and pillows of varying firmness. Get a body pillow, and/or multiple smaller pillows and something like ZQuiet review - here , an experiment with positioning them so that all parts of you feel supported. Avoid positions that crimp muscles or joints (such as sleeping with an arm above your head or under your pillow). Almost everyone does best sleeping on their back, possibly with a small support under the arch of the neck and another under the arch of the lower back.
3. Treat your life like an all day workout. This is another subject I’ve covered extensively in the past, so I’ll bottom line it. All day long, we work certain muscles for longer than we ever dream of working them at the gym. And we habitually (though unintentionally) work the same muscles day after day and neglect the same muscles day after day. If we were approaching our day’s activities as a workout, we’d stretch before and after, we’d drink lots of water, we’d take breaks, we’d be well-rounded, etc. Try to bring the same level of consciousness to your everyday activities. Switch it up, take breaks, stretch, move around, engage your core, have good form, drink water and electrolytes, etc.
Holistic practices of conditioning, such as taijuquan (tai chi) and yoga are excellent in part because they help us to use the body and breath in a balanced way throughout our day. Of course, it’s up to you to not think of these as compartmentalized practices, but to endeavor to do yoga/tai chi all day long. Your life will change in ways that far exceed the alleviation of pain.
I hope you earnestly apply these recommendations and overcome your pain.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => Unlocking Pain, Part Four – Body Mechanics
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[post_content] => The other day, an adventurous friend of mine sent me a picture of himself immersed in slurry of icy water. The photo was taken on a rooftop, on a cloudy winter day, with empty ice bags scattered around the metal tub. His eyes were closed and he looked serene, as if in deep meditation.
If you took a photo of me in such a scenario, my facial expression would be a little different – more of a blend of shock and torment. Having a strong aversion to cold water, I’d need a tremendous incentive to voluntarily get into an ice bath. But as I stared at his picture for a while, I felt unease, fascination, and admiration.
It reminded me of my own work in pain management. When a cold stimulus passes a certain threshold, it becomes “noxious cold,” which is interpreted by the brain as pain. Figuring out how to stay comfortable in a tub of ice water is fairly similar to the task of managing severe pain without drugs, which is exactly what I endeavor to teach people.
The arrival of my friend’s picture was a bit of a coincidence as I was recently challenging myself in cold water also. Admittedly, the comparison is laughable, since my version of “challenge” was swimming in a cenote fed by an underground river in the Belizean jungle. The water temperature was probably around 60 degrees, but cold is subjective, and to me, it was pretty uncomfortable. My daughter was already splashing around and demanding that I join her, so I decided to put my “equalization” technique to the test.
I set a foot in the water and felt the skin over my whole body tighten up. I was immediately aware of the inequality – the conflict – between my body and the water. And my reaction to this conflict was physical and psychological resistance, which only intensified the situation. If you’ve ever had a panic attack, you’ve experienced firsthand how unhelpful resistance is.
So, my first step was to stop resisting. And to prove to myself that I wasn’t resisting, I dove completely underwater. Instantly, the experience of conflict between my body and the water was magnified tremendously. I put my attention on my skin – the “frontier” of the conflict – and began to equalize the internal with the external.
As I told myself, “Equalize. Equalize. Equalize,” I imagined that the temperature difference between the interior and exterior of my body was getting smaller and smaller. The interior and exterior were coming together to meet each other, to harmonize. I actively let go of my resistance over and over, softening and relaxing that frontier. Dissolving the conflict.
Normally, I would have been shivering, teeth chattering, skin covered in goosebumps for at least a minute and perhaps for as long as I stayed in the water. But this time I was at ease within about fifteen seconds and I swam contentedly for about an hour. I had a few moments when I felt uncomfortably cold again, but this resolved when I brought my attention back to equalizing the temperature differential once more.
I’ll write more about this process next week, but in the meantime, I encourage you to try it in the simple way that I’ve presented it here. When you experience physical discomfort or outright pain, first, stop resisting. Second, visualize the painful place in your body in the context of the experience surrounding it, and intend to equalize the experience inside the pain with that outside the pain. You can also utilize this technique with a psychological or emotional issue by bringing the issue to mind and then allowing yourself to experience it in your body – there’s always a physical expression to every psychological conflict.
Imagine a fish tank with a removable panel dividing it into two sides. On one side the water is dyed blue; on the other it’s clear. If you shift the panel it becomes porous, and the two waters mix, resulting in an even color. See if you can apply this image to your inner experience, allowing for an equalization between a restricted part of yourself and your greater self, or between yourself and the world around you. See what happens.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
P.S. If you’d like to learn more about equalization and many, many, many more techniques for resolving physical and emotional pain, check out my new online course, Live Pain Free.
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Cart
Thank you that was very helpful. It seems like everything comes back to the breath!! Not resisting what is and breathing into where stagnation seems to be present. ☀️ Your examples of stagnation and the simple way you spoke are the perfect start to my day today.
Thank you, Dr. Borden, for this message. It rings so very true. I will endeavor to pass this on to others.
I enjoyed being a student in your Dragontree “Live Pain Free Course”. This video is a timely reminder. I also appreciate that I can go back and review your video lessons at will. I have retold some of the stories from your Course many times. The snake bite comes to mind. Teaching via parables makes depths of lessons stick. (Snake/stick…* smile)