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[post_content] => Almost everyone will experience at least one episode of back pain in their life, and many of us will have several bouts or even chronic back pain. While acupuncture, massage, and chiropractic can help, it’s worth having some tools you can use on your own, wherever and whenever the need arises.
I’ve been helping people get out of pain for the past 20+ years, and have discovered many useful strategies for back pain. Today I’ll share five of my favorites.
But first, a little theory. I’ve found that teaching my patients about the mechanisms behind pain often produces an instant reduction in their discomfort. A fundamental principle of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is that all pain involves some sort of stagnation. Whether it’s stagnant digestion, stagnant blood flow, stagnant lymph, or even stagnant thinking and emotions, stuckness is counter to wellness. Good health, on the other hand, always entails flow – a free-flowing adaptability to challenges, free movement of blood, other fluids, muscles, tendons, and joints, and freely feeling and moving through thoughts and emotions. So everything I recommend below entails opening up stagnation and restoring free movement again.
1. Keep Moving Your Body. After an injury, we’re often told to rest (which has some value), but total immobility usually slows down the recovery process. In nearly all pain, there is muscular tightness and restricted circulation. This stagnation is even more obvious in the case of swelling (e.g., a sprained ankle), where lymph has pooled in the area and gets stuck there. Safely moving the affected area promotes clearing of pooled lymph, elimination of cellular waste and debris, an influx of fresh blood – and a reduction of pain.
In biomedical terms, pain is an alarm that’s trying to warn us of danger or injury – like the pain that arises when you touch a hot pan. But it’s not an infallible system. It can be trained (or mis-trained) to give us a strong pain signal even when we’re not in danger. It can also get “stuck in the ON position” – not turning off the pain even though we’ve resolved whatever the issue was.
Experimenting with ways to safely move the painful part of your body without causing pain is a useful means of retraining the nervous system to deactivate the alarm and lower its sensitivity.
Also, it’s always a good idea to move around frequently throughout your day, since a sedentary lifestyle – and the postural stress it causes – is a major contributor to back pain.
2. Heat + Topical Herbs. Another way to promote circulation and alleviate pain – and especially useful when movement is restricted or not possible – is through the application of heat and circulation-enhancing herbs. Heat application promotes dilation (opening) of blood vessels. It doesn’t have the numbing effect that cold can, but in the long run it’s a more useful treatment.
It’s especially effective when applied in combination with external herbs or essential oils of plants that also enhance circulation. Many of these can be found in our
Muscle Melt products. Some of the most popular are peppermint (or its most active constituent, menthol), eucalyptus, cinnamon, fresh ginger, and capsaicin (chili pepper).
It’s always a good idea when using a heating device to check frequently to make sure you’re not burning yourself, since sensitivity to heat may be impaired due to the pain, pain medications, and/or the external herbs.
3. Stretches + Hydration. Dehydration often plays a role in pain. The suppleness of our tissues and the free flow of – well, everything in the body – depends on water. Especially if you combine dried out muscles with a sedentary lifestyle or exertion without first warming up, you’ve got a recipe for pain. I like to have patients combine hydration with stretching, to help get the water into the affected tissues. There are lots of stretches that can help, depending on the particular nature of your back pain. These are six that tend to be the most helpful.
a. Cat-Cow. On your hands and knees, slowing alternate back and forth between a fully rounded spine and a fully arched spine. Taking a five seconds to move from one position to the other. Repeat ten times.
b. Cobra. Lying face down on the floor, place your hands palm-down under your shoulders and slowly arch your back. Hold, then slowly release back to the floor. Repeat ten times. You’re primarily using your back muscles to lift yourself, with the hands just there for stability. You don’t need to strive for a big stretch here – just enough muscle engagement to warm up the lower back without causing any pain.
c. Child’s Pose. Kneel on the floor, touch your big toes together, sit on your heels, spread your knees as wide as your hips, then lay your torso down between your thighs. Rest your arms at your sides, palms up. You can lie in this position for as long as it feels good. Breathe slowly and deeply.
d. Lying Side Twists. Lie on your back with legs extended. Bring one knee up toward your chest, then take it across your body, aiming past the opposite hip. Your knee may or may not rest on the floor. Hold for ten seconds, then come back to center and repeat. You can also try placing the knee higher and lower to direct the stretch to different parts of your back. Generally, with a high knee (even with the opposite hip, for instance) you’ll target the lowest part of the lumbar spine. With a lower knee (even with the opposite knee, for instance), you’ll target more of the upper lumbar region and lower midback.
e. Lying Glute Stretch. Lying on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor, cross your left ankle over your right knee. Then interlace your fingers to grasp your right knee (either inside the bend of the knee, holding onto the hamstrings, or – even better – grasping over the front of the knee) and pull the knee toward you. You may need to use your left elbow to press against your left knee to push it away and intensify the stretch. Make sure your left foot is extended (dorsiflexed) toward the left knee. Hold for 30 to 60 seconds, then switch sides.
f. Hamstring Wall Stretch. Lie on the floor near a flat wall. Scoot your butt as close to the wall as you can get it. Gently raise your legs and place them with unbent knees flat against the wall (scoot your butt a little bit more forward if you need to). Tight hamstrings often contribute to a tight lower back and this hamstring stretch tends to be easy on the lower back. Rest in this position for 30 to 60 seconds.
4. Breathe Through It. In TCM, our vital energy – Qi – is considered to be circulated by the breath. That is, breathing moves energy. It’s part of why we sigh when we’re stressed – or relieved. Intentionally breathing “through” a painful area can often quickly reduce pain. Imagine that you’re drawing your inhale through your back, and then exhaling the pain out through your back.
Meanwhile, practice non-resistance. Don’t fight the pain. Just for this moment, allow it to be here, stop struggling against it, and stop telling yourself something is “wrong.” In fact, see if you can even invite the pain to just be here. And breathe.
5. Visualize Movement. There are many useful visualization practices for alleviating pain. A basic place to start is to imagine movement happening in the painful part of your back. Visualize blood coursing through the area, see energy or light moving in and out of your back, “watch” your cells shutting down the inflammation, making repairs, and soothing irritated tissues. Inhale white, healing light, and exhale dark, stagnant pain out of the area. Find a visualization that works for you. I sincerely hope these techniques work for you and that very soon you’re pain free and getting back to what you love.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
P.S. If you’re looking for more support for living pain free, we invite you to join us for an online mini-course my wife, Briana, and I are leading on how to give a relaxing, pain-relieving massage. Briana and I have over 40 years of combined professional experience giving massage and training teams of massage therapists. Massage has so many benefits: It relieves tight and painful muscles and joints. It measurably decreases stress. It strengthens immune function. It improves sleep quality. It promotes better circulation. It reduces fatigue and improves mood. And it facilitates faster recovery from injury and surgery. We should all be taking advantage of it! Since that's not possible due to the pandemic, why not learn how to give each other massages at home?
Unlike massage trainings for people starting a new career, this course is geared toward non-professionals who want to learn the fundamentals of good massage - even if you don't have a massage table or other special equipment. We'll teach you the most effective ways to release tight muscles and promote stress relief. We'll share ways to use your body so that you can work deeper and for longer without getting tired or sore. And we'll explain some things we wish were taught in massage schools that make for a better overall experience for both the giver and receiver.
Learning massage skills is a gift that will provide a lifetime of connection, relaxation, and effective pain relief. If you’ve ever thought, “I’d love to massage my partner, but my hands hurt and I can’t do it for more than a few minutes,” or, “I want to give a good massage but I just don't know what I'm doing”, this is exactly the course you need to gain confidence in your ability to provide a great therapeutic massage. Join us live to have your specific massage questions addressed.
And if you’d like to learn a bunch more about managing your own pain – including both Eastern and Western approaches, psychological tools, special acupressure points, guided meditations, pain relieving herbs, and altogether the most comprehensive course in the world for getting out of pain (I made that up but it’s probably true!), check out Live Pain Free. We’ve gotten only rave reviews from users.
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Do you know what finna, on fleek, stan, and W mean? If I didn’t have a teenager I probably wouldn’t either. (I’ll provide definitions below.) The older (and possibly lamer) I get, the more picky I am with my words, and the less attracted I am to jargon and slang.
But I’m guilty of overusing certain words in my work and putting my own spin on them – mostly because they describe a significant aspect of what I do and I haven’t found anything better. Case in point: the words expand and expansion.
I use the word expand all the time to describe the process of transcending your ego, getting outside your comfort zone, and going beyond your human conditioning. Expansion means recognizing that these limitations aren’t real, and even discovering that who you really are goes beyond your personality and even beyond your body.
I use the term often because I think this is generally a really good thing and I believe it represents a form of personal evolution.
Sign up now for Sacred Expansion – an 8 week course devoted to your healing and evolution!
When we don’t challenge our conditioning, we operate according to deep mental programs that define who we can be, what we think, the range of emotions available to us, etc. This “unexpanded” state restricts our freedom and tends to limit our depth of engagement with life – our body awareness, how deep we’re willing to go in relationships with others (and ourselves), our connection to the natural world, our openness to spiritual experiences, etc.
Expanded versus unexpanded isn’t a black-and-white situation. Expansion is relative, always changing, and there’s no end to it. To be open to expanding beyond our limitations wherever, whenever, and however we can is a way of life.
To be clear, “expanded” isn’t the same as happy. There are plenty of people who are happy the way they are, even if there isn’t much (or any) Spirit or growth in their lives. If you’re happy, you’re happy, and I don’t want to try to convince you otherwise!
But once you have an inkling of recognition that there’s more to life than what’s on the surface, it awakens your inner seeker, which has an insatiable appetite for the truth and perpetual inclination toward expansion.
Where do we start? There are countless ways to promote your expansion. In my opinion, two of the most vital and powerful are these:
- Cultivate an inner YES. When life is uncomfortable, we’re pressing against our limitations. When we resist and say “no” to what’s arising, we stay small and confined. When we say yes, the experience changes. When we say, “I’m open to this,” or, “How can I make this an opportunity?” or “How can I grow through this?” or “What is this showing me?” or “How does this support my highest good?” these are all ways of saying YES and promoting expansion.
- Be innocent and curious. One of the biggest hindrances to expansion is all of the shoulds we’re imposing on ourselves and the rest of the world. Some examples: People should let me into the lane when I have my turn signal on! I should be more successful at this point in my life. He should appreciate everything I do around the house! I shouldn’t be sick. Taxes shouldn’t be so high! We all do it. Just watch your mind and you’ll see. There’s a certain arrogance to “should,” as it implies that you know how the world is supposed to be and it’s wrong. Instead, what happens when you release your “shoulds” and your grievances? What happens when you just become innocent and curious?
The third way that I recommend you support your expansion is through our upcoming course, Sacred Expansion. It starts April 1st.
It’s an 8 week journey led by my wife, Briana. She’ll guide you through a nature-based framework for recognizing where you’re limited and discovering who you could be without those limitations; releasing baggage; deepening your connection to Spirit; and building the resilience and courage to continue the process on your own.
Initially, Sacred Expansion was the preliminary phase of our Dragontree Life Coaching training program. We felt this process of “cleaning house” and opening oneself to growth and change was an essential prerequisite before guiding others.
But the response in the first couple years was that the Sacred Expansion portion of the training was, for many students, the most transformative part. So, we decided to make it available to people as a stand-alone course.
Here’s what one of our graduates had to say about it:
Sacred expansion is like a crash course in being a better human. So often, we stop examining what we do and what we say in a meaningful way – we get so steeped in assumptions and learned behaviors, and patterned thinking, that we forget there are other ways to look at things. This is challenging self-work, but at the same time, Sacred Expansion is so gentle, so loving, it’s almost as though the lessons and questions are hugged into you, they are absorbed so sweetly, so completely without judgment or blame or shame. – Heather Wells
I highly encourage you to sign up!
Click here to learn more about it.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
P.S. for those who are out of the Gen Z slang loop. . .
Finna: like a contraction of “fixing to,” as in “going to” – “I’m finna go to the store”
Fleek / On Fleek: flawlessly styled, groomed, perfect, etc. “That outfit is on fleek! That song is fleek!”
Stan: a very zealous or enthusiastic fan
W: abbreviation for “win.” Used to congratulate someone or express a victory or success.
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We recently opened enrollment for this year’s life coach training program, which always feels exciting to me. There’s a buzz of activity as the new participants get oriented and we’re introduced to the next group of open-hearted individuals who are devoting themselves to helping others. First everyone goes through an eight-week program called Sacred Expansion which is kind of like “cleaning house” before we get into the details of how to help others.
Of the many topics we cover in the coaching curriculum, one that people often mention as being both incredibly basic and incredibly life changing is our relationship with agreements. Agreements can be seen as a primary tool of creation. Ideally, the process begins with getting in touch with the impulse to create – what is sometimes called “divine will” – and is informed by your life purpose. This way the effort comes with its own batteries, rather than draining us. Having a clear vision and setting a clear intention of what we want to create are also important.
When we then make an agreement (or agreements) in service to this intention – with ourselves, with others, with the universe – we initiate what my teacher Matt Garrigan called “a contract for fulfillment.” We engage the power of our word. And as we follow through on our agreements, momentum builds and opportunities arise. It never fails.
Except when it does.
The problem is, we often make agreements without any of the consciousness I described above, and then we consider it no big deal to break those agreements. While we might recognize, sadly, that what we intended never materialized, we often have a blind spot around the fact that we didn’t keep the agreements we made to support the intention. One of the things our coaches learn is how to bring clarity to this process for their clients (in a non-blamey way); it’s very gratifying for both the coach and the client. Not only does the client start achieving their goals, most importantly, they learn to trust themselves and their power.
Today I’m going to share with you a basic method for rebuilding the self-trust that’s diminished by broken agreements.
When we make agreements with others, most of us understand the consequences of breaking them. If you break agreements with your boss, you might lose your job. If you break agreements with your friends, you might lose your friends. If you break agreements with family, you might hurt their feelings and lose their trust. In all cases, a relationship will be damaged.
So, what happens when you don’t keep an agreement with yourself? It’s not so different, really. A relationship is damaged, it’s just harder to see. Let’s say you decide to work out every day for a month but you quit after five days. There doesn’t seem to be anyone getting screwed by breaking this agreement. Nobody is mad at you. Of course you’ll let yourself off the hook. But your self-trust is eroded.
If you forgot to pick up your child from school, you would probably make it a priority to regain their trust because you care so much about the relationship. But, chances are, you don’t do that when you break an agreement with yourself. You may be barely aware that an agreement was broken. This matters in many big and small ways.
If you serially break agreements with yourself – you don’t get things done when you say you’ll get them done, you don’t wake up when you say you’ll wake up, you don’t treat your body as healthily as you tell yourself you will – the material consequences are unfortunate, but small. The bigger consequences are things like not being able to count on yourself or giving up your big dreams for ones that are more “realistic” given your history. If you have a habit of breaking agreements with yourself, and now you want to do something big and important, your mind will have a lot of evidence to undermine you.
Here are four important steps for reestablishing self-trust.
1: Become clear about what constitutes an agreement and be conscious of the agreements you make. If you had a passing thought about washing the car and then it didn’t get done, is this a broken agreement? Well, you need to decide that (before it happens). I recommend choosing a format for making official agreements with yourself and sticking to it. If you want to make agreement with yourself to wash the car, you might think to yourself, “I agree to wash the car today,” or you might say it out loud, or you might write it down. Just come up with the terms for what constitutes an actual agreement.
2: Be forthright and clean with yourself. You know whether you meant something to be an agreement or not, and you can’t really hide from yourself. But we pretend to hide, keeping our agreements nebulous, by maintaining a cloudy mental environment. Did I say ONE more game of Candy Crush and then I’d walk the dog? I think I meant to say SIXTY games…Or, I know I planned to work out today, but what I meant was that I would work out unless something more important came up. Be honest. As you distractedly lift your two pound dumbbells while watching The Late Show, ask yourself, Is THIS what I intended when I agreed to work out every morning? Do your best. Think about the quality of participation a boss or client would expect of you, and deliver at that level to yourself.
3: Don’t make too many agreements, especially as you begin this process. If you wanted to get an estranged friend to trust you again after you missed five consecutive lunch dates, you wouldn’t start out by offering to edit their thesis, refinish their floors, and meet them to watch the sunrise every day for a year. You’d be setting yourself up for more damaged trust. Instead, you might ask them earnestly to give you one more chance at lunch, and you’d make sure to get there a half hour early.
The process of reestablishing self-trust starts with baby steps. For the first few days, you might want your only official agreements to be things you’d probably do anyway, like, Wake up by no later than 7 o’clock, and, Have dinner ready by 6:30. Do this so you can become more conscious of your agreements with yourself and the be sure to keep them. Over time, you can add a bit more to your list. But never make an agreement you think you’re likely to break.
4: Clean up broken agreements. Treat yourself like a friend. If you broke an agreement with a friend, you would acknowledge the damage that was done (“I feel terrible about missing your show. I’m really sorry. I cherish you as a friend and I want to be there for you.”). And you might do something special the next time you saw them (like bringing them flowers or helping them with a project) to demonstrate your interest in fixing the relationship.
Likewise, if you break an agreement with yourself, rather than beating yourself up, acknowledge and repair the damage. Believe it or not, there really is a hurt part of yourself – a part of you that takes these broken agreements to mean, I don’t need to keep my agreements with you, because you don’t matter. Affirm to yourself that you do matter and that you can be trusted. Then make a new agreement that goes beyond the one you broke, and be sure to keep it. Or, if you broke the agreement because it wasn’t a realistic agreement (which means you had no business making it in the first place), make a new agreement about something that supports you in another way (some act of self care, for instance), and keep it. Be a person of integrity.
Eventually, you’ll have an impressive mental dossier on your trustworthiness. In essence, you will have demonstrated to yourself hundreds or thousands of times that what you say is going to happen … happens. Then your word will be as good as law. When you say to yourself, I’m going to change the world, there will be a mountain of evidence to indicate that big things are coming. If anything is out of whack in your life, turn back to your agreements, start keeping them, and watch how things fall into place.
If you’re intrigued by the idea of teaching this to others, guiding them through the process of coming into their power and sharing their gifts with the world – then check out our coaching program. Enrollment will be open until April, but Early Bird Pricing ends Tuesday Feb 23rd at midnight!
Be well,
Peter
P.S. One more hint: when you’re in a state of trust, your heart will feel open. When you’re not trusting, your heart will feel tight, clenched, or closed. Tune in.
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[post_content] => Almost everyone will experience at least one episode of back pain in their life, and many of us will have several bouts or even chronic back pain. While acupuncture, massage, and chiropractic can help, it’s worth having some tools you can use on your own, wherever and whenever the need arises.
I’ve been helping people get out of pain for the past 20+ years, and have discovered many useful strategies for back pain. Today I’ll share five of my favorites.
But first, a little theory. I’ve found that teaching my patients about the mechanisms behind pain often produces an instant reduction in their discomfort. A fundamental principle of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is that all pain involves some sort of stagnation. Whether it’s stagnant digestion, stagnant blood flow, stagnant lymph, or even stagnant thinking and emotions, stuckness is counter to wellness. Good health, on the other hand, always entails flow – a free-flowing adaptability to challenges, free movement of blood, other fluids, muscles, tendons, and joints, and freely feeling and moving through thoughts and emotions. So everything I recommend below entails opening up stagnation and restoring free movement again.
1. Keep Moving Your Body. After an injury, we’re often told to rest (which has some value), but total immobility usually slows down the recovery process. In nearly all pain, there is muscular tightness and restricted circulation. This stagnation is even more obvious in the case of swelling (e.g., a sprained ankle), where lymph has pooled in the area and gets stuck there. Safely moving the affected area promotes clearing of pooled lymph, elimination of cellular waste and debris, an influx of fresh blood – and a reduction of pain.
In biomedical terms, pain is an alarm that’s trying to warn us of danger or injury – like the pain that arises when you touch a hot pan. But it’s not an infallible system. It can be trained (or mis-trained) to give us a strong pain signal even when we’re not in danger. It can also get “stuck in the ON position” – not turning off the pain even though we’ve resolved whatever the issue was.
Experimenting with ways to safely move the painful part of your body without causing pain is a useful means of retraining the nervous system to deactivate the alarm and lower its sensitivity.
Also, it’s always a good idea to move around frequently throughout your day, since a sedentary lifestyle – and the postural stress it causes – is a major contributor to back pain.
2. Heat + Topical Herbs. Another way to promote circulation and alleviate pain – and especially useful when movement is restricted or not possible – is through the application of heat and circulation-enhancing herbs. Heat application promotes dilation (opening) of blood vessels. It doesn’t have the numbing effect that cold can, but in the long run it’s a more useful treatment.
It’s especially effective when applied in combination with external herbs or essential oils of plants that also enhance circulation. Many of these can be found in our
Muscle Melt products. Some of the most popular are peppermint (or its most active constituent, menthol), eucalyptus, cinnamon, fresh ginger, and capsaicin (chili pepper).
It’s always a good idea when using a heating device to check frequently to make sure you’re not burning yourself, since sensitivity to heat may be impaired due to the pain, pain medications, and/or the external herbs.
3. Stretches + Hydration. Dehydration often plays a role in pain. The suppleness of our tissues and the free flow of – well, everything in the body – depends on water. Especially if you combine dried out muscles with a sedentary lifestyle or exertion without first warming up, you’ve got a recipe for pain. I like to have patients combine hydration with stretching, to help get the water into the affected tissues. There are lots of stretches that can help, depending on the particular nature of your back pain. These are six that tend to be the most helpful.
a. Cat-Cow. On your hands and knees, slowing alternate back and forth between a fully rounded spine and a fully arched spine. Taking a five seconds to move from one position to the other. Repeat ten times.
b. Cobra. Lying face down on the floor, place your hands palm-down under your shoulders and slowly arch your back. Hold, then slowly release back to the floor. Repeat ten times. You’re primarily using your back muscles to lift yourself, with the hands just there for stability. You don’t need to strive for a big stretch here – just enough muscle engagement to warm up the lower back without causing any pain.
c. Child’s Pose. Kneel on the floor, touch your big toes together, sit on your heels, spread your knees as wide as your hips, then lay your torso down between your thighs. Rest your arms at your sides, palms up. You can lie in this position for as long as it feels good. Breathe slowly and deeply.
d. Lying Side Twists. Lie on your back with legs extended. Bring one knee up toward your chest, then take it across your body, aiming past the opposite hip. Your knee may or may not rest on the floor. Hold for ten seconds, then come back to center and repeat. You can also try placing the knee higher and lower to direct the stretch to different parts of your back. Generally, with a high knee (even with the opposite hip, for instance) you’ll target the lowest part of the lumbar spine. With a lower knee (even with the opposite knee, for instance), you’ll target more of the upper lumbar region and lower midback.
e. Lying Glute Stretch. Lying on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor, cross your left ankle over your right knee. Then interlace your fingers to grasp your right knee (either inside the bend of the knee, holding onto the hamstrings, or – even better – grasping over the front of the knee) and pull the knee toward you. You may need to use your left elbow to press against your left knee to push it away and intensify the stretch. Make sure your left foot is extended (dorsiflexed) toward the left knee. Hold for 30 to 60 seconds, then switch sides.
f. Hamstring Wall Stretch. Lie on the floor near a flat wall. Scoot your butt as close to the wall as you can get it. Gently raise your legs and place them with unbent knees flat against the wall (scoot your butt a little bit more forward if you need to). Tight hamstrings often contribute to a tight lower back and this hamstring stretch tends to be easy on the lower back. Rest in this position for 30 to 60 seconds.
4. Breathe Through It. In TCM, our vital energy – Qi – is considered to be circulated by the breath. That is, breathing moves energy. It’s part of why we sigh when we’re stressed – or relieved. Intentionally breathing “through” a painful area can often quickly reduce pain. Imagine that you’re drawing your inhale through your back, and then exhaling the pain out through your back.
Meanwhile, practice non-resistance. Don’t fight the pain. Just for this moment, allow it to be here, stop struggling against it, and stop telling yourself something is “wrong.” In fact, see if you can even invite the pain to just be here. And breathe.
5. Visualize Movement. There are many useful visualization practices for alleviating pain. A basic place to start is to imagine movement happening in the painful part of your back. Visualize blood coursing through the area, see energy or light moving in and out of your back, “watch” your cells shutting down the inflammation, making repairs, and soothing irritated tissues. Inhale white, healing light, and exhale dark, stagnant pain out of the area. Find a visualization that works for you. I sincerely hope these techniques work for you and that very soon you’re pain free and getting back to what you love.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
P.S. If you’re looking for more support for living pain free, we invite you to join us for an online mini-course my wife, Briana, and I are leading on how to give a relaxing, pain-relieving massage. Briana and I have over 40 years of combined professional experience giving massage and training teams of massage therapists. Massage has so many benefits: It relieves tight and painful muscles and joints. It measurably decreases stress. It strengthens immune function. It improves sleep quality. It promotes better circulation. It reduces fatigue and improves mood. And it facilitates faster recovery from injury and surgery. We should all be taking advantage of it! Since that's not possible due to the pandemic, why not learn how to give each other massages at home?
Unlike massage trainings for people starting a new career, this course is geared toward non-professionals who want to learn the fundamentals of good massage - even if you don't have a massage table or other special equipment. We'll teach you the most effective ways to release tight muscles and promote stress relief. We'll share ways to use your body so that you can work deeper and for longer without getting tired or sore. And we'll explain some things we wish were taught in massage schools that make for a better overall experience for both the giver and receiver.
Learning massage skills is a gift that will provide a lifetime of connection, relaxation, and effective pain relief. If you’ve ever thought, “I’d love to massage my partner, but my hands hurt and I can’t do it for more than a few minutes,” or, “I want to give a good massage but I just don't know what I'm doing”, this is exactly the course you need to gain confidence in your ability to provide a great therapeutic massage. Join us live to have your specific massage questions addressed.
And if you’d like to learn a bunch more about managing your own pain – including both Eastern and Western approaches, psychological tools, special acupressure points, guided meditations, pain relieving herbs, and altogether the most comprehensive course in the world for getting out of pain (I made that up but it’s probably true!), check out Live Pain Free. We’ve gotten only rave reviews from users.
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