The MindBody Approach

The majority of chronic pain is reversible. Learn how retraining your brain can fix your pain! ALL pain is real. People who say it's 'in your head', meaning that you're making up your pain or other persistent symptoms are just ignorant, dismissive, and outright cruel. But today we also know that all pain is constructed by the brain - even if we feel it in our lower back, the neck, the knee, or all over our body. At its core, pain is a decision the brain makes at any given moment to protect us from danger. The brain's danger detection system is switched on when there is a perceived threat and switched off when there is no perceived threat. This evolutionarily crucial survival mechanism is influenced by many factors and many of them run below our conscious level of awareness. The latest understanding of pain neuroscience is that the majority of chronic pain isn't actually caused by structural issues of the body but by faulty neural pathways in the brain, i.e., the brain is misinterpreting normal sensations as dangerous and, therefore, produces pain to keep us 'safe'. This well-meaning but overprotective and misguided approach by our brain is like a faulty fire alarm that goes off: There is no fire, but the false alarm is just as loud as the real thing. And like I stated above, ALL pain is real, and all PAIN HURTS. The good news is that we have a great deal of impact on our pain by how we respond to it. We can learn how to regulate our nervous system and retrain our brain to reassess the actual threat level, dial down the pain's volume, and react appropriately to so-called danger signals. This also means we can REVERSE chronic pain - not just learn how to live with it or manage it, but reverse it and get back to the things we love doing the most! Mind-Body Coaching Sessions are available via Zoom. (Pacific Time Zone)