Eliminate Pain Forever with Steve Ozanich Part 2

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence, first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey there. Yes. Here you are today for part two of my interview with guest expert Steve Ozanich, who talks all about and helps people on a daily basis free themselves of chronic pain. Years, decades of chronic pain, healed rapidly without surgery, without drugs, when a lot of that stuff doesn't really work in the long term anyway. And yet he's found a way to share this. And in fact, as he said in the interview, it's not his way. He learned it from a physician by the name of Dr. John Sarno, and there's many other physicians now that are practicing this approach to chronic pain and having remarkable success that is way more remarkable than the success of mini back surgeries and other things like that. So this obviously is the second part of an interview, so you'll be kind of lost if you haven't listened to that last episode, the one before this one. So start with that. And of course you can even listen to the one before this where I talk about how anxiety can create physical pain in the first place. So this is a little series here that I'm doing for you just because it's been so life transforming for me. That's really what I do with this podcast and anything that I do, the mastermind, the weekends that I run, coaching, it's all to turn around and share everything I'm learning right as I'm sharing it, cutting edge in my own growth, my own life, my own transformation, which doesn't stop just because if we get more confidence doesn't mean the journey ends. And so I'm excited to share this with you because it's near and dear to my heart and the level of physical confidence and freedom that I've developed in this last year has. Has been truly one of the things I am most grateful for in my life and continue to be grateful for. And Steve Ozanich and other amazing authors and physicians and people that have really pioneered a new way of being with Our bodies. I am eternally grateful to those people. So without further ado, let's continue on with that interview with Steve Ozanich.

Expert interview. One of the big problems in our and our whole society is information. We live in the information era. Right now. We're constantly pounding information to the left side of the brain. Bam, bam, bam. The more you know, the more you know, the more you survive. But after a while, it's really crippling us terribly. You know, it would be better just to begin to let go of more things. I let go of more things in my life, let go of more attachments, begin to rest in the moment, more, see the joy and more things in my life. And my pains disappeared.

Yeah, you know, it's really interesting, I've found, because, you know, there's so many overlaps between this process and general confidence building and overcoming social anxiety and insecurity. And one thing that I use a lot and really encourage a lot of clients to do is to build our capacity to slow down and feel whatever's happening and not be running from whatever, someone maybe not liking us or our own judgments. And just how can we really just slow down and be? And what I found is the biggest obstacle to that is often that when we first slow down or maybe something's going on in our life, it's not like pleasure and joy in the moment. It's like some uncomfortable stuff waiting there for us that we've been pounding down with all that left brain knowledge. Right.

Yeah.

We need to have a courage to be. Like, okay. In order to kind of be and feel, that means I got to be open to feel whatever's there.

It takes courage to heal. I believe that people read my story and they're horrified by it because it's about a third of the book. Wow, Steve, you were so courageous. I never thought. I never felt that way, but I guess I look back on it, you just either fail or you move on. There's really. Or you're sitting still, I suppose. And where I was at in my life at that point, it was just rock bottom. And so for me, there was only one move forward. But you're right. At the height of my pain, when I was crippled in the late 90s, I stopped going out and seeing people. Like a social anxiety thing. I remember my wife at the time was saying, when's the last time you were out of the house? And it'd been like months. I don't even remember. I just wasn't interested. And that falls right into the teeth of the problem into depression. When you isolate yourself, it's dangerous because depression isn't isolation. It's a form of self isolation. In many cases, it's a form of guilt involved, like a form of atonement that we've done something wrong. And so no matter what we talk about, love is always going to be the answer. Here it is the answer to solving the health problems. It may sound corny and cliche, but this is it. Because there's only fear and love. And fear is the opposite of love. And that's what's causing the problem. Fear is causing all the anger and all the health problems. This is why we're anxious. This is why we can't sit still. This is why we're obsessive because of the fear. The opposite of fear is knowing connection, light, love. And so love is the answer here. But we can never get there until we learn to love and to forgive. If we forgive ourselves. That's the main blocker. You know, the great Sufi poet Rumi said, you know, it's not your task to seek love, it's your task to figure out why you're putting up all the barriers against it in your life. Which was a brilliant observation, really brilliant. Rumi got it. We have love, we are love, we are loved, but we block it. And it's always blocked through guilt. And that guilt causes the shame and all the fear and all these other things. And so love is the answer. I guess the prophets have known it for thousands of years and the Beatles knew it in the 1960s. But the problem I see is guilt. And I don't know if you remember, but the last page of my book, after 10 years of writing it, I thought, you know what, I better sum this up somehow, because it's pretty dense and it might frighten some people. And I decided, I reflected for a long time. I even worked with the editor who was a medical doctor, and we hashed it out and I said, you know what? It's guilt. Guilt is the cause of all of our life problems. We're not allowing the love to surface, the forgiveness to come through, and we're just punishing ourselves in a way because we don't good enough or even worthy of being loved. And so it may sound odd to people listening to this, and we're talking about physical health symptoms, we're talking about things like this, emotions and love and relationships. But this is the problem. This is where it's at, this is where it's coming from. The, the very first line of my book is, life is Relationship. That's the very first line. I wanted to make it the very first line on purpose because that's nothing else in the world except relationship. But the most important one is the one you have with yourself. This is the problematic one. That people don't have love for themselves. They have no respect for themselves. They feel they've done something wrong. When I work with people, sometimes I'll start talking about this. They'll just start crying hard and they'll say yes. They'll be nodding their head. I don't. I didn't do good in my relationship. I wasn't a good enough son. Or I wasn't good enough there. I wasn't good enough. And bam, there comes the pain. And the pain, of course, is just somaticizing is the word. It's your deeper self talking through the body because it doesn't know how to express itself.

Yeah.

And so it's all about relationship.

Yes. And that willingness to heed the call and hear that and then move towards. I love Pema Chodron has a great book that's called Coming Closer to Ourselves. And that's really what she keeps talking about is like our. You know, we're sort of lost in this endless dissatisfaction and distraction and sort of an intolerance for being able to just be with ourselves.

Yeah, that's perfect. I think there's so much. What's the name of that book?

It's called Coming Closer to Ourselves. I got the audio version, and I think it's a collection of her teachings, maybe even some live recordings in there. So I don't know if there's a paperback version, but there's an audio version.

Excellent title. Excellent title.

You know, there's something that you mentioned in your book, which I think is an interesting question I wanted to ask you, which is. So I remember you said that when you were leaning more. One of the things is to not be intimidated by the pain and say, look, there's nothing structurally wrong with me. I'm going to use my body. And that was a turning point for you when you really started to do that. And it was for me as well. And I remember somewhere in the book you said every day you would just run. And you're like, I was running and reflecting, running and reflecting. Now, another approach that people use and I've used is is you run or do something else. And you're kind of listening and re listening to Sarno's book or your book and just kind of continually sort of brainwashing yourself in a way with this new Approach. Now, I'm curious, is that. Would you suggest that or does that turn into another form of like you're intellectually listening to the book to turn off feeling and it's better to run in silence and just reflect and feel?

Well, yeah, you opened up about three big points there. The first one reminds me of the discharge of a freeze response when you said I was running and running. Of course, when I was doing this, I had no idea what I was doing. I only learned later on when I looked back what happened there. I can see clearly now what happened, but I was running. The chronic symptoms and the pain are part of the fight flight survival response. If fight or flight aren't taken, then it's freeze. It's called freeze response. All the anxiety and all the fear and all the anger are caught in the neural network and they're locked in there. Running is a way of discharging that, as in fleeing. On the flight side of it, there's a great YouTube video, I don't know if you've seen it, that's Polar bear about. It's called Trauma and fight Flight. And these researchers are going to hypo this bear from a helicopter. And it's running from them and they shoot it with the hypo. And then as it starts to get drowsy and drop, they get out and they're observing it. They're saying, watch it. Its arms, both of its. All four of its legs, I should say, are running. And it's breathing fast and fast. In its mind, it's still trying to escape. And the one researcher saying, watch it will not stop until it has escaped the fear in its own mind. And it goes on for a while and the legs are going like crazy because it thinks it's still in danger running. And then when it does, when it thinks it's escaped it, there's this huge breath inward, massive sound, and the legs quit and it relaxes so that it discharged the freeze response. It discharged this flight response from its system. In other words, it wanted to feel safe in its mind. And you can look at it this way too, as far as healing. Healing is really about teaching your deeper brain that it's safe. Because the child never felt safe if there was problematic relationship, but the parents or the parents left them or died or whatever, the child always felt scared. And so it moved into its intellect forever and stayed there, blocking its feelings. But the other thing you talked about was the head headset. There was another thing I did by accident. You know, there are really two major ways to Change the habitual brain. The reason we can't get rid of the pain instantly in most cases is because of the conditioned response, you know, the, the Pavlov's dog response. If we're doing the same things all the time, you know, same sights, sounds, smells, actions, and we tend, the body tends to just loop it, keep doing it over and over again. And so two ways to break this habitual mind. One way is through hypnosis and the other is through repetition. And I did both by accident. I didn't know it, but I would fall asleep with Dr. Sarno's voice in my head saying, there's nothing wrong with your body, there's nothing wrong, you're okay, you're going to be okay. I would pass out from being tired and I would listen to that through the night looping. So that's hypnosis in a way. And the other way was, is through repetition. That's one way to break any conditioned response. And that was where the running came in, you know, the golf ball hitting and just reading the right material. I just, I was relentless at a day after day after day, until finally now I prolonged my suffering. I'm very open about it. I did things wrong. And the main thing that I did wrong was that I was watching how I was progressing. That was the main thing I did wrong. That's why in the back of my new book Back Pain Permanent Healing, that I wrote that One statement by Dr. Sarno that I believe is the most powerful world changing statement that he made that nobody's paying attention to when he said in his book Healing Back Pain, that as long as you are preoccupied with what your body is doing, your symptoms will continue. But I, I read that line, but I wasn't taking it to heart. I just kept getting up and looking. How am I doing? Is it a 7.5 or a 5.3 or a 6.1 or whatever? And I prolonged it that way, but it finally disappeared when I forgot all about it. I broke the obsessiveness. Remember I said earlier that it's not your powerful thoughts and emotions that are threatening you and threatening to overwhelm you are not hiding behind the pain, they're hiding behind your obsession on your body. I broke the obsessive looking and I got my. Shifted my conscious awareness to my daily activities into goals. Goal setting is so important not to reduce pain. Never, ever, ever do anything to reduce pain goal setting in your life. Goal setting goals themselves are acts of faith. I'm going to get there. I'm going to Be better. And so, you know, there are many different roads to get there, you know, many different roads to get there, you know, and that's why the book so long, because I found many different ways from different people to heal. But you'll find your own personal journey. And of course, when you look at the Dao de Jing, it's 81 verses long. But the most famous verse in the Dao de jing is that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single first step. And so you've got to pull away from the medical industry. If they're telling you that arthritis or you've got a ligament shorter or your hips higher or your leg's longer or your herniation is causing it, you've got to be able to discern from that and say, based on what we know from the millions of people that have healed from this, from Dr. Sarto, that that's wrong. It is not coming from that, especially if it's chronic. But you said earlier something interesting. You hear a crack or a popping sound. That doesn't really cause pain either. Like he said, in healing back pain, you know, people are. It's ingrained into our society to think that when we hear a popping sound that have damaged my back. But in retrospect, he said, we know it isn't true. And of course, after all these years of doing this with my own work, you know, I know that it's not true. A lot of mothers who new mothers have great demands made on them, great demands, and they often get back pain. And they'll tell me, I picked up my baby and I threw my back out. Well, the baby can't throw your back out. It's the strongest part of the human body. But what happens is they're in a TMS state of mind, and their brain is looking for any trigger to begin diverting it to the body. They're beginning to get overwhelmed with their personal life and their work and their baby. And so the brain thinks, I'm going to use this opportunity of bending over to pick something up to use as a trigger to make them think something's happened to them. And it happens. It's probably the most common thing too, is the crack or the pop and the bending or all that. But it can start spontaneously. You know, people get it just sleeping. All of a sudden, it just starts, you know, and that. What does that tell you? It can't be a structural thing. You're not even moving.

I know that's what happened to me. I just woke up one morning and there it was bang, went to bed feeling fine the night before.

And then you tell yourself, I wasn't even moving. How could it be a herniated disc?

Yeah. There's so much in here, what you're saying. I think some of the key things I really want to reinforce and highlight is that at the core of this, there is teaching and showing our brain, that and our nervous system that we're safe.

Yes.

And, you know, and to think so much of the root of this and maybe even anxiety and lack of confidence in life is this deep seated feeling that we're not safe and, and that we can't handle what happens. And then hence all of these million and one behaviors to try to deal with that. So that's a really key thing to say. Okay, how do I start to guide my focus on how to be in this moment to increase a sense of relaxation and safety? So that's a huge point.

That's excellent. That was well said. Very well said. That is it. That's why we become alcoholics and drug addicts and obsessive and workaholics and we don't feel like we're comfortable with ourselves and that we've got to keep diverting that pain away. Divert it. Divert it. But if we don't do drugs or alcohol or other things, then we get. Give ourselves tms, what we're talking about here, Mind Body syndrome. But that's really a good point. Safety. Because the child never felt safe and secure in its early environment. And I was actually shocked. One thing that's not in the book, that I didn't realize until after I wrote it, but how many people contact me who moved around a lot as children? I was always in the same house. My parents are still in the same house. You know, we were always stationary. So I wasn't aware of this, but a high percentage of people were in military. Kids or their families moved around or my dad was an international, you know, businessman. 11, 12, 13, 15 times, 20 times they moved. The child never had a nice base and secure environment. So this amygdala, this brain we're talking about is the amygdala brain, the deep survival brain. It's afraid because it doesn't have any security and safety in its mind. And so it develops a personality that Dr. Sarno identified. I'll work harder, I'll push harder. I'll be perfect, I'll be good, I'll do everything right. So maybe they'll like me, they'll stay in my life. They won't reject me because I'VE been doing this enough years to see this is all about loneliness, this sensation that I am alone in my heart. Depression. There's always anxiety and depression in the people. Sometimes it's worse than others. Sometimes they're crippled, they can't get out of bed, or they can't get there in wheelchairs. But there was always some precipitous breakup, something severe. When they're crippled badly, it's always somebody's dying or somebody's died or they've gotten a divorce or somebody's hurting them. And they usually don't cry a lot in the consultations, but other times it's just a gradual build up into a midlife crisis. Is this all there is? I'm worried. Am I good enough? Am I doing the right things? And so people are complex, but the healing process doesn't have to be. It can be very simple. I mean, some people can heal just by reading the books.

Yeah, yeah, I know. And that's where it's so interesting, is just how each person is affected. I know, me personally, I needed to read the books a lot again and again. And I was one of those people that really needed to get in there and feel and sort out some of the complexity. Not that I have answers to everything, but just feel the different parts of me. Feel the yearnings or the confusion or the grief or the anger and just really acknowledge it. Not to solve certain things that happened in the past, I can't do anything about them. But meeting them, as you're saying, with love, with forgiveness, with openness, with curiosity. Because my training to go intellectual and into my head and not feel was so strong that I think in order for me to really heal with this stuff, the deeper guidance and learning for me was like, oh, I got to learn how to feel. And I remember my wife really helped me with this. And we had a date away from our two little kids, and we were sitting outside in the summer, and I was sort of like, man, but to really heal this stuff, I have to feel, feel so much in my heart. And my. This is hard, you know? And she said, well, in a way, you grew up and your family, the way you grew up, it was almost like you were like that muscle was sort of underused or atrophied. And she's like, it's almost like you grew up in a house where they said, don't use your arms. Don't pick anything up with your arms. And she's like, watch. We were sitting at this restaurant outside. She's like, pick up that Cup. And this is the benefit of having a wife who's an amazing healer and coach, by the way. So she's like, pick up that cup. And I'm like. She's like, but don't use your. Don't use your arms. And I'm like, you know, so I kind of lean over and try to tip it with my lips. And sure enough, it starts to spill, so I reach out and use my hand. She's like, don't. Don't use your. You don't need to use your hands. You don't need to use your arms. Just use your feet. And it was kind of a silly example, but it helped me realize that when I was growing up, I got the pretty strong message, don't use your heart. Don't feel. You don't need to feel. Put that feeling away.

We become feeling challenged.

Yeah, I was feeling challenged and I learned to go to my head. So now as I, you know, these last number of years, I've healed this stuff or worked through it and had. I keep having to feel more. And there's a part of me that's like, yeah, I got some feeling skill, strength building. I just need to keep learning how to feel and be in my feelings.

It is pretty wild. You know, I think in the great book Autobiography of a Yogi that Yogananda said, you know, intellect takes you farther from God and feelings bring you back closer. We are meant to be feeling people, to feel in our hearts, to live in our hearts and joy in our hearts. But we need a brain, of course, so that we can remember who we are and where we live and what we need to do for a living. But we're locked inside this thinking function. And most of the people contact me, they're stuck in the information gathering of healing, still in the function of thinking. They don't realize that I said you're stuck in intellect. You cannot solve these health problems with intellect. You know, we need some intellect to solve them, but it can't be completely solved. It has to be solved through joy in the heart and peace and happiness. This lack of conflict, which is one reason yoga is so important in healing, so vital in healing. We have to calm the waves of the mind out because it creates beta wave activity, which is the highest state of stress in hospital visits in the world. Intention in the body. Thinking, thinking, pushing, pushing, living locked inside the intellect. And the thinking function is destroying us. Yeah, we have to learn to feel again.

Yeah. You know, one thing, and this really brings it back to you saying, like, it's all really about love, you know, underneath. And what I found is that. That obsessive thinking. I've seen this a lot as I study this in myself, maybe in the last three, four months. It's. It's the illusion of control. It's like if I could just control and manipulate all the factors in my head.

Excellent observation. That is absolutely right.

Safe. And I can control everything. And the more I work on this feeling and letting go and feeling this, I start to realize I. You know, there's like, how little control I have of anything outside of myself. You know, I don't want this person to do that, and I want this person to say yes and that person to say no, and this person to not make sure they don't ever do that. And I realized that by this sort of obsessive juggling of mental stuff, and I should say that, and then I need to do that. It's this illusion that I'm somehow moving all these chess pieces around. That's excellent, but I'm really not.

That was excellent. When you listen to the great Wayne Dyer, I really wish I could have met him. I really started looking at him after I did all the work. But he really got it. He was a bright man. He talks about that, you know, let these people work things out on their own. Let it unfold in front of you. Because this personality, the tight T we call it, for tension, it's a very controlling personality. I've got to have that happen. I've got to have this happen. This has to happen. And it never goes that way ever. You know, and so you're frustrated, you're angry all day long. It didn't go the way I wanted. But then again, the word ego in German means me or I. You know, it's not the way I ask people sometimes. Why do you, you know, this person? You don't like the president. You don't like Congressman or whatever it is. They get all huffy. Why do you think the world needs to think like you do? Why does the entire world have to think like you? And they sit back and think about it. It's ego. I want everybody to think like me. Well, you remember Deepak Chopra making that statement that life gets easier when you realize everybody's working from a different level of consciousness than you are. They might not understand it, or maybe they understand it way more than you, and you're getting frustrated with both sides of it. Just deal with yourself. Take care of what you have to deal with in your life, you know, and it's Easier said than done, of course. But that is a great observation. See, you're getting it. I mean, you really do get it. I mean, you're doing a lot of thinking, I can tell. It'd be nice to get you to move back into the feeling function, you know, back into the heart again. I just watched, you know, Sadhguru. I don't know if you've seen him, he's a Hindu guru. I just saw him recently on a YouTube video and they said, what do you think about? He goes, I don't think he's one of the funnier ones. He's kind of like a hip guy. He drives like a sports car. He's got jewelry and everything, but he's got the big white beard and stuff. He's kind of living both lives. But he said, I don't think he goes, people ask me that all the time because unless I'm talking to someone like you, I'm not thinking at all. He's just being in the moment and he's got the big smile on his face all the time. He just feels happy. And so it's really strange to say that because we live in the west, of course, and thinking is just the more you think, the more you know, the farther you get ahead, but the more unhappy we are in many times it's a personal journey for everybody. Definitely. It reminds me you were talking about this feeling more and blocking it. You mentioned the word blocking it, which is so true. It reminds me of the paragon of TMS examples, which was Dr. Sarno's patient named Helen. She was in all of his books. She's in all of my books. She was crippled, like bedridden, with severe back pain and hip pain, I think. And her family heard about him in New York, so they got her up there to see him. And he knew when you came in to see him whether you needed to attend his lectures or whether you needed therapy. Well, when they told him, you know, she's been bedridden, he said, well, you better go to therapy. You know, the lecture is not going to do it. So inside of therapy, intense therapy. She had remembered being molested as a five year old girl. They sent her to support groups and in the groups she got worse and worse and worse. She wasn't getting better with the knowledge. She panicked and she called Dr. Sarno back and she said, Dr. Sarno, I believe you. I believe this is TMS, I believe this is the cause, but I'm not getting better with the information, the knowledge, the intellect. And her husband was standing right there at the time. And he said. When she said that, he said, but you're talking about 40 years of repression. And for some reason, when he said that to her, she collapsed on the floor and she started having visions in her. She was shaking and her heart was beating erratic, and she was screaming, I want to die. I want to die. Let me die. I'm so ashamed. Let me die. And within minutes, all of her pain was gone. It disappeared. He said, okay, I know what's happening. I see what's going on here. This is a protective mechanism. The pains and disease are protecting us for certain aspects of ourselves that we do not want to see and face. We're blocking it with it, with the physical symptoms. And so it's such a great teaching point here. She's the paragon of examples. Because he said, everybody that came into our office after that wanted to do that experience. They wanted us to reach into them, rip out all these emotions, and they would have perfect health. But he said, we tried it for years and it didn't work. It doesn't work. There's something about this Persona superego, this false mask that we put on that we won't allow those feelings to come out because we so closely identified with this false self, that we're simply not going to give up the secrets. In her case, his words made her suddenly realize, I have been lying to myself for 40 years, and that it just broke down that repressive wall between the conscious and unconscious. And she melted. It's like a flood. Flood of healing. I had a guy last year contact me, telling me same thing happened to him in New York. He was in upstate New York. And I said, why are you contacting me? He said, I want to write a book about how it happened. So I thought maybe he could help me, but. So it can happen, but I wouldn't count on it that way. We do it through personal revelations like you're going through, you know, and I'm going through little insights of truth, you know, between intellect and feeling and joy and peace and fear and love and things like that, which I think is the whole idea of life, you know, is to. Is to expand the spirit in that manner through the struggles. Yogananda said one time I heard an audio of him. He said that a wrestler never gets stronger unless it wrestles a stronger wrestler than itself. You can't wrestle a weaker person who never gets stronger. Part of having the physical body is to grow and to expand, but that process involves moving from fear into love, because that's where we're all heading. That's where we're all going in the end.

Steve, this is so good. There's so much here. And other times I've interacted with you, I always get the feeling that we're, no matter how much time we would just be scratching the surface. And that's why I would strongly recommend, if you're listening to this and intrigued, curious, hopeful, maybe you've had a back problem or a knee problem or any other problem in your body, and the list of what can be mind, body, you know, truly just endless. So any sort of issue, any sort of problem, even like a something like anxiety or depression, you might say, oh, that's just, that's not physical. That doesn't apply to me. Look, it's all connected. And anxiety and depression can be forms of distraction from deeper feeling. So if you're at all in any way intrigued, definitely go out, get one of Sarno's books, get one of Steve Ozanish's books. We'll have them linked below on the podcast site shrinkforthshyguy.com or if you're listening, you probably wouldn't have made it this far. But if you're listening to this and you're like shaking your head from side to side and saying like, no, come on, how's this true? And you're resistant, that might be a really good sign too, because there's a charge there, right? You know, of course, and you've talked about that, Steve, where when you first read Sarno's book, you threw it across the room. So there's this. There's an energy there. Anyway, definitely get those books. And if you want to go further with Steve, go to his website, which we'll have linked below these podcasts as well. But Steve, maybe want to just say what your website is out loud, too.

Yes, my name, steveozanich.com and if they type in the great pain deception, I'm sure they'll find me. That was a really great point too, you know, resistance, you know, why if I bring this information to people who are crippled and I say, here, this will heal you forever, why isn't their first inclination to say, show it to me, but it's almost always, get out of here. That's stupid. Why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you do it? And the reason Dr. Sarno discovered, because it's a protective mechanism. It's protecting us. You don't want to see, you do not want to know the cause of it. That's why that book. I told you, my new book is all about a long argument and why people don't want to heal.

Yeah.

Because I could see most of them could heal. It's clear that they have tms, but they do not want to because they're not ready.

Yeah. And, man, I gotta say, going through this process, the level of ability to deceive ourselves, and when I really started to get some things about this, I remember the very first night, because I used this, a lot of this approach to heal all kinds of things. Plantar fasciitis, wrist problems, neck problems, jaw problems, you name it, stomach problems. But there was this one place in my body, my low back and my buttock and down the leg, that I was like, no, that's something else. I have a fancy diagnosis for that, Ankylosing spondylitis. That can't be, you know, tms. And I remember as I started to go through, and I even consulted with you along the way, Steve, and it was somewhere. I don't remember the exact day, but somewhere in there I got, Whoa, this is TMS2. And, like, this whole version of reality and how I saw things kind of crumbled like a house of cards. And then there's a sense of confusion, like, well, wait a minute. Wow. What else is not true that I thought was true for 12 years, 15 years, 20 years. And I remember the very night, the day that it happened, that night, I was in bed and I woke up like four or five times throughout the night spontaneously. And I usually don't. I usually. Pretty good sleeper, even with kiddos. And I woke up with this sense of, like, what?

No way.

Really? You know? And so it's amazing how your reality, your identity, everything can radically shift, and everything you thought was true about your body maybe is false. And the fact that you're broken and infirmed and unable and incapable is false. And that is the message that you bring. And it truly is a message of healing and empowerment and love. And I deeply appreciate what you're doing, Steve, and I will continue to spread the word in the ways that I can. And thank you so much for showing up today and for sharing so freely with your time and your knowledge and your insight.

Well, thank you for the opportunity. It was really nice of you, and I wish you the best, and you're doing a great job. When I listen to your words, you really get it. You really get it. You're getting it at the deepest levels, all these key words that you said. And so that's very cool, you know, and you're one voice out there that's trying to help people, and that's really great too. If we can help one person with this interview, then we did a good job.

Yeah. Damn right. I love it, man. Thanks again, Steve.

Okay, thank you.

That brings us to the end of the episode. And there's one thing we got to do though, before we complete. Time for action. Action. Action. Action, man. There are so many action steps that could be taken. I would just say do something. I know it's not very specific, but do something. Were you inspired to do something? I'll share what I was inspired to do. And each of us is at different stages of the journey. Maybe you were inspired to pick up one of these books and start reading it. Great. That's awesome. Maybe you are inspired to start journaling and, and getting to what some of your deeper feelings might be. Also great. For me, what I am inspired to do is to go on a little fast. I'm gonna do a seven day fast from my phone. Well, I use it to do sessions, so I'm going to use it for work. But other than that, I'm not gonna have my phone on me. I'm not gonna listen to any audiobooks, I'm not gonna listen to any YouTube videos. And I adjusted. Kind of a chronic habit of taking in new information and learning, which was really helpful to hear from Steve just about how that can be. You know, when we're turning on the intellect, we're turning off feeling and just seeing how important that is for me to keep building my capacity to feel. So I don't know if I'll make it a permanent thing. But for the next seven days, I'm going to kind of go extreme and just unplug and just feel, not be listening to something. When I drive or bike or run or walk around or do dishes and just see whatever's there, feel whatever's there. So that's one action step. I mean, there's dozens. So really choose your own adventure here. Find one wherever it is appropriate for you and your journey. Take action on this stuff. And I'm not gonna keep saying it again and again and again because you've already got the point and the message. But seriously, in my experience and in lots of people that I've talked to, tsw, this shit works. And if you want to go check out more about this, go to the tmswiki.com tms the letters T as in tiger, M as in Mary, S as in Sam. TMS wiki W I K I. And it's like online community of people that have healed tremendous things, just levels of what was supposed to be permanent and chronic like my condition and many others who are now strong, athletic, free, healthy, using their bodies however they want and just lots of people sharing. There's forums, there's new people asking questions, there's structured training programs to help you overcome it all for free. Alan Gordon's training program on there is the bomb. Anyway, check that out if you're really drawn to it. And thank you for being with me on this journey. I hope this can serve you in some way in your life, either now or down the road. Until we speak again. May you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Azeez. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free vlogs, ebooks, and training videos related to open Overcoming Shyness and Increasing Confidence, go to social confidencecenter.com.