Running Your Pain Away with John Thornton

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. Welcome to this episode of Shrink for the Shy Guy. I'm very excited to be having a conversation with someone that I've personally learned a lot from him and his partner Laura John Thornton, who is the co founder of the Pain Cure Clinic in Colorado, which has helped many, many people free themselves from ongoing chronic pain, including significantly helping me in my life to become a lot more active and able. That's something really we're going to dive in in today's episode is how to be more active. Now, when you're listening to this, you might say, wait a minute, I don't know if I have pain. I don't know if that's my thing. But what I've found is that people with anxiety and social anxiety and niceness, excessive niceness, are creating a lot of tension in their body. Their, their fear system is overactive. They might also have a lot of self criticism and perfectionism. And all those things produce tension in our nervous system, which actually can create quite a bit of pain in a variety of ways. Oftentimes people think they're injuries. I have a quote, bad back or oh, my old knee is acting up. But it can be stomach problems, headaches, like so many different things. And so whether or not you do have ongoing pain symptoms, listen to this with an open mind because you just might find how many ways that you're creating disturbance in your body. And we're also going to talk about how you can live a more active life regardless and really free yourself. So thank you so much for joining us, John.

Thanks, Aziz. It is great to be here. Good to see you again.

Yeah. So let's, let's dive right into this. You know, one of the key things that I think happens when people feel pain is they, they get scared and then they think, oh, no, I have an injury or a problem. And the impulse when we feel pain, the bad back acts up, the knee acts up, hiccups up, the foot Acts up, you know, is to, is to stop all use of it, rest it, don't do anything on it. Maybe a little gentle stretch or something, some icing. And that might seem reasonable, but what, what have you found in, in clients that you're helping? And is that the best approach? Or how, how, how do you help people when, when the pain is there?

Yeah. And let me, let me start by saying I used to be that way myself. I. The symptoms, all those chronic symptoms, most of them you mentioned, I've had started about 15 years ago. And I believed, like most people do, that they were all real medical conditions. And I went to the doctors and I took the drugs and I did everything they told me to. And it was until I had an epiphany and found this mind body connection that it was actually stress. Not herniated discs or a genetic defect, but just emotionally being stressed out that was causing all my chronic symptoms. And that was, that was a real awakening. And, and to get to your point, among other things, if there is, if, if it's stress, then that means there's, there's nothing really wrong with you. So there's no reason to do what I did too, originally, which is to retreat and become. I had been a, a very physical person, but the, the biggest symptom was back pain. And when that hit, I just stopped everything and waited for it to heal. And, and what I figured out was that was the worst thing to do, that the best thing to do was to challenge the pain. And by challenging it, it ended up going away.

Can you say more about what you mean by challenging the pain?

Yeah, and it doesn't matter. You can get pain anywhere in your body, whether it's a shoulder or I had tennis elbow, I've had calf pain, a lot of other things. And when you retreat from that and try to rest it, and I think it's when you get a new pain symptom, I think it's not a bad idea to maybe let it rest for a couple days to see whether it's a real structural problem, because certainly people do get real things. But for example, my tennis elbow, you know, I went to sleep one night, I was fine, then I woke up the next morning and my whole arm was red with pain. And there was, there was really no reason for it. So when you retreat also the, in fear, the fear increases and, and that's part of it. So the, the best way to, to move forward and resolve things very quickly too, because I think with a lot of this stuff, and I know you've experienced this as well by challenging the pain directly. Like my tennis elbow, I held for a couple of days, and then I just started working out again. As soon as I did that, it went away. Now, that may not seem like a big thing, but that could have lasted for years and ended up in surgery.

Yes.

And a lot of stuff like that to where I, you know, my story is I, I was pretty active. I was running my own business, and by the time all these symptoms piled up, I was a couch potato. My business was gone, and I was doing nothing. And it wasn't until I, I started saying, you know, I, I started pushing back after reading a book called the Mind body prescription by Dr. Sarno that my whole life changed. And then Laura, my wife, saw what happened to me, and she did the same thing. And her rheumatoid arthritis went away.

Yes. And. And so I think one of the. The challenges, and I, I was just noticing this pattern in myself. So I feel like I am able to do so many things. I'm active, running, lifting weights. It's amazing. If I look back to when I was in chronic pain, it's like a dream come true. And there are still. I can still run certain patterns that will generate the pain. And I feel like that's the next level is like, Laura, who I coach with, would always, you know, remind me to prioritize my intensity because I would approach things with this kind of like. And I was actually just reflecting this last week about, you know, I think I'm at the stage to, like, really create larger and larger space between pain or is actually to not just prioritize it, but almost learn to soften it, basically be a little, little less intense. Because that intensity is like a control thing. Right. It's like I need to get this or that. But what I noticed is when the pain will come on, I'll run a very similar pattern for the first day or two. I'll go very quickly into, like, despair. And what I realized is that the link is because I spent from the age 15 to 19 in just like, the most intense pain I had in my life and no hope. Right. We've got all these doctors and treatments, and nothing worked. And I was trying to be like a normal high school, early college kid and just trying to look normal, but really being, like, totally distraught inside.

Yeah.

And so when the pain comes, and the fascinating thing is you talk about tennis, elbow, whatever, I, you know, the mind body approach I was able to do with neck pain, foot pain, jaw pain. And so when those Come on, now I'm like, okay, now we know what's going on here, you know? But when there's a certain pain in the back, like when I was 15, it's like, oh, despair. And then I'll do that for two days and. And then there'll be a moment of, like, remembering, like, oh, the key is to become less reactive to the pain. Like, to not freak out. It's just like, okay, and. And, oh, maybe I can do a little less. But, hey, I can still do things. And then I will start to use my body again. And. And then, sure enough, when I'm not reactive to it, it's still there. But then within a short period of time, usually a day or two, it'll. It'll lift.

Yeah.

And so it sounds like when you're confronted or challenging the pain, there's a way to do it, because I've tried, like, the.

I'm gonna.

David Goggins this. I'm. I'm hurting. I'm just gonna run, like, screw you body, you know, and that actually makes things way worse because there's so much tension down to that. So there's a way to, like, lean in, but with a much more kind of relaxed, like. Okay, that's. That's. There's, you know, it doesn't mean anything. It's just there. So I'm curious about, you know, how you kind of.

Yeah, that is. That is how I do it. I never really thought about it that way, but I do give myself a break. I don't. I don't. David F. And Goggins, the whole thing, as he likes to call himself. I give myself a break. Okay, what's going on? But the other thing as, you know, and. And. And the thing is, you know, as being the coach and the guy who puts himself out there is the guy that cured all his chronic pains. And that's been true. And I haven't had chronic pain since 2016, but I do get pains because I'm human. I get stressed out. Lots of things happen. I haven't, you know, learned how to live life without stress. So I do still get pain maybe once every year and a half of some kind, but I don't fear it anymore. And. And I, you know, and as you said, you just kind of accept it. Okay, what's going on in my life? Well, usually it's pretty obvious, you know, oh, I got this big problem, and the. That's the cause and effect. So just relax, and you don't have to go out and run a hundred Miles or whatever it is, but give yourself a break for a couple days, make sure it's not a real thing, and then just slowly ease back into it the way I did originally. You know, I, my story was I thought I had herniated discs and degenerative discs and three surgeons told me I definitely needed spine surgery and I had to give up my medical device company. So I was consulting for doctors, kind of business and marketing consulting. I was sitting, having lunch with one of my clients, a general surgeon who had had seven back, seven failed back surgeries and before he became a patient of Dr. Sarno's. And so he turned me on to Sarno, he gave me the mind body prescription and, and he did a little physical exam and he said, john, there's nothing wrong with you. And I'm like, what do you mean there's nothing wrong with me? I, you know, I, I got herniated disc. They say I need surgery. No, there's nothing wrong with you. And if you miss running, because I told my miss running, you should start running today, there's nothing wrong with it. So, and I, I hadn't run in three years. So the first day was more like limping and jogging half mile. And, and, and at the end of that half mile, I was in more pain than I have been when I started. And so I went through this bell shaped curve of pain to where I kept increasing my, my running incrementally to the point where I got, I got to where I was running about three miles. And at three miles, instead of more pain at the end of the run, it was about half as painful.

Can I jump in and ask you a key question here?

Sure.

That first day you go out for half a mile, you're kind of limping and jogging and limping and jogging. How are you working with that in a way that, you know? Because I find that if I'm in that. Okay. One problem I found for me is I, and this is where softening my intensity is coming in, is that there was a time where it excited me to do like super long endurance hikes and runs and stuff. And then at some point I found they became pressure. I ha, I'm training for this, I must do this. Oh no, there's pain. That's going to limit my training. Oh no, right, of course that. But so what would happen though is if I'm going to go out for one of those, I think there would be a lot of like frustration, like, this sucks. I don't want to be limp hiking, running for half A mile. So it's like, and then maybe even, oh, I can't enjoy this run because it's hurting. So there's a lot of emotional reactivity. So how did you work with that in yourself? Because I think if you're doing with a lot of reactivity, it might not produce the same result.

Yeah, I, I, I think maybe you and I are different. And then I have an intensity, but it's always been, it's not been necessarily directed towards my running. So running was my relaxation to start with. And I, I never time myself. I, I do, I did, and I still run races, but I, I don't put the pressure on myself. So to me, it was just getting back to the thing that I loved. And I, if I could, if it took me six months, I was willing to, to, to be patient with that because I, I, I could see progress and, and I could even see, even when it hurt at the end of that first half mile, it was like, okay, well, it hurts, but that's better than sitting on the couch. And it didn't kill me. So let me come back tomorrow, let's see if I can run, you know, 10 more yards than I did today was what it was. I'd say, okay, I made it to this tree, so tomorrow I'm going to make it to that stop sign, you know, which is 10 yards away. And incremental improvement is, is a, is one of the things we, we coach people about and one of the things that I've always found to be effective.

Yes.

You can't be king of the world and, and first time.

Yeah, well, there's a key, yeah, there's a, there's a way that you're holding it as this longer process as opposed to today right now. And there's a, I mean, connecting to the, the victory is the, is the freedom and joy of running, not some particular milestone that you're like, I have to get to that. So, okay, so you were, did that you worked your way up to three miles a day, and then you found that paradoxically, more running actually relieved pain.

Yeah, yeah. And that was the course, that was the breakthrough. You know, I think we could step back at this right here and say, you know, what's the, what's the challenge with all this stuff? Is, you know, we say that we have what we call the three pillars of curing chronic pain, and it's changing belief, reducing emotional tension, wherever that's coming from, and then increasing physicality. And the first one is the hardest for it seem, would seem like the easiest. But I know a lot of people are listening to this thinking, are these guys crazy? Of course these are real medical conditions because everybody in society, you know, thinks they are that. All the doctors are telling them they are. But at the point where I hit that three miles, well, that was like, okay, these doc, my Dr. David that told me about this and the guy that coached, the guy that treated him, Dr. Sarno, they're right and everybody else is wrong. Those three surgeons that told me that I needed, I had needed immediate surgery on my, my back, they were wrong. And that's a, that's a really key point. That was a key point in my life when that, when I ran farther and the pain went down. And then, then when I got to four miles and it went away completely, it was like, okay, that is the change of belief. You can't believe it until you see the, see it go down. But once you do, then a whole new world opens up and everything changes.

I love that and I. That changing the belief is the, it's the, it's the battle of belief really at the beginning. And it's a, it's a big one. Because usually the information that we've stacked has been, you know, perhaps from childhood and many, many, many years, decades even of one way of seeing it that's reinforced by authorities and, and medical diagnoses and fancy Latin sounding terms and people in lab coats and you're like, well, they know what's going on. And so then someone comes along and you're like, 32, 42, 52. And you're like, wait, you're saying that everything I've thought for 40 years is not right, that that's a hard pill for people to swallow. But I think if people have experienced enough pain and enough like failed attempts, usually people to kind of grind through the medical approaches, at least I sure did. And then at some point they're like, you know, okay, I'm open. I'm cracked open enough to, to be curious. And we have other episodes in this show if you're curious. Just do a search@trinkforthshyguy.com for pain and other episodes that really kind of make the link for people to see that. To clarify, we're not saying that the pain isn't real or it's made up. We're saying that the source of the pain is not a structural problem like your bulging disc or your twisted hip position, or that the source of the pain is actually a learned response in your brain that's, that's creating A, a true signal of pain. It's just that there's nothing damaged in the body. And so this, the solution is not to fix the spine. The solution is to, well, fix the mind, really fix perception.

That's. That, that's exactly right. And you know, it, it, it's, it's a bridge too far for about 90% of the population. They, they have a tough time going there. No. No matter what. And I know even a lot of my friends and family think that we're sitting here, you know, lighting candles and burning incense when we talk about curing people without, without a doctor. And I am the most practical person in the world who's never into anything like that in the past. And the way we coach, a lot of what we do is prove it with clinical studies and stuff like that. The same way Dr. Sarno did way back when was most of what he did was just use clinical data to prove that, you know, knee problems and hip pain and jaw pain and everything else. Tinnitus, Lyme disease, you name it. There's a lot of clinical data that shows that it's not what they say it is. There's plenty of clinical data. It shows it's stress based. You know, there was a survey by the American. I can't remember the name of the organization, but it was the American Family Practice Physicians. They surveyed them and they, the survey said that they believed that somewhere around 85% of the, the things that people would set up appointments for with them were stress based, which is a big number because when you go into a, a primary care physicians, they never talk about stress. Yet they say that 85% of the office visits are being caused by stress. So there's a real disconnect between the reality and the way medicine is being practiced.

Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a lot of momentum and you know, decades of training and careers. Like if you trained to do spinal surgeries and stuff, that's going to be a very large amount of dissonance to, to, to change. Right. So, you know, that's the kind of thing that, that will, that machine will grind on and each of us as individuals can learn tools to really navigate and, and find liberation for ourselves. You know, one thing that's interesting, you talked about stress there. I remember that Sarno often talked about, look, you don't have to change your, you can't change your personality. You know, if you're kind of a goodest or a perfectionist, you know, you can't change that. You don't have to change that. You Just have to know the pain is not coming from structure and you'll, you'll know. Set yourself free. I've found personally that that works to a certain degree of freedom for me of pain. But the level of, because I think freedom from this is, it's not just like okay, I have episode long periods of pain free but mine were never, have never been as long as yours. So I'm like, hey, there's another level. But I'm thinking like it's also not a sense of like my pain could come back at any time. Right. That's not real freedom here.

Yeah, that's, that's a bad way.

And I feel like the, for me the, the, the progress, the next level of progress has been to actually address qualities of my character that are stress producing. Like the perfectionism, the intensity, the, the niceness and that. I mean, you know, I don't know if we like resolve in the sense that I never have those patterns again. But you know, if I keep running the same pattern where I grasp onto this goal and I'm freaking out inside about it, I'm going to create pain. Yeah. And so I'm curious your thoughts about. We can't change the personality according to Sarno. And at the same time I found that we actually it seems to me like I do need to change these patterns in myself to a degree to reach the next level of physical freedom.

Yeah, you know, well, Tall Ben Sahar wrote a book called, what was it? The Pursuit of Perfect and it was about perfectionism. And he talks about switching from being a perfectionist to being an optimalist, which is basically a perfectionist, you know, the way we coach it without pain. So yeah, you know, I think it is impossible to change your, your personality completely but just a recognition and then, then you can make, you can actively on a day to day basis say okay, I need to stop this because it's, it's crazy. You know the, I'm, I'm going to the nth degree here. And you know, perfectionism is an attempt to make life perfect, which is impossible. And I think that causes a lot of repressed anger. And goodism or people pleasing is an attempt to make all relationships perfect, which again is impossible. And it will lead to a lot of anxiety and, and repressed anger. So even just recognizing that and as you said many times, just learning to say no is a lot of what you coach that is working around the margins and, and changing things. Now you can do other things too. You know, there's a lot of other things you can do. And there's a lot of other things that cause chronic pain. You know, a lot of times we, you know, we recommend, in order to just get out of your complete environment, what we did last year, which was to go, you know, live in basically a hut on the beach in remote Mexico for six weeks and totally, you know, detach from the environment. And that will work too.

Wow.

It eliminates all your, your tendencies and your environment that you can't get away from.

Yeah, yeah. And so that was like a, a form of kind of a reset or recharge time for you guys. Yeah.

When you. We lived in a. We lived in a little town called La Punta outside of Puerto Escondida, which was way down near the. The southern part of Mexico. And, you know, the main street was sand. To give you an idea of how remote this place was. And, and all the restaurants had sand floors and thatch roofs and it was, it was very remote. And so we didn't have tv. We did, you know, we had, we had a nice accommodation in an Airbnb, but we, we checked out from almost everything and, you know, that's going to relax almost anybody and get rid of perfectionist tendencies and stress and at almost an automatic level. And so there's a lot of ways to, to get to that point where, you know, because what we're trying to do here, I guess we haven't said it directly, is we're trying to shut down what ends up becoming a continuous fight or flight response. Right. Yeah. You know, it be. You know, we're agitated all the time these days because of technology and, and everything else.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, there's. You talked about perfectionism and goodism and both of them trying to create perfection in either or, you know, the perfect outer relationships, the perfect inner. To me, it seems like the, the stress in those scenarios that can fixate on certain things. Right. Like the goodest is, oh no, did someone get upset with me or did I do it? The perfectionist is like, oh no, am I going to achieve this at this time? What if I don't? Ah, fail the. That those are. That underneath those is our feelings that we just don't want to feel.

Yeah, right.

You know, feelings of anything, a powerlessness, desire that might not be fulfilled, old emotional pains. All this stuff is there. And to me it seems like one of the fast tracks to, you know, releasing the, the pain which is coming out of the fight flight. To release the fight flight is a willingness to basically face and just kind of be with different feelings.

Yeah.

I'm curious your. Your perspective on that.

Yeah, I think there could be, and I, I'm guilty of it myself, of suppressing feelings. And, and so part of the process that we. We go through when we're coaching people is uncovering what's actually going on, what's. Which act, what's actually challenging them, the. That they can't find themselves. For example, you know, really, this morning I. I coached an acting coach who's been very successful for a long time in Hollywood. And he's in an age where most people would say, you should have been retired, you know, 15 years ago. But he. The. What we figured out in, in that coaching session was, yeah, he's coached a lot of it. A lot of Academy Award winners and stuff like that, but he never got to act himself. And so he's starting. So he had to. He had to uncover what he was resisting. And, and he's got an agent and he's going on auditions. Like I said, in an age where most people would easily, almost everybody would be retired and he doesn't need the money, but he tamped down this desire that he had his whole life and, and the fact that he had been successful and made lots of money and knew lots of famous people was great, but what he really wanted to do was act himself. And so he's doing that. And I see that in people all the time. They. They're. They're. They're afraid to do what they really want to do.

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So it seems like there's maybe multiple contributing factors to that. Underlying, perhaps conflict in emotional conflict, life conflict that's creating disturbance inside. And then we're maybe pushing it down. We're fight flight, maybe stressing about all kinds of things in our lives, but underneath there's this thing that needs attention. And it seems like one thing might be kind of a life direction.

Yeah.

You know, maybe I'm not doing the work that I want to do. I'm not doing the job that I want to do. Sometimes I'd imagine it could be a relational thing.

Yeah.

Like, am I. Is my relationship what I really want it to be? Can it be. Have I settled? Like, that stuff can be very scary for people to really look at because it can be destabilizing to their sense of life and normal. And then I think the other, you know, probably other. Other ones as well. But the one that I see as well is in myself especially is these. These patterns we were talking about, about perfectionism and goodism and really kind of softening or changing some of those to the degree that we are able to be, you know, an optimalist or free of pain.

Do you see other.

Other big things that are kind of like underneath for people?

Oh, yeah. First of all, let me say, you know, we use your. Your book Not Nice. This is kind of the textbook, all right? Helping people overcome goodism. So we. Goodism is part of our. Our course and part of our coaching. But we, we do. It's. It's. It's recommended reading for everybody that we, we coaches is not nice because it's. You know, the thing about niceness and goodness is it's. It's not inherently easy to understand. What could be. What could possibly be wrong with being good? I mean, what could possibly. You know, and so people have a real challenge with the idea that. That they should not be as good as they are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I know.

But where can. But I think the question was, where can stress come from? What can activate the fight or flight response and cause chronic pain? Is just about anything. And I think it is layers and layers. Too much. Anything from too much technology to a life goal that has not been lived. And I mean, even on a basic level, it seems like society has a way that society exists to perpetuate society. Right. The individual, but it does not exist to perpetuate the individual. So the individual seems like. And I think, you know, I'm not a psychologist, but Freud and the kid and. And the adult all gets into this idea of the kid. You know, when we were down on the beach for six weeks, that's what the kid wanted to do. You know, that's what the kid really wanted. The kid wants to have fun. Right? The kid just wants to have fun. That's part of this whole thing. Society says, you can have fun. You gotta pay the bills, you gotta go to work, you got to do the laundry, you got to mow the lawn, and you'll get to. You'll get to have fun when you're 65. So you just wait, but nobody wants to wait. And that. It's that inner conflict between those two things that I think is a huge repressed anger that causes a lot of pain.

Yeah, yeah. There's a great phrase and the title of one of his books by Gabor Mate called When the Body says no.

Yeah.

And I've seen that a lot with myself. Like, there's something that I'm like, we're doing this. And then all this pain comes up. And then I'm like, maybe we're not doing that and then the pain, you know, subsides and it's like, oh, I get it. Yeah, you don't, you know, you don't like this kind of intense activity that's no fun. And yeah, I think finding and accessing that, that balance is so important to really, to, to be able to indulge that, that, that playful leisure entertainment. But the thing is, I think people kind of confuse, especially in this day, you mentioned technology entertainment with certain activities that are actually not restorative but can be further agitating to our system. Like spending a bunch of time scrolling through social media on a phone is actually probably not necessarily indulging the little kid. It's kind of this in between gray zone where we're not working or not being productive, but we're not also really resting and we're stimulating a lot of it's stimulus, it's emotion, it's absorbing. And then when we're done with it, we're kind of like. And my brain is still jacked up and I feel like that's, that's a challenge with people consider that leisure. But that actually doesn't restore us.

No, it's, it's the, you know, it's definitely, you know, stress. And eustress, I think. Would be you familiar with the term eustress? Yeah, which is, which is positive, stressful things and we all need that as well. So it's a tricky place to balance out because a lot of perfectionists know that the only thing they can do well and perfectly is what they've already done. So they tend to start to get smaller and do the same thing over and over again because they've got it down pat. Well, of course that goes against eustress because eustress is which comes from the prefix, the same as the euphoria, which is, which is stress that challenges you in, in the, in a proper way. Like, you know, I'm running the Vietnam jungle marathon in a couple months and you know, I don't know how I'm going to do it, but it's, it's, I'm looking forward to it and it's a, it's a eustress type thing, thing of challenging myself in a, in a positive way and if I don't finish or whatever happens. Whatever happens. But that, that's, I'm not sitting still.

Yeah. Is it actually in Vietnam, in a jungle? All right, yeah, that sounds like a fun adventure and I love. You can just hear your approach to it is that it doesn't have that edge of perfectionism. And intensity. Right. It's like I'm drawn to it, I'm excited about it. And whatever happens, happens. Versus like I must finish. What if I don't? I have to finish with this time. What if I don't, you know?

Yeah.

And that's, that's where all that pressure comes in.

I win if I, you know, if I get there and, and have a good time. I do want to finish, but time.

Yeah, well, yeah, there's, that's the eustress, right? Is, you know, we're not talking about softening intensity so that there's no. No goal, no challenge, no nothing. I don't think that serves us either. I think that, that there's like, it's. Yeah, I want to do this thing. I'm energized, I'm excited and I'm not going to make this so high stakes that I cause fight or flight. Stress, fear, intensity. Over this over. I mean I, I think the ultimate goal I'm realizing is how do you, how do you respond to the challenges of life without so much of that fight or flight getting triggered? And I know it's not like we, we're just totally placid and don't feel anything, but just. I think there's so many things in life that we can be like, oh yeah, oh no. Ah. And. And they're not really. And even if they're unpleasant or even if they're challenges, there's this. And I see that for myself as being kind of the next level. The next chapter is like, hey, just basically chilling out a little bit more about life, about the next goals, about the next steps. And I. And to me it seems very linked actually to finding a greater sense of faith or trust in life, in myself.

Yes.

The divine and just. And going with life more versus needing to.

It's also balance too. Which balance? You know, it's a tricky thing. I mean this is, this is kind of balance because how do you balance? You know, you can balance, but, but the, the trip to Vietnam is, is. Is part of that balance. But a lot of times when we're coaching people, it just ends up being life coaching where. You know, I coached a guy several years ago who. He lived in San Francisco he became. And he. And he had a startup that went out of business. But lo and behold, he got another job as CEO in. Of a tech company in Connecticut. But his, his ex wife and kids lived in Canada and his new wife lived with him in San Francisco in, In, you know, with a little child. So. And he's wondering why he's got stress, you know, and he can't, the kids can't leave Canada because of the court order. So he's got, he's triangulated. So, you know, where's the stress coming from? Well, it's obvious, you know, it's, you don't have to look too deep. He's just spread too thin. So a lot of times life is, is, you know, you can look at it and just say, you can't do everything. You know, you, you can only do so much. So I'm a big fan of the book that I've got this thing sitting on right here, which is the four hour work week, which is really about how to manage your life without driving yourself crazy. And that's just basic stuff. It's. You don't have to look deep if you just have too much stuff going on.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that links back to what you were saying when, if we, the battle for belief. Right. Because if we're aware, oh, this pain is coming from stress, are we start to look in a very different direction.

Yeah.

And what, what. So that, what to resolve if you're wondering, like, well, if I'm not going to resolve my, my herniated disc, what am I going to resolve? It's going to be, oh, yeah, like my life schedule, my relationship, my work, my something. And it just, your, your spotlight goes in a very different place.

You might have taken a job where your commute is an hour and a half away because you needed the job. Well, you know, that's, that's going to cause stress. Yeah, yeah.

What if someone's listening and they're like, well, that's all well and good, but I, I got, I need that job. I can't not commute right now. Maybe in a year or two I could get something else, but for right now, I gotta commute. Does that mean I'm gonna be destined to be in pain during this stressful period of my life? Or, you know, I got a sick relative and it's gonna be a long road of recovery with uncertainty if they're gonna get better. You know, look, we're looking at a year of treatments. I'm, you know, I'm having a lot of pain. I can't fix that problem. I can't, you know, get out of that. So am I destined to be in pain for the next year?

Yeah, that's, that's a tricky one. And, and you mentioned one. You know, first of all, people have, usually when they say, I can't I've got a problem that I can't change. 90% of the time, it. It can be changed, but there are 10% that I've got a sick parent, an elderly parent that needs a lot of attention. You can still work with stuff like that, too. Of course. That. There's no way you can change that. But you can bring them from the assisted living in Michigan and bring them down to the assisted living next to your house. There's a lot of different things you can do to that. But most of the things people think they can't change, they can. And what we do is we say, you know, what causes resistance? You're all locked up. Because when you think about changing this, it causes so much anxiety. Nothing gets done. So we create what we call a safe zone, kind of the investigational phase. Now, in the investigational phase, there's no pressure here. We're just looking at, what if I, you know, I know I'm making a lot of money doing this as. As, you know, a Wall street guy, but really want to. What I want to do is be a yoga teacher in Bali. And, well, you know, don't automatically do it. Just go through the investigational stage. What would it take? You know, how, first of all, I need to, you know, learn how to be a yoga teacher. Maybe I need to take a course. And, And, And. And, you know, there might be a spouse involved or whatever it is, but when you lay it all out in front of you, a lot of times it's not as scary when you look at it step by step, just like building a house or something like that. And that takes the fear away, because a lot of times the changes seem so big only because you haven't spent the time to look at the step by step. And that usually works.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. So what have you found as you're working with people are some of the biggest, like, sticking points where, where people kind of. So if someone's listening to this and they're like, okay, I'm interested in, you know, challenging the.

The.

The pain and moving towards it, or, okay, I'm gonna look to solve some of the underlying stressors in my life. So they have a bit of a roadmap here. What have you found in the places that people just. They get stuck on them?

Oh, the. The biggest one, a disease by far, is their diagnosis. They vacillate back and forth forever as to whether this is a real medical condition or tms. You know, we'll coach somebody or they'll go through our Masterclass, and they'll be sure that, oh, I just. This is, this is stress. That's all it is. The, you know, the clinical information in the course clearly shows that there is no revelation. Let me give you an example for the people watching. There's a lot of clinical data that shows that the occurrence of herniated discs is exactly the same in people with and without back pain. So there's no real correlation between the two. But no matter what information you give people, there is an inherent herd mentality that I think is instinctive, that goes back to the beginning, you know, our ancestors, that says, you know, always stick with the herd. If you, if you go away from the herd, you'll die. It doesn't even matter if the herd's going off a cliff, you're going to run off the cliff with them. Because the instinct is that the herd is always safe. So people have a real tough time. Most people can't get there to start with, but even if they do, they, they, they jump back and, you know, I'll talk to them again. Well, I'm not really, I, I went to get another mri, you know, and they have a tough time, or my doctor said this, or, you know, so that is the biggest one by far is belief. That it, and, and the way you, the way you get over belief is we have the three pillars, which is changing belief, reducing stress in a variety of different ways that we talked about and then increasing your physicality. So what we, we take them through a process where you just move forward with those three each week and you see incremental. You're going to see incremental improvement in symptom and that will cause the belief to go up. And that is, that's how you resolve the belief problem. That is, that is universal. The, the next one is change. People are resistant to change. They love to journal and meditate about things, but they, they don't want to change anything. I don't like to change. And a lot of times the situation costs, calls for a change. So people, people resist that. And then the third thing is they, they, they're fearful to move or exercise. And, you know, it hurts now, and I'm afraid, I'm afraid it's going to, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hurt myself.

Yeah.

If I start moving more. And, and, you know, I had a guy who came to see me and he had been playing pickleball a lot and he was afraid. And, and, and I, I gave my advice that I give everybody, if it hurts, do twice as Much of it, you know, which is. Which is they don't like to hear that, but it's true. Yeah.

And that. So I have a question about that last one, but I just referenced the first one about the belief, and I get it, because I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, which is an autoimmune condition. But by the way, autoimmune conditions, it might seem like, oh, that's a, quote, medical thing, real thing. But there is an incredible, like, measurable link more and more between stress and emotion and autoimmune and also personality styles and immune. I think Gabor Mate has done some really amazing work about even looking at really severe conditions like ALS and Ms. And these things that seem like, oh, that's just a genetic. You got a bad hand. It's like, no. If you look at the personalities of these people and the way they go through their life, there are trends and the same thing, and this one is real. People don't like to hear this, but the same thing is true as a contributing factor, not the only factor, but even to cancer is these. These things. So it's. There's this distinction between, well, it's a medical thing, as if it's like a physical, predetermined process that has nothing to do with my mind and emotions. But in any case. So I had that with ankylosing spondylitis. And I think that was one of the really healing factors in working with Laura from your clinic was her being like, hey, I had rheumatoid arthritis. And I was like, oh, that's just as real as ankylosing spondylitis. Okay, all right. You know, And I was like, I could hold on to that. And that really helped me, you know, cross that. That hurdle into a new perception. One question, though. You said about number three, kind of if it hurts to do twice as much. I think sometimes there's the fear that the pain is danger. Right. Like, or the fear that the pain is damaging me or I have a condition. But even if that's not there, sometimes the pain just really hurts.

Yeah.

And we're afraid of the sensation of the hurt. And there's, like, just a resist. Like the way we might resist to go into a cold plunge or, you know, do something uncomfortable physically. It's like, oh, wow. Exercising on this is like a stab every time I step. You know, how do you help people when they feel like, hey, look, I get it, it's not a condition, but, man, this pain is. I'm afraid of it, it hurts.

Yeah, that's, it's hard. There's no, there's no way around it. You know, I've kind of related it to if you're, if you're addicted to a drug, it's, it's really hard. And withdrawing from that drug is also really hard. But in the end, one of them, you're better off, and the other one, you're just, you just stay the same. There isn't any, there isn't any magic button. It allows you to get out of it without a little pain. But I, I can say from my own experience, and I know you've been through this too, is that, you know, I went through years of just continuous pain. So a, a 90 day period of a little bit of increased pain was more than, you know, willing to pay that price of admission for what has turned out to be a life without any chronic pains. You know, when I first got over the back pain, I didn't realize that the headaches and the eczema and everything else was, was also. And it all went away. So that's the, that's the thing you can look forward to on the other side, which is a way better life.

Yeah. Yeah, I love that, that message of hope and inspiration and, and you know, it's, it's true. I can really attest to how much my life has gotten better. And I am forever grateful for you and Laura and the, and the support and, and that. I mean, I feel like the, the tipping from believing I had this diagnosis, like I kind of was battling it but couldn't win, you know, and then there's the. Working with Laura is just like, okay, all right, all right. You know, and that's, you know, there's still more work to do after that, but that is like the, the doorway to step through that really allows you to start, you know, opening up in cool ways. So if people would like to learn more from you. You mentioned a master class and maybe obviously coaching with you as well. Can you share where people can find a bit more about these resources?

Yeah, we're, we're at best place to find is our website, painkureclinic us paincareclinic us not.com you need to change that. But. And we, we started out strictly coaching for several years and we kind of put together a template for curing and that ended up being our, our master class. So we, you know, we're kind of like the teachers in the, in the textbook now. So you can either just get the textbook or, or, or get a combination of the two, and we'll take you through the process of, of curing all your CR chronic symptoms. And it's usually not that hard, and it can be done in, in a month or three months or something like that, and you'll, you'll be over and done with and, and onto the rest of your life without pain.

Yeah. Wow. I love it. Thank you, John, for, for sharing with us today. And thank you for the work that you're doing.

Thanks, Aziz. That was fantastic talking to you.

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