Healing From Pain Once and For All with Steve Ozanich and Joe Polish

Almost all the time. They don't say, how's your relationships, how's your sleep, how's your kids, how's your career, how's your job? They immediately give you a structural diagnosis. Now, most of them are trying to do all they know. They're not trying to purposely keep people in pain. They just don't understand the mechanism, what causes this. Even the people that are trained in this for years. Let me introduce my friend, Steve Ozanich. So Steve Ozanich, spelled O Z A N I C H. Steve Ozanich is a mind, body, healing, health consultant, teacher of presence, spiritual researcher, and author of five books. His first book, the Great Pain Deception, became an international bestseller. His second book, Dr. John Sarno's Top 10 Healing Discoveries, was written as a homage to the late Dr. John E. Sarno, who forever transformed the medical industry with his discovery of tms, the Mind Body Syndrome. Steve's third book, Back Pain Permanent Healing, Understanding the Myths, Lies and Confusion, was an Amazon number one best seller. Over the past 23 years, he's helped to teach thousands of sufferers how to heal themselves through his lectures, books, articles, videos, and interviews. So welcome, Steve. We're going to hand this mic back and forth. This is not something that I've ever seen you done. Get in front of a group of people and talk. And so because he lives here in Ohio, I insisted that he get his ass down here in person and talk to people. He talks to lots of people, but usually not in groups. And he's been interviewed by some pretty prominent individuals. And this guy really knows his stuff. He's a wonderful human. He's been through his own journey of hell and through that process figured out something that most people that are in the pain business don't understand at all. And I cannot tell you how many really brilliant doctors that are usually the most resistant to it, including chiropractors, including physical therapists, including surgeons that have struggled and suffered with pain that could not get out of pain. And I've introduced them to Steve and the ones that listen and many don't. And I'll say, do a call with this guy, do a session with this guy, read his book. If they do and. And they believe the pain in many cases doesn't just minimize, it goes away. I could go on and on. I could spend half an hour just telling stories, and I have a tendency to want to do that right now. But I want to just ask you, tell us who you are, what you do.

Sure. Thanks, by the way, for the beautiful invitation. Has anybody Heard of that phrase TMS that he just mentioned? Looks like the people who know me. It's a very important phrase. It could save your lives someday, actually, and it has saved many lives. I guess my story is a good place to start, right? I was in severe pain for 30 years. Started in the low back, and of course I did the normal routes. You know, I tried everything. Acupuncture, physical conditioning, physical therapy, core strengthening. Hanging upside down like a bat. I always tell people I did that, you know, inversion tables are called. But I never tried to suck the blood out of anyone's neck. Of course. Hundreds of chiropractic adjustments. I think I bought some houses for chiropractors. And everything works for a little while, everything. But nothing was working permanently. But in the late 1990s, my pain got so bad that I was crippled. I was crawling around on my hands and knees, and my left leg was paralyzed. I had the quadricep and the knee on there, but I lost the hamstring and the calf and the foot on that side. The deep tendon reflexes were gone. No sensation. I drug it around for a year, and of course, I was putting off the inevitable. Surgery was coming. It was obvious. So I think I was two weeks out from the last surgical consult when a friend of mine showed me an article. He said, this reminds me of you. So I looked at it. It was by some doctor named John E. Sarno from the New York University Medical Center. So I went home and I got Sarno's book, and I started to read it, and I saw his implications, and I threw the book against the wall. The very book that was going to save my life rejected it. And as Joe knows, 90% of the people do reject it. What I'm going to tell you works every time. But only 10% of the people can see it, which is okay, because there's different levels of consciousness. It's all about consciousness. Certain people can see it and go, oh, that's me now. I didn't see it at first. Actually, maybe I did see it. That's why I threw the book, right? And so I got worse, of course, and I quit eating. My family was freaking out because I was down like £50. I've been a trainer my whole life. I was down 50 pounds. And so I went back and I looked at that book of Dr. Sarno. It's called Healing Back Pain. And they connected. Connected. Tears were flowing.

It was.

It was powerful. But this beautiful man had given me the answer. So I started doing what he said. And it didn't happen as easily as it happens for most people. There was no one like me to come to and. But I healed eventually by following the advice and I ended up writing that book, the Great Pain Deception. And getting his endorsement was tougher than healing. Dr. Sarno, he didn't endorse things at all. He was just a medical doctor. But it's done well out there. Many, many tens of thousands of people have healed from it. And I wrote a couple follow up books. One was an homage, like you said, to him. And the third one was called Back Pain Permanent Healing. I had more to say. After a 400 page book, there was some more I still wanted to say. So his discovery was something he called tms, which originally stood for Tension myositis Syndrome. He was very frustrated and upset with his results. He was actually a physiatrist at the New York University Medical Center. He was so frustrated with the results of his work that surgery wasn't working permanently and therapy wasn't working and on and on and on. So he did something unique in modern medicine. He went and looked deeper and he took the files out of his back pain patients and he noticed, oh, they've got other health problems too. They've got allergies, they've got, you know, sleep problems, they've got skin problems, they've got stomach problems. So he did something even more unique today. He began to talk to them, which is very rare. I have people say to me, my doctor never looked at me, came into the room, looked at the chart, scribbled something out and walked right out. But he was, he was an old man, so he was old school. And he started to notice tendencies in these people. Personalities. It's a personality problem. He's a paragon. He noticed these people tend to be perfectionistic, goodest strivers. They push, push, push, push, push themselves to win, to succeed, to learn, to know, to understand, keep everybody happy. But what they didn't know was that they were furious inside about all that. We despise every minute of that. As Carl Jung said, there's another within us whom we do not know. There's two people here. There's the one that we show the world, which Freud called a superego, Jung called a Persona. This outer face that we show everybody is to please people, mainly the parents and then by extrapolation, everybody else in the world. And so these people who tend to have this personality type, we call it tight T person, which stands for tension, they had all kinds of health problems. They were magnets for anger, tension. But they didn't know it because the process is all unconscious, which means you don't know it. It's outside of your awareness, outside of your consciousness. And so that's probably the main reason people don't believe it, because they can't feel anger in these things. Yes, they feel stressed out sometimes, but they don't understand the magnitude of it. And so he discovered when he started telling his patients, you know what? I don't think there's anything wrong with your back. I don't care about that disc herniation or that stenosis or that spondylolisthesis or the spondylolysis or the spondylitis or the cauda equinas syndrome or the prolapse disc or the sequester disc, whatever the label they want to give it. I think this is your brain diverting your attention to your physical body and away from this rage. And he said he was astounded when he told his patients that they began to heal. He couldn't understand it. He said, I was mystified. That was the word he used, that the knowledge of what's going on was the healing mechanism. We don't have to do anything else now. It makes sense, because what the brain is trying to do is divert your attention to the physical, whether it's feet, knees, hands, shoulders, doesn't matter, and away from the emotional, which once again, is outside of the awareness of the individual. So it makes sense why we would reject it, because it's helping us. He said, it's a favor your brain is doing for you. It's trying to help you cope through your daily life so you don't have to deal with all this crap that you're putting on yourself. And so if it's trying to help you, why would anybody want to get rid of it? So you can look at pain or disease as an emotional crutch that's helping you walk each day. And people don't want their crutches kicked out from underneath them. So about 10% of the people believe it's statistically. Well, let me say this. Everybody believes what I'm saying is true, except when it comes to them. No, no. I got a hernia, and my doctor told me I had a bad back. You're right. You're right. But my back's bad or my shoulder's bad, you know? And so he called his discovery tms, originally for tension myositis syndrome, which means muscle tension. But as he got better at what he did, he changed that phrase, TMS to Tension myoneural syndrome, which is muscles and nerves, because he realized there's tendon involvement as well. But towards the end of his long life, he changed that phrase TMS to the Mind Body Syndrome, because he realized it's everything. Your immune system, the cancers, the autoimmune things, because they were healing like crazy. And so that's one of the things I like to talk about. It's not just pain. Yeah, it's not just pain. It's everything. Which sounds so panaceic, you know, if it's too good to be true, gotta be wrong, right? But it works. It's almost like this. E equals MC squared. That Einstein discovered this little phrase, tms. He figured it out, and guess what? Everybody hated him. The medical industry mocked him. He worked at nyu. They mocked him and ridiculed him. They turned their back on him. They wouldn't even eat lunch with him because his sin was helping millions of people to heal. And of course, the people don't want to heal it for what I just talked about. It's protecting you. He's got a famous. There's a lady named Helen that was a famous patient of his. She was crippled with hip and back pain so bad that she couldn't function. She was actually bedridden for over two years, which is a tough. I was close to that two years. They heard about him in New York. And if you went up to see him, he knew whether you needed psychotherapy or just go to his lectures. He had a weekly lecture. Well, when the family said, she's been bedridden, he said, you know, I don't think the lecturers are going to get it. Maybe you better talk to somebody. Something deep happening here. So under deep psychotherapy, she had remembered being molested by her father at 5 years old. Well, they sent her to an incest support group. And she got worse in the group, worse. And she panicked. 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 your knowledge therapy. Like you said, we were supposed to do the understanding. But her husband was standing there and he said to her, you know, you're talking about 42 years of repression. And when she heard that, something in her brain clicked and she collapsed. She said she was on the ground shaking like this. She was watching her life flash before her eyes. She was yelling to her husband, I want to die. Let me die. Please let me die. And in the next breath, hold me. Please hold me. What is it? Which one do you want? So Within a couple minutes, all her pain disappeared forever. So he realized, okay, this is a protective barrier. Our health problems. Knee, foot, hand, shoulder, whatever it is, it's protecting you from things you don't want to see. And of course, everybody came into his office after that. He said, wanted to do the Helen thing, reach into me and take this out so I can just whistle away from here. But he said, we tried it for decades. It doesn't work. It was the only case he ever saw where the unconscious burst into consciousness and it was healed. They only saw one case of it. I've seen one since he's passed away. But we have to do it through consulting and books and through knowledge, things like that. And so when I wrote this book, I thought, well, I'll help a few people heal. You know, I didn't have any idea it was going to take off like that or how many other health problems were going to be healed from it. I just had a couple driving from Pennsylvania took me to dinner because their cancer went away. Both of their. Both of them, husband and wife. I just helped a lady get her hearing back from Redondo Beach. She went deaf. Very interesting case. A guy from Wisconsin named Joe. He signed on to Zoom. He was so thin, I almost shocked. He looked like an Auschwitz prisoner. I thought, wow, this guy's suffering. But I don't want to gasp. It's not a good way to start a consultation by gasping. But, I mean, he could see the bones in his face. And he proceeded to tell me that.

He.

Would eat foods and he would have a reaction to them, swelling and all kinds of things. His wife had rushed into the hospital and his family, and they were scared to death of having to eat anything. And so all food has histamine in it. Chicken and rice happen to have low histamine in it. So his doctors told him he had a histamine intolerance and that he should try chicken and rice. So he had been eating chicken and rice every day for five years. That was it. And that made me understand why the thinness. But I said to him immediately, there's no such thing as histamine intolerance. Forget about all the labels in health that are crippling us. There's no such thing. Your mind has bought into it with the help of your physician. And he said, that's not why I'm here. I said, wow, that's not why he was here. He said, during this time, I went through a car wash, and they put that cherry smell on top of the car and make it smell better. He said it triggered a chemical response in my nose. He said it was like they took a bucket of molten lava and poured it over top of my head. Every nerve in my body was on fire. The entire body was on fire. Burning is one of the common symptoms of TMS that Steve had. Remember this surgeon? And of course, I told him, there's no such thing as a chemical sensitivity. Your mind is bought into it. Okay? These are all mind things. Well, he didn't kind of buy into what I told him that day. He was hoping, you know, like most people tell me, to do X, Y and Z so I can get better. It doesn't work that way. But the next day, he sent me a very nasty email. It was beautifully written. I almost congratulated him on what a good job he did. It was two pages long. It's like you don't know what you're doing here. You're talking about consciousness and yogis and all this stuff. So I need money to live. But his life was worth more than a few hundred dollars. So I sent him his money back to make a point. I said, you don't want to heal. I explained to you, by the way, there's the only people that don't heal, the ones that don't want to, which is quite a few of them. And he said, what do you mean.

I don't want to heal?

I said, I explained it to you. I've seen it working for 23 years now. People just like you. Not that thin. But he reflected on what he said, and a few days later, he healed. He got out an egg. He told me and his wife and friends were going, don't do it. Don't do it. I have this vision, I always think in comedic terms. He's trying to eat this egg, and there's all these people holding his arm back. Suicide by egg. Because they had rushed him to so many hospitals. Don't do it, he said. Steve said, I can eat anything I want. Well, he ate the egg and he said, that's like the greatest egg of all eggs in the history of eggs. You could imagine eating something different because change. Human beings need change. We have to have it. Nothing happened. So he got out. He said one of the things he wanted was Dilly Bars. So he got like six of them and ate them. His wife is worried he's going to get fat now, which is actually the same problem on the other end, because it's the same thing as addiction. The same mechanisms of causes and effect. Okay, but he's Fine. He's fine now. He's at, like, me. He went out all these, what they call histamine intolerance groups on Facebook and all this stuff. And of course, they throw him right out of the group. I have this thing in a frame in my house where I was thrown out of the spine group because I went in and I said, I can help you. The moderator threw me out. The last thing they want is to be helped. I guess I learned that hard there because the first group I went into, when I first published that book, it was a fibromyalgia group. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna go and help some people. What is it? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. They came at me like wounded badgers. And I've helped a lot of fibro people, but I realized why I learned something from that. We learned something from even failure, right? Probably more from failure than from success, actually. But the little old lady that ran that, she was a sweet little old lady with a bun in her hair and the knitting needles. You know, like that little sweet lady from Tweety Bird had. They were always talking about teas and which kind of pillows and which. This will help. I realized, you know, this was the reason this woman got up in the morning, and I took it away from her. There's a lot to be gained in suffering. The world just doesn't want to hear this message. Dr. Sarno never believed that it would take off. He said, if it did, there would be economic collapse within the industry, and there would be, and it won't. Of course, he talks about the orthopedic surgeons that he helped, and I've helped a few myself. But the orthopedic surgeon said to him he was in serious pain, and Dr. Sarno got him out fast. And the surgeon said, I don't know what I'm going to do now. I got to go back to. It was either Arkansas, Oklahoma. Knowing what I know now, I don't know what to do. And Dr. Sarno said, Good luck with that. But years later, he saw that orthopedic surgeon. He said, and he said, what did you ever do with that? He said, well, if they think it's a mechanical structural problem, I deal with them that way. If they think it's a mind body problem, I deal with it that way. He figured out a way to ride the fence, you know, which I guess is half steps better than no step, right? But there's a great story about this Rabbi Benson Scheinfeld. I contacted him by the way he was so crippled with back pain, he was hunched over like this. He said, I was so depressed because I couldn't function and I'm an athlete and I can't do anything. So he went to a neurosurgeon who told him he had a fragmented disc in his back with the mri. Fragmented, not herniated, broken off. We call those. I call him a floater. They call it fragmented. And so the surgeon said, you need immediate surgery, or are you going to be paralyzed for the rest of your life if you move the wrong way? Well, he was like me. The only smart thing I ever did was avoid surgery. That's the only thing I avoided. So he went to an orthopedic surgeon or a neurosurgeon. And neurosurgeon said, that's a fragmented disc. You need immediate surgery. Going to be paralyzed. So I went to a third one and a fourth one. So after the fourth one, he said, my options are out. You know, I was trying to avoid surgery, but I don't think I'm going to be able to. But in the meantime, a friend of his who was crippled with pain was free. And he said to his friend, what happened to that pain? And he said, I went to talk to this doctor in New York University Medical center and went away. Well, it's funny because the rabbi says, I never heard anything that ridiculous in my life, that someone can talk to you and the pain can go away. But he said, I was desperate. So I made an appointment with Dr. Sarno. That was the doctor, he said, I took my MRIs up and I handed my MRIs to him. And I knew what he was going to say because the ego always anticipates it, always anticipating that this is not tms, you need surgery. This is a physical, structural problem. And he said, but he didn't say that. He looked at the MRI and looked at me and said, son. Everybody was son because he was an older. He said it kind of rocked me because I just had four people tell me, you know, they were well respected people. He went to that. You're going to be paralyzed. He said, there's nothing wrong. So he asked Dr. Sarno the golden question. It's asked 99.999% of the time to me and everybody that does this work now, which is thousands of people, by the way. There was only like two of us before. Everybody who heals, writes a book, starts a company like mine, and they're competing against me. The people that I helped, they're charging like three Times what? I'm charging. The question some of you are probably asking right now. I saw some hands go up, that they're in pain. What do I do? That's the question. What do I do every day? I get it. And Dr. Sarno, being a wise man, said, what do you like to do? He said, I like to ski. He's in Go skiing. You told him, go skiing. I just had four people tell me to be paralyzed.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out. And if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So he said, I didn't believe him because it was four against one and it sounds a little wacky. I saw, you know, I see it. This guy. I don't know about this guy, because I didn't believe him either. But he went to Dr. Sarno's lecture. He drove Dr. Sarno crazy. Sarno was the most blunt human being I've ever seen in my life. I mean, he would hurt people's feelings. He didn't mean to. He was just blunt. He kept asking him, why did it happen here? How come it happened there? Why did it happen over there? He was driving him crazy. And Sarno, he said. Sarno just pointed at me during the lecture. You can't ask any more questions. You're done today. He said, that's the way he talked. He said, if you want to talk to me, you'll make an appointment with me. But he wanted to get out of the lecture and wanted to go home, probably. Well, he said, I left that lecture that night not really fully believing it, which most people here might not be fully believing. He said, two days later, the pain disappeared forever. I contacted that rabbi recently. He said it still hasn't come back. These aren't physical, structural, body problems. They're consciousness problems. And so what do I do? Go skiing. Although he never had to actually go skiing. You know, he just. It was what Dr. Sarno called knowledge therapy. This is the healing mechanism. You understanding what's going on. He just wanted the rabbi to listen to what he had to say in that lecture. You know, shut up and listen to me. And he did. And it healed. Sometimes it works that fast. I've had people, many people on Zoom heal right in front of me. The first one was Shanda. Remember Shanda? He sent her to my way. She healed right in front of me. I thought she was screwing around with me because it had never happened to me before. I said, now get out of here. No, it's gone. She said. I said, get up and bend over there. Run around there. And she did. She had tears. It's gone. So the mechanism is knowledge or truth. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. But sometimes it takes more. There have been people who had tough childhoods, abuse. And sometimes they need therapy, sometimes they need programs. Sometimes they need this or that, which I would call intermediary steps. All of these things, like whether it's journaling or programs or NLP or whatever label the medical industry wants to give something these days, those are intermediary steps to the final goal, which is presence. Once they become present, in other words, living in this moment, it's over. Now, that's tough because, as Eckhart Tolle would say, you are mind addicts. You're all addicted to your thoughts and your mind, which is right. You know, his agent is my agent, you know, Bill Gladstone, who don't, you know, is probably a better list. So sometimes it's tough to break that stranglehold. And so essentially, what's going on, whether it's abuse or whether Joe has both cases actually in his life, but. Or people like probably many of you may have had good childhoods who just ask a lot from yourselves. Oh, well, duh. Look where you guys are today. You all want to be winners. You all want to be the best. You all want to succeed, right? He showed that that was so enraging to us inside, but we don't know it because it's unconscious behavior. Sometimes they have to do some work to get that anger out of there, of the demands we make on ourselves. Sometimes people just need to hear a lecture. I had a guy contact me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. My lifetime of back pain's gone. And I said, oh, thanks for telling me. It's always nice to hear that. I said, which book of mine did you read? He goes, you wrote a book? He goes, I was watching the Wall of Victory, and he healed. I started it was because of Dan Hollings. That was nice of you to set me up. But then he said, you know, you got to get out there and show these people it's free on YouTube. Show the success. Because, you know, you know me, I don't say anything after somebody heals. And so I started a wall, a wall of victory. Of people who were told they could never heal and they're all fine now. I said, I want to make. I want to make this wall so big. You know, you said something in that meeting we had. Remember Elders, in that meeting with this couple things you said were beautiful, you probably don't even know what it was. One was, what do we leave behind that's important? And the other one was, life's all about flow. You said, I want Lincoln's. Oh, yeah, that's what it's about, flow. Because anger means you're not flowing. You're not flowing right. And so I wanted to make this massive wall so big, nobody could ignore it. And I said, I'm going to make Mexico pay for it. So it's not just pain. Although that's what my understanding started with. I've seen people heal from skin problems and intolerance problems. And like the lady who lost her hearing, you know, every day they ask me, is this tms? And I always had to say, I'm not allowed to diagnose people. I'm not in the medical industry. I'm not going to do it. I can give you my opinion. Of course it is. What was happening at the time it disappeared, the hearing. She was a pilot, and so she couldn't fly anymore. She was pretty upset. And she said, well, not much. Which is always the thing causing it. It's called negation. In psychology, the first thing people do is they put down the actual thing that's causing it. I think it has something to do with ego. I talked to Dr. Sarno's psychologist. They said we see the same thing, negation, immediately. So she says, not much. Other than I heard my brother was going to die. I said, not much. Do you love your brother? Yes, very much. Why did you say not much? But once she understood the favor her brain was doing her, it was so painful to hear that her brain shut off the hearing gate. We live our lives to our senses in this world on earth here. Sensory realm, sight, taste, touch, sound. And it was so painful, her brain just did her a favor. I don't want to hear it. Well, once she understood, I explained to her, it came right back. So you asked me, what's tms? I said, what isn't tms?

Yeah. Let me have a. I want to share.

No, my hand is glued.

What do you think of that so far? Sound interesting. So, yeah. So what is tms? So let me just kind of back up and share how I came about Steve. And it all started in the beginning of 2002, 2012, I was doing P90X with an ex girlfriend at a friend's condo, and it was in Oregon, and it was really freezing out in January, and I wanted to work out. And I had recently interviewed Tony Horton, you know, who's the guy that P90X. He's been doing exercise videos for years, Beachbody and stuff. And my knee had been hurting since December of 2011, and it was out January, but I was like, well, you know, I'm just gonna do a light work. I'll do some P90X. Which really wasn't a light workout, but. But it was a. It wasn't weight bearing. It was a pyrometrics one. So I was just jumping around like a jackass, right? Yeah, jumping around. And I was like, yeah, I'm kind of work through it. Maybe it'll loosen up the knee a little bit. And when I was done, it was really hurting by the end of the day, and I had to take a flight back later that evening. My knee had swollen up twice the size. I mean, it literally looked like a grapefruit. I could not bend my knee. And so I had to literally limp my way onto an airplane. I couldn't. I couldn't, like, bend it, really, other than just kind of. It was so swollen and my. You know, my legs like this during this whole meeting I'm having that day. And then later in the day, you know, taking a flight back to Phoenix. And at the time, I was paying Connie Mariano to be my concierge doctor, and she had written the book the White House Doctor. She was the primary doctor in the White House for Clinton Bush Jr. Bush Sr. And she could get appointments with anyone right away. And so I got an ultrasound first. And, you know, doctor said, yeah, it looks like it's a herniation. I mean, a torn meniscus and in your mendial meniscus on the inner part of my knee. And so I. Connie got me an appointment with the top doctor at the time for the Phoenix Suns, who said, basically, yep, it's torn. You're gonna have to get surgery. There's nothing you can do. I was like, man, I. But the pain came on in December. I didn't do anything. What would. How would I have, quote, unquote, torn it? And I could understand aggravating it, but why would it just tear? And so I said, can I get a second opinion? And she refers me to the top surgeon for the Cardinals, says the same thing. And I'm like, damn it. You know, this doesn't make any Sense to me, there's something inside that was like, you know, why would I just have to go get cut into in order to fix something that I don't even know what started it. Now, 15 years prior, I had all kinds of physical pain, and I had bought one of Sarno's books, and it might have been the book before Healing Back Pain.

Mind Over Back Pain.

Yeah, Mind Over Back Pain. That was it. That was his first book. That was written in the late 70s, right?

Yes.

Yeah. So I'd heard about TMS, and like Steve had mentioned, originally it was Tension myositis syndrome, then it was Tension Myel Neural syndrome, and then now it's referred to as the Mind Body Syndrome. And basically, it's. The cause of the physical pain is oxygen deprivation in the muscles, tendons and ligaments brought on by repressed emotions, predominantly anger and rage. But you don't feel it because it's on an unconscious level, like he had mentioned. So none of that made any sense to me. And then I would go to other doctors and like, no, that's. How many of you have ever had physical pain? And you went to a therapist, a chiropractor, a doctor, anyone, to get help with pain. Now, keep your hand, raise your hands again if they gave you anything other than a structural diagnosis. Meaning? Because usually when I go into pain, they're like, let's take a look at your back. What's wrong with your back? Let's massage this. What's wrong with your knee? What's wrong with your elbow? What's wrong with your wrist? Almost all the time they don't say, how's your relationships? How's your sleep? How's your kids? How's your career? How's your job? They immediately give you a structural diagnosis. Now, most of them are trying to do all they know. They're not trying to purposely keep people in pain. They just don't understand the mechanism, what causes this. Even the people that are trained in this for years. And so I totally ignored it for 15 years. I was given the solution, the book. I just couldn't. I couldn't. My brain could not believe that this is a psychosomatic thing and it's real physical pain. This is not the pains in your head. It starts with a thought process. But my freaking knee was twice the size. So I then, you know, I'm like, I gotta try something else. So I get prolotherapy, I get drilled into my hip, they pull out stem cells, they inject it into my meniscus area. I do PRP, prolotherapy, all this stuff, physical therapy. I can't run 20ft without my knee. Just constant pain, complete. Felt like my body was deteriorating within a two year period. Even though I was trying to work out, my wrist started hurting, my shoulders started hurting, all kinds of other parts of my body start hurting. And so then I, you know, come end of 2013, I go to almost two years because it started at, you know, literally the beginning of 2012 is when I had that quote unquote injury. So I go to the Hoffman Process, Hoffman Institute and they're doing some really deep work there and I'm, you know, doing well and I'm trying to get to, you know, just figuring out how to rehab my knee. And five days in, you know, there's a thing where you're kind of moving around, jumping around and I just feel a tweak because all of these emotions are coming to the surface and I'm wanting to fight them, right? And the next two days I finish this seven day process. No access to phone or anything. With my freaking knee and an ice pack up there swollen, I'm like, damn it, I got to go back to Arizona and just get fricking surgery. And it was such a pain. I'm like, finally two years of trying to do it, I'm going to go get surgery. And there was one other process where they're like, do brain balancing and stuff. And I'm going through this thing for five days where I'm listening to meditation stuff and have electrodes hooked up to me and all this stuff related to, you know, helping with physical pain. And during, so I was doing this for two 90 minute sessions and I had to drive to this location to do this. And during the first session you can't have any. You can't read, you can't do it, you have to sit. But the second you could either read or you can listen to audio. And so I, for some reason I go online and I'm like, remember tms? Like I want to, you know, see. So I download Sarno's book Healing Back Pain. That was the only book that he did on audio there where he did in his voice, although his other books on audio. So I'm listening to John sarno During the 90 minute sessions, like, and I'm like, holy shit. Like, is my brain doing this to me? Like, like, what is going on here? And I go home one night and I look online and like, TMS doctor can't find any TMS doctor, but I find a TMS Forum, and I see posts by this guy just explaining to people for free. Here's how to heal from stuff. He has an AOL email. I send an email to this guy saying, hey, I've not read your book, but can I hire you to do like a Skype with me or a phone call? And he's like, yeah, I guess so. And I'm like, okay, what do you want me to. What will you charge me? He's like. He was like, I think I did a phone call with you first. Like, I don't know, 100 bucks, $100. I'm like, okay, you know, I'm spending, you know, $200,000 into this shit over the last two decades, right?

Had I known you couldn't afford that, I'd have made it cheaper. Right, Right.

Yeah, no, exactly. So I get on you schedule a Skype call. This is total techno, like, ridiculousness. And he spends two hours on the phone with me. And at that point in time, I am in severe physical pain everywhere in my body. That first started with the knee. Literally, do this call with him. He's explaining all this stuff to me. I'm listening to Sarno's stuff, you know, fighting everything about, like, every chiropractor I've been to, every physical therapist, every acupuncturist, every doctor, all of this stuff saying, God, you know, it's this unconscious sort of thing. And within two weeks, the pain was 95% gone and has only come back, like, three times. And the times it's come back was when I first interviewed you in 2015. I did an interview with him. And it is because I went in and I was like, I got to do, like. But I knew it was not structural. There was something going on. There was some stress. And it started when I went to do a week vacation by myself. Like, the day I get to Santa Fe with no one, I wanted to just be alone. And, like, literally I get to the resort and I'm like, there's an art event in Santa Fe. I just started, like, Artists for Addicts. And I'm like, you know, take. Have the. I think it was an Uber. Drive me downtown. And I go to Reach Over. I'm in my room, ready. I'm like, I'm going to go downtown. Then I say, can I leave my luggage? And they're like, yeah. And I had my backpack. I kind of move the backpack, and I feel like, oh, this tweak in my. And I'm like, ah. You know, TMS is. Nothing's going to Hurt me. And I get in the cab and they drop me off. Like it's about a 20 minute drive downtown Santa Fe. And I get out and I'm like, I'm like, holy shit. I mean, this, like, hurt. And I am limping and it hurts so bad. I was like, I can't walk around this place. So I get on my phone, I find a hotel that's in that area. Can I get a massage? I just wanted relief. And that whole week, my back.

Why?

Because here I am trying to let go of the crazy, insane work schedule I have and my brain is like fighting.

That's how I made it.

No, I know you can. Yeah, well, and you explained it in our interview. So I was like, during this week, I'm listening to Sarno's book again, and I schedule an interview with Steve and I tell this story in the beginning of it. Now, that interview has helped hundreds of people get out of physical pain. That first original one. But that was the seed. But so what happened there is. I was like, yeah, and you can explain what happened, of course. But here's the point I want to make today. I know there's a lot of people like, well, what do you do then? Okay, if you have physical pain, what do you do? And I will say, first off, read Steve's book, read Sarno's books, listen to them. I think it's probably 60% of people, if they read the books and believe it, they heal. Another 30% need to go a little bit deeper. And what is it, 10, 20% needs psychotherapy. 10%? Yeah. Where you literally, you know, you do, you do therapy because there's a lot of repressed emotions. But the bottom line is we live in a world where there's massive amounts of money made on pain. And the first chapter of my book, what's in it for them? Be a pain detective. So much of this stems from pain as a messenger. Pain is trying to give you a wake up call. There's something wrong and we numb it, we drug it, we drink it away, we Internet it away, we freaking eat it away. I mean, there's all of these avoidance things that people do to avoid the real, you know, just life. And there are a lot of industries, there's a massive industry built around keeping people in physical pain surgeries. You know, I can tell stories on and on, but yeah, go ahead and explain what happened there. But for timing, I know we can spend all day talking about this. What I do want to do is, yeah, explain what people need to know. But then what to do with this. Because if you understand and learn this, I know every single person here has someone in their life that is in chronic pain. And they come. They may work for you. You may be married to them, they may be your children, they may be your friends, but most likely, they're you. And when I wrote in my journal in my 20s, when I was a carpet cleaner, I used to journal almost daily, and it was mostly negative. How difficult my life was, things I was pissed off about. I had no memory of this. But when I went back and looked at journals I wrote in my 20s, when I was in good physical shape, almost daily, I had no remembrance of any of this. Almost daily I was writing how much my neck hurt, how much my back hurt, how much I was in constant physical pain. I had no idea because it was so avoided, even though it's so real when you're feeling it.

Yeah, like David Hawkins, the late, great David Hawkins, said, you know, your health problems are from your negative attitude, he said, which is primarily true. But in your case, I've teased you in the past, many times, you know, I said, joe, you never got over the drug and alcohol addiction. It shifted into a work addiction, okay? And now when he goes on vacation, he needs to have another addiction. His brain is scanning, so it creates a pain again. It's that simple. Because the brain's goal is to help you obsess. It wants you to obsess. Dr. Sarno uncovered an obsessive personality type. Gotta win, gotta get it, Gotta push, push, push, push, push. And so TMSing was a phrase that he had coined. It changed our world. It's equivalent to the word obsessing. Your brain is creating these little niggles, we call them, all over your body. Because I want you to keep thinking about it. Put your attention in your mind's eye and the body over and over and over. Not only that, I also want you to look for the solution. I want you to obsess on a solution. That's what the Buddha called the double arrow of suffering. The second arrow of suffering. The first one is the symptom. The second one is the worrying about it. The other. And so you have the personality type that most people do. There's very few people that don't have it. Pretty much everybody in the world has tms. Sometimes they don't realize it, you know, they get a little heartburn. I eat this type of thing gives me heartburn. Well, that food doesn't cause heartburn. It's just called a conditioned response. And so there's something I like to say to every study in the world. Scientific study shows there's no correlation between herniated discs and back pain. There's not one study that shows that they work together. I cite it in my third book, stenosis study. You know, the narrowing. Those people had less pain, had more stenosis in the study because it's doing its job. The disc is doing its job by herniating. So I've seen people heal from quad equina syndrome, and you name it. Gabor Matti had a sequester disc. I seem to heal from that. But there's not one proof of evidence that these things, the structure of the spine, causes back pain. And we have astronomical proof that these things don't. Dr. Sarno trained about 25 physicians, and now, like I said, there's thousands of people doing what I'm doing. It's in the millions. Now. These things don't cost back pain. It's that simple.

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