[Special MRP Presentation] From Pain to Peace with Jane Hogan [Feb 21, 2025]

Hello everyone. Welcome, welcome.

Good morning.

Welcome. Dan.

Welcome.

Serena, Tara.

Nice to see you. Trying to get my computer plugged in.

Okay.

Okay.

So as we're just tuning in here, let me know in the chat what you're all grateful for today. Anna says sunshine, yes, sunshine is always welcomed in these cold winter months. Just changes our mood. Right. Dean says it's not snowing. Serena says I'm grateful for my family and my home. Awesome. Yep. Always good to go back to those basics. Right. When we express gratitude, it doesn't have to be something you know out of this world. Could be. Grateful for. Clean water, Grateful to have a roof over our head. Right. Dan says grateful to go from 219 pounds from loading days to 208.6 seventh day. Congratulations. Awesome. Going strong. Anna says someone sent me the most hilarious gratitude journal last night. Oh, could you share the the name of it? We would love to know. And also as you're tuning in, if you could turn your camera on. We always love to see your beautiful faces. Hi Jennifer, great to see you.

And we'll just another minute or so.

And then we'll get started. And for those of you are just tuning in, let me know in the chat what you're most grateful for today.

Foreign.

Okay, so as you all may know based on the reminder emails and the Facebook posts, we have a special guest today. Her name is Jane Hogan. She's known as the wellness engineer and she blends proven leading edge science and ancient spirituality inspired practices to help people release chronic pain using the mind, body and the breath so they can become more empowered creators of their own health. She's had her own personal experience with rheumatoid arthritis. Using natural solutions inspired her to leave her 30 year engineering career and become a functional medicine, certified health coach, certified yoga teacher and wellness educator. Jane has helped thousands of people release chronic pain naturally. She is the host of the Wellness by Design podcast and her empowering message has been featured on numerous podcasts and summits. She's also been published in Thrive Global and Elephant Journal magazine and is the contributing author on three bestselling books. Jane is the host on Becoming Pain Free Online summits, empowering thousands of participants towards pain free living. So I'm going to turn the stage over to to Jane. Let's give Jane a very warm welcome into our community. You can all just this is how we welcome people. So just give her a little warm welcome and I'll pass the stage on to you Jane.

Thank you Deepa. I'm so happy to be here. Nice to See all your faces and other people that are, you know, sitting there in the background. Welcome and just really honored. So thank you so much for having me here, Deepa. And so I, I help people with chronic pain, and I understand that maybe not everyone here has chronic pain, but what I'm going to be talking about today will actually help anything. It'll help actually with weight loss as well. So, so I'm, I'm putting it through a chronic pain lens, but it's not just for chronic pain. But how many of you do, do, and does anyone here have chronic pain? Yes. Okay, so some people do. So this is going to be helpful for you. Serena raised her hand as well. And chances are you probably know someone with chronic pain as well, because it's like 25% of the population suffers from chronic pain. So you know, you probably know someone. So I think it's going to be relevant. So I'm going to share my screen. I got a few slides. I'm going to go through a few points with you, and, and then I'm going to lead you through a little exercise. Does that sound good? Not exercise like run, run, run, but an exercise in brain retraining. Okay. All right, I'll share my screen.

And.

Pick this one and go into present mode. And just if you could let me know if you can see that. Good. Yep, we can see. All right. So as Deepa mentioned, I, I and the wellness engineer. And I'll tell you a little bit about my background in a minute. So this presentation, I'm calling from pain to peace. From pain to peace in the body. So, yeah, I was an engineer for 30 years. I was a structural design engineer. And my life was going great. But I got chronic pain in 2016, and then that changed my life completely. And eventually I hung up my hard hat. This is my little joke. I hung up my hard hat and followed my heart. And I became a functional medicine certified health coach and a certified yoga teacher and a wellness educator now. So ever since then, my mission has been to help people become pain free. So I'll see Daisy. Here we go. On to the next one. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about my background so that you understand where I'm coming from. And maybe a lot of people hear themselves in this story. So this picture on the left, these two pictures were taken three months apart. The picture on the left was at my 50th birthday party. I was lip syncing to Janis Joplin, dancing, having a great time, strong, vibrant woman. And three months later, my knees were swollen. I had pain all throughout my body. I could hardly walk. I could barely look after myself. Now, in the year before, before this 50th birthday party, I had had a lot of stress. My mother died suddenly. She was my best friend, my champion. And it was a shock, a biggest shock of my life. And I. I was also the ex executor of her, like, the estate. Not that it was like a big, big mansion or anything, but just an ordinary, you know, my. My parents had lived in the house for 50 years. They were travelers and collectors. So there was a ton of stuff. And I have two old. Have two old older siblings and one younger sibling. And if anyone has ever been involved with dealing with an estate after someone dies and you have siblings, you'll know that it's. It can be very stressful. So let me know if you. If you relate to that. I'm going to open the chat. So I can see. I can see the chat. Yeah. Does anyone. Can anyone relate to that? So. So I'd had this really stressful year, and then I found myself. I. I had to deal with the contents of the house. And this is when the pain started. I was like painting and boxing things up frantically, and I developed pain in one shoulder and then in another shoulder and then my elbows, my hands, my knees, my feet, my jaw all over. And I felt like someone had a voodoo doll and they were sticking pins in me because it was like moving all around. And I thought, okay, I just need to. I just need to get the house sold, deal with the contents, take some time off work, and I'm going to be okay. So I. That's what I did. I took the. I got everything done. I took the time off work. Yeah. David says he can absolutely relate. Lost three parents in five months. Wow. So I. I took the time off work and I got worse. I was. I just started. My whole body was just totally inflamed and I didn't know what it was. And my husband had gone to work and I was lying in bed one morning. Of course I hadn't slept because when you're in that much pain, you don't sleep very well. And I had this. I was just lying there thinking, how did my life come to this? We were soon coming up to retirement. Freedom years. Our three kids had just left the house. So we had, well, three. The last one had left. We had an empty nest. And I was like, I'm not going to be able to do anything. I'm not going to be able to look after my family and. Or look after myself even, or I was letting my family down. And I thought, I'm ready to be done. I'm just kind of ready to check out. And in the next moment, I heard a voice that was in my head, but it wasn't my voice.

It's.

I know it sounds weird, but this voice said, you're going to figure this out and you're going to teach other people. And so I kind of got up and was like, okay. I was still in pain, but ever since then, I had this knowing, this deep inner knowing that I would figure it out. And so then I got to work with my. With like, my engineering problem solving skills. I was like, okay, I got this problem to solve and I'm going to figure it out. And I started, I started. I heard about food could be medicine, so I started with that. And then I started like, learning about functional medicine, trying these things. I saw a functional medicine practitioner and I started like, you know, I was getting better and I was graphing and charting everything, but I would plateau. I would get a little bit better and then I would plateau. So I was like, I was going along like a warrior. I was a fighter. And I eventually got diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. And so I called myself. I would actually say this. I'm an RA warrior. So I was like, in this big fight against this illness in my body and what I discovered, I was like two years working as a. Like a warrior, and I finally figured out that I had to learn to surrender. And then I finally healed. So there's a. There's a surrender that had to happen. So this is me three years later, at the summit of Grossmoor Mountain. I live in Newfoundland, in Canada. Gros Morne is the second highest peak in Newfoundland. It's a tough climb, tough hike, and I did it. So this was like, oh, can be a bit weepy, but this is like a special moment for me when I, when I reached that. So that's my background. I discovered a lot along the way. I've. I've read now hundreds of books and scientific papers. I've interviewed hundreds of people on my podcast and my. Between my summits, and I've put it all together and it's like, how can I fast track this for other people? So these are the three things that I want to talk about today. I'm going to talk about the missing piece in chronic pain treatment, some lessons from neuroscience, and then we're going to do a brain retraining practice together. Does that Sound good? Okay. All right. So the missing piece, the missing piece in chronic pain treatment and actually for a lot of chronic condition treatment is not addressing the primary issue first. Now what do I mean by the primary issue? So I found this analogy, kind of helps a lot of people if you, if you think of your, your health like at your house. It's your home you're living in, right? And we, we have these things come up. We've got genetic, people say, oh, you're, you're just getting older, nothing you can do about it. Oh, it's in your genes, can't do anything about it. Oh, that pain is from an old injury. Too bad to suck it up. You know, this is, this pain is from a disease and there's nothing you can do about it. That's what I was told with rheumatoid arthritis, you know, I was told there's nothing you can do. It's going to get worse as you get older and you're probably end up in a wheelchair one day. That's what I was told. You're told that it's gut issues and you may have gut issues. I had gut issues. Infections, toxins, food intolerances. But the problem with only dealing with the secondary issues up here, which is what I was doing for two years, years, was that my, what was going on was my foundation was crumbling, right? The foundation below was crumbling. And so it didn't matter. I would get a little bit better. Course, like imagine you're fixing up your house. You can, you can do some little, you know, patch jobs and things like that upstairs, but if your basement is crumbling, then it's kind of like never really going to get 100% better. So, so really the primary issue from what I've found with most chronic pain and most chronic conditions is that the nervous system has gotten dysregulated. So stuck in a fight or flight response. And it may have been going on for years, but when we, when the nervous system gets dysregulated, all the other systems in the body start not working as well because the body thinks it's got to fight for its life, right? So if we don't deal with the nervous, the primary issue of nervous system dysregulation, we're just going to keep having flames and fanning the fire, right? We can, we can like try all the anti inflammatory diets, we can take the supplements and do all that, but we have to address the nervous system. So I'm not saying that all these other things addressing infections and toxins and all these other things aren't important. They are important, but either. Either do the nervous system first or make sure you're working on your nervous system alongside it. So what happens with the nervous system is that we. We create a biology of stress in our body. So stress. We think of stress as being the event. But as my good friend Dr. Amy Opigian said when she was on my summit, she said stress isn't the event. It's the response of the nervous system. So it can either be like a stressful event that was too much too fast or too little for too long. But whatever it is, the nervous system, it's that response of the nervous system. And if the stress goes on too much, too long, too. Too little. Sorry. Too much too fast, too little for too long, then the nervous system can get stuck in that fight or flight. It's just like. It's like the messages don't get through. We can. We can kind of say everything we want in our conscious mind. Like, I'm fine, everything's good. But it can.

It.

The message doesn't get through. And so the. The chemistry and biology of stress continues to get created in the body. It results in defense. Protective behavior or defense physiology is kind of how I think about it. Right. Pain is protection. And so that's part of it. Like, we might even start, like, raising our shoulders up, start getting pain in our neck. We wear like, tightness, and. And we can get tightness and stiffness in our muscles and so on. That can be a starting point. And I'll talk about the behaviors in a minute. But the. When. When the nervous system gets stuck in that dysregulated state, then we also get the physical breakdown. So we can get breakdown in the. In the hormonal systems, the immune system, and the digestive systems. And then that could lead to other illnesses and diseases. So you can see it comes right back to the nervous system. All right, so, yeah, we're wearing our protection. It's like walking around with a suit of armor. It's like, you can't. It's so hard to go through life with this heaviness and uncomfortableness. And, you know, eventually it gets painful. So I want to talk about the behaviors of stress because Gabor Mate. Has anyone read Gabor Mate's book when the body says no? It's. It's a. Deepa has. It's a really, really good book. So he talks about in that book behavioral adaptations. So this is when we. When we need to protect when we're little, a lot of this happens when we're little. So when we're little and we're in our family unit, we can't fight because we're like one of the smallest ones, right. We can't flee because we got to live in this family. We can't look after ourselves. So the, the term that's being used a lot now is fawn. But it's, it's developing these behavioral adaptations for protection. So this is what I see a lot in people with chronic pain. And let me know if you see yourself in, in these people. Pleasing perfectionism. Being overly polite, right. Not wanting to, not wanting to like, you know, speak your truth because you just don't want to ruffle anyone's feathers. It's just easier if I don't say anything. Hyper vigilance, right? Being really aware. I wonder what they, I think when I said that I don't think they liked it very much. I wondered if they like it. Do they like me or even like being hypervigilant about, you know, making sure that the stove is turned off about six times before you leave the house or leaving a phone message and you got to leave your number like two times, maybe three times to make sure they got it like that. Really Being hyper vigilant, which is usually a pretty good thing, right? But it's a, it's a sign of this behavioral adaptation that on some level like you got to protect problem solver. In other words, like you, you're just always trying to solve problems and folk hyper focused on problems all the time. I see this a lot. People with health issues, they're so focused on their problem that it's keeping them in stress. Oh, thanks for putting that in the chat. Deepa Trouble setting boundaries. So the inability to say no, sensitive to criticism, putting other people's needs before yours. Hyper independence, I can do it myself, you know, fear based thinking like, oh, this is what I was doing, right? Oh, my future is so bad I'm not going to be able like what's going to happen? And you know, I can't manage his house in the stairs. So this is exactly what happened to me. So I, I was all of these things, sensitive to criticism. Was, was a big one. I grew up in a family. I didn't have major trauma. I just had some minor trauma. I had an older sibling that teased me all the time so much that I stuttered and so I didn't feel, I didn't feel like I was belonged in this family or that I had anything worth saying also, you know, tell Me, I was. This was my brother, and I love him now, totally forgiven him. But I. I had this undercurrent of stress my whole life, which led to these behavioral adaptations, which then led to eventually the pain. And I think when my. When my mother passed and, you know, I was dealing with my siblings again, and my. My brother, the same brother, was very critical of me. I think it just triggered everything again. You. You're thinking, my goodness, I'm 50 years old. I should be over this. But that little child inside, those messages are still there. And so that's what I mean about surrendering. I was so mad with my brother. One of the things I had to do was forgive. Forgive him for that. So the missing piece in chronic pain treatment is, you know, is we will. The problem is treating the secondary issues. And what we want to do is address the primary issue of nervous system dysregulation. So the second point I want to talk about is what we've learned from neuroscience, because so we know. If we know that nervous system dysregulation is keeping us in pain, then the mistake is repeating, repeating the patterns, right? Those. Those subconscious thoughts and beliefs that I had that was repeating the patterns of nervous system dysregulation. And so what we can learn, what we've learned from neuroscience, I'll talk about here, is that we can reprogram the brain so just to talk about pain as. As a mechanism. So we've all. We've got our. Our background, our. Our childhood beliefs and all of these things. But then once someone does have pain or when someone does have an illness, we get stuck in a cycle. So what happens in the brain is the, you know, we have whatever the nervous system dysregulation, which leads to the pain and then the pain. We have fear about the pain. Oh, my goodness. What if this pain doesn't go away? What am I going to do? And then we have more fear about that. Now our brains are hardwired to pay attention to fear. And so what it does, it thinks, okay, things aren't safe here. I better turn on more protection. So it turns on more pain. And so we get stuck in this cycle. We feel the pain, we have more nervous system dysregulation, more fear, we go into pain and so on. So we get stuck in this cycle. So we keep repeating the patterns. That's the biggest mistake, that we're repeating the patterns. I see your question there, David. You said, what if I can't identify any trauma? Is this process dependent upon having to identify specific Trauma? Not necessarily, but I will say almost nobody has had no trauma. We've all had some things where we felt embarrassed at some point in our lives. It doesn't even have to be something major. You know, maybe you went to school one day with, you know, I'm just thinking about like short. Back in my day we used to call them flood pants. Maybe you went to school one day with floodpants and the other kids made fun of you. You know, it could be something as simple as that, right? That your brain kind of wires something. Obviously we know that with severe trauma there's a connection with, with trauma, severe trauma and health issues later in life. But they also know now that even mild trauma can, can be connected with health issues later in life and has a lot to do with the support systems that you had in place. You know, in my instance, you know, my parents are kind of not around very much, so I didn't really have anyone protecting me. I didn't have someone standing up for me. And so for me, yeah, that micro trauma, which sometimes we don't remember is, Is so key. So in terms of pain, it can become a learned response, but so can those, those other traumatic things. Minor trauma, whatever, what, whatever's those beliefs that are in our subconscious mind. It's just learned, right? Thoughts that we think over and over again become beliefs which then are nerve are learned responses and create neural networks in the brain. And so the brain is neuroplastic, which means that it's capable of creating new neural networks. Networks throughout. It's throughout your life. They used to think years ago that all the neural networks you had by the time you were 25 or so was it. And now they know that's not true. New neural networks can always form. So this is called some different names for this type of pain. Neuroplastic is one, one word which means, you know, it's neuro, the, to do with the neuroplasticity of the brain. It's also called centrally sensitized pain, which means the central nervous system is, is regulating the pain. And it's also called, could be called Mind Body Pain, Tension Myositis Syndrome, tms. John Sarno, if anyone's read anything by John Sarno, he, he talked about, he labeled it tms. So basically it's all this pain that originates in the brain and nervous system. So there may at one point have been a physical reason for the pain, but the body hangs on to it not because of any physical reason. It's because it's because the brain, it's become a learned response of the brain. So in the simple solution then is to reprogram the brain for safety. We teach the brain how to be safe, we feel pain and we feel safe at the same time. So we teach the brain how to release pain. So I'm just going to talk about a couple of different studies there. So the Boulder Back Pain study was done in 2021. There was about 150 participants and they split them into three groups. One got the usual care, one got a placebo, and one got a brain retraining process. It's called pain reprocessing therapy. So all these people had had back pain for at least 10 years. And the people who got the pain reprocessing therapy, they got over four weeks. They got eight, eight one hour sessions of this brain, basically a brain retraining. And after just four weeks, 63% of the people who got the the pain reprocessing therapy were nearly or fully pain free. This was after 10 years of chronic back pain. And 98% of people having that pain reprocessing therapy had at least some improvement. And then they followed them for a year afterwards and that that all their improvements were maintained for a year. So it's pretty promising. What we're hearing now from the science is that about 85% of chronic pain cases can be reversed using some form of brain retraining. Just to kind of talk about how powerful the brain is. This New England Journal of Medicine study on bulge discs, so they took about 100 people who had no back pain and they did MRIs on them and they found that 63% of those people had disc abnormalities. So things like, you know, bulge discs out of alignment, things like that, but they had no pain. So they to kind of put this in a different light, a lot of people may have some back pain which may be coming from their brain, but they don't know that. They go to their doctor, the doctor does an mri, says, oh, you've got bulge disc, that's why you've got the pain. And so the brain goes, oh, okay, there's a physical reason for the pain. I'll just keep that on because there's nothing, you know, we can't do anything about it yet. This New England Journal of Medicine study found that 63% of people had abnormalities and no pain. So just because you have an abnormality doesn't mean you have to have pain. But if you tell the brain that it probably will have pain because it learns it right. The other thing, this other study on Vagal tone and chronic pain. So they took about. It's just over 500 people with chronic pain. And they did put them through a whole bunch of metrics, measured all kinds of things, and they measured vagal tone. So I'm sure you probably know about the vagus nerve. You probably heard about that through Deepa. But the vagus nerve is that parasympathetic branch of the nervous system. So. So if the nervous system is regulated, you know, if you're switching back and forth, as you should be with, you know, between parasympathetic and sympathetic, then that vagus nerve has tone. It's like a muscle. It has tone. It can do what it's got to do. What they found with people in chronic pain is everybody with chronic pain had impaired vagal tone. Their vagus nerve was not operating like it should. In other words, they weren't getting into that parasympathetic state. They're stuck in that sympathetic state, the dysregulated state. And I love talking about this has fascinated me for years, the power of the mind. So we know with placebo, right? Every single clinical drug trial has a placebo group, and there's always a percentage of people in the placebo group who have a positive effect as if they had taken the drug. They can also have a nocebo effect. So in other words, they can have negative side effects, as if, you know, the ones that they expected on the drug. But here's another fascinating thing, and I don't know if you've heard of this before, but they've even done this placebo studies on surgeries. So in other words, like a knee surgery, they will make an incision and stitch it up again, but they don't do anything at all in the placebo group. And they found that people will have positive results as if they had had the knee surgery. That's the power of our minds. Multiple personality disorders, or dissociative personality disorder, I think it's called. Now this is really fascinating too, that in. They have found that in different personalities, one personality can have an illness and the other one doesn't. So tested with blood tests, diabetes in one personality, not in the other personality. They've even studied. There's. There's documented cases of different eye color, different eye colors in the two personalities as well, which is kind of freaky and wild, but just. I just want you to kind of understand the power of your mind, the power of thoughts. I remember hearing about this too. This not on my slide here, but people under hypnosis if someone, if the hypno hypnotherapist took a, probably wasn't a hypnotherapist. This is probably one of the freak hypno hip hypnotist shows. But if they took a pencil and they touched it on someone's arm and said that it was like the, a cigarette, a burning cigarette, the skin would bubble even though it's just a pencil. That's the power of the mind. Phantom limb pain. People have had limbs removed. People, people who have had limbs removed have pain in where there's no limb. So they'll experience pain as if the limb is there, but it's not there. But the brain thinks it's there. And so the brain is what's firing those, those networks. And I want to say, like, it doesn't mean that this pain is in your head. It's not bad. It does feel like real pain. All of it feels like real pain. It's just the brain is modulating it. It's like turning it up or turning it down, delayed pain. So these are documented cases of people who are, say, in combat or had a terrible injury like backcountry hiking or something like that. And their immediate survival depends on them getting to safety, getting out of where they are. The brain will turn off the pain and then when they arrive at safety, it turns the pain on then so they'll, they document that they had no pain while they are getting, getting out of where they are. Because that was their, that, that was their life and death meant, you know, getting out of there. And so the brain just, okay, we can't, we're not prioritizing, we're not prioritizing pain right now. We're going to turn off the pain. We got to get to safety. And then, then the pain got turned on. So I think it's pretty fascinating the power of our brain. And so what we know now is that most chronic pain and a lot of chronic health conditions can be resolved with a mind body approach to regulate the nervous system. So yeah, it's pretty powerful. Jennifer says that's incredible. I know, right? So big lesson here is that the brain can unlearn pain. We can teach the brain and nervous system to unlearn pain using the scientifically proven techniques. What I find interesting about a lot of the scientifically proven techniques is that they are ancient wisdom that's now being proven by science. It's the stuff that's a lot of it is the stuff that's been around for thousands of years, but now they're going, hey, what about if we did this here? What, what does this do? And now they can sort of measure a lot more things with the brain. And so we know, we know that these do work. So the biggest mistake that people make that reinforces pain is repeating the patterns that perpetuate the pain cycle. So want to teach the brain and nervous system to new patterns to unlearn pain. So that's the simple solution. We just need to teach the brain and nervous system new patterns to unlearn pain. Now, the. The thing about it, it's very simple, but like anything, the brain learns by repetition, and you have to keep doing it. So, you know, we. We can't. It's not like this is something we can do once in a while. We have to keep doing it. It's just like learning to ride a bike or learning to drive a car. We've got to, like, teach the brain how to do it or learning a piece of music on the piano. We got to teach the brain how to do it. We repeat, repeat, repeat, practice, practice, practice. And eventually those new neural networks do get formed and the brain can let go of the old patterns. So I'd like to do a brain retraining exercise together. And I know not everyone here has pain, but we can apply this, really to anything in our life. So are you ready? Would you like to do Let me know. Okay, I'm getting the thumbs up. All right, excellent. So I'm actually just gonna exit out of here and stop the share and just come back to the screen. That's the easiest thing. There we go. So the way I like to do this with my audience that has pain is I get them to rate the pain that they're feeling out of 10. So zero would be no pain at all, and 10 would be the worst pain you can imagine. Now, you can also use this for another stressor in your life if you don't have physical pain, right? So maybe there's something. Maybe you've had an argument or, you know, something going on or something that just like, little, you know, got under your skin a little bit, you know? So pick something that's kind of emotionally bothering you or a physical thing. Either. Either one. And on and rated out of 10 on how much it's bothering you. So zero not bothering you at all. 10. It's like the worst bother you can imagine. So anyone feel brave and want to put that in the chat? What? Your Number out of 10 is starting. Number. That's okay. I know you don't know me very well. Okay, four out of ten. All right. Sciatic pain. Okay, five. Sorry, I don't mean to sound excited about sciatic pain. I'm just excited for you because I, you know, I. This is going to help. So that's an end. What's that, a seven? Seven out of ten? Yeah. Three. Okay. All right. Thank you for being brave and sharing. If you. If you're not physical. Pain from Lyme was my four. Okay. So if you're. If. If you didn't share it in the chat, that's okay. Just, you know, write it down or whatever. So let's go through this little exercise now, and then we can have time for questions at the end. Just be a few minutes. So just relax where you are and you can close your eyes. Or I. I think it's better for you to close your eyes and just notice the support of the chair that you're sitting on or whatever it is that you're sitting on. And notice that you're fully supported. And then notice your breathing. Notice the breath as it comes in and goes out. And you can even let it go with a sigh if you'd like to. Just take a moment to appreciate that there's always another breath for you. You don't even have to think about it. You don't have to think about the support beneath you. You don't have to think about the breath. You're always supported. And now I'd like for you to think about whatever this problem is. Imagine that this problem was solved, whatever it is, if it was. If it's a pain, maybe it's been limiting you. And you can think about something that you would love to do if this pain was resolved. And if it was some other issue, you can just imagine that it's fully resolved in the most harmonious way. And imagine you doing some activity as you are acknowledging that this issue has been resolved. And if it's a pain, then imagine that you're doing something that you would love to do, some activity that you'd love to do. And notice. Notice yourself doing this. Now you're there now. And just look around you and notice where you are. Notice your surroundings. Are you indoors or are you outdoors? Do you notice any colors around you? Notice what you're wearing? Notice what's on your feet. Notice if there's people around you or are you alone? Now tune into the sounds. Are you hearing any sounds? What are those sounds? Do you hear any sounds of nature or people talking or activity around you? And. Or maybe it's quiet. And just notice that too. And then notice what you feel. Do you feel any sense of heat or do you feel cool? Do you feel any movement of air on your cheeks? Notice the feel of your clothing touching you wherever it touches your skin and makes contact. And maybe you notice a smell or maybe you don't. Maybe there's some ascent of flowers or ocean or some other scent. Or maybe there's no scent at all. And notice if you could taste anything in your mouth. Maybe you don't, and that's okay. And now tune into the emotion. What is the emotion? If you could put a word on the emotion. Is it happiness? Joy? Exhilaration? Love? What's the emotion? Think about the word of the emotion, the word that represents the emotion that you're feeling. And if you're not sure, just pick one. Just go with one and then notice. Shift down from thinking about this emotion to the feeling that's in your body. So now tune in, really, to the feeling in your body. The feeling of this emotion of joy, exhilaration, love, happiness, whatever it was, could be peacefulness. Notice where it is. So tune in. Scanning down from the neck, is it in your throat or your chest area? The heart, is it somewhere in the belly, the upper belly or the lower belly? And if you're not sure, just pick one. Maybe just go right to the heart. But go wherever you feel feeling the strongest. Or go to the. And now tune into the breath again. And as you inhale, imagine breathing into the area where you're feeling this feeling. And as you breathe in, this feeling gets bigger. It's. It's like your breath is inflating it and making it bigger. And every time you inhale, it doubles in size. This beautiful feeling that you're feeling. You inhale again and it doubles in size again. It can completely fill the inside of your body. And it can get so big on the next inhale that it's even outside your body. In fact, you can let it get as big as you want. You could fill up the room that you're in. It's like you're bathed in this beautiful feeling. Just enjoy it. And then I'd like you to imagine pulling that feeling back into the spot where you feel first felt it. So it's like you're saying, this is mine, this is my feeling. I'm pulling it back and make it into a tiny dot. It could be. It could be a tiny dot of light. It could be a tiny dot of color. You can decide right now what color it is or if it's light. And if it's light. Maybe the light has a color, but you tuck this feeling back into your body in this spot, holding it there for safekeeping. And anytime you want to feel this again, you can just breathe into it with each breath. You can make it double and double and double and double in size again and make it as big as you want. Anytime you want, it's always there for you. So keeping it tucked away now, just to bring your attention back to your body, support it on the chair. Maybe you want to wiggle your fingers and toes, move a little bit, just coming back into the body again. One final breath in and out. And then when you're ready, and slowly and gently open your eyes. How do you feel? Hope you feel good. So go back to this, this pain or this problem that you thinking about before we started and rate it again out of 10. And then if you want to share in the chat, you can share your first number and your second number. So, you know, did you go from a four to a what or five to a what? Five to a three, Anna. Awesome. Seven to two, Teresa. Excellent. About half now at two from four. Excellent. Okay. This is wonderful. So I. What I. What I wanted you to feel from doing this exercise is how empowering it is that you can do. That was a brain retraining exercise. I mean, we can call it other things. It was a visualization. You could call it a meditation. But we were teaching our brain something new. And that was like 10 minutes, I think. So imagine if you practice this every day. If you practice this every time you. You notice pain or, or every time you noticed I'm upset about something, you can just bring it down. Bring it right down. And you can do it for longer, of course. Right? So now you got your little. Your little dot, your little spot, right? You can, you can inhale and, and expand it as much as you want. So there you go. One after the exercise, two to one. Excellent. Body feels tingly. Yeah. A little better. Three or four instead of. Instead of a one, A little. A little better. Okay. I think that's backwards. Yeah. But I'm glad you're feeling better. Yeah, that's great. All right, so I'm happy to answer any questions if you have questions.

Thank you so much for that, Jane. So powerful, so valuable. And I just feel like a lot of what you taught is so aligned with our community and, and the things that we like to focus on with the nervous system. We always. You know, I knew you were going to do this little practice, but on our Q and A'S Every Friday, we always open up with some sort of mindfulness or breath work practice just to really, you know, retrain that brain. Right. You gave a lot of science behind it. But this is, you know, for all of you who have been tuning in weekly, this is why we do these, you know, weekly breath work and mindfulness practices. Right. It's really to retrain the brain. So we are going to open it up for some Q and A. We have a few more minutes with Jane. And Jane, also, I'd love for you, before I forget, I'd love for you to also share where people can learn more about what you do, whether it's a social media channel, your website, whatever it might be. If you could put that in the chat, that would be super help, super helpful for, for our community as well.

Thank you. I will. The, my website's the wellnessengineer.com I'm trying, I'm going to try to not make any spelling mistakes.

I can put that in for you.

And I have a podcast called Wellness by Design. And actually Deepa's coming up in a, in a couple of months. I think your, your episode will be coming up. And I'm on engineer.com. i'm, I've got YouTube and Instagram and Facebook at Jane Hogan Health because someone, someone already had the Wellness Engineer and they're not giving it up. I had to, I had to go.

It's a great name. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can find me. It's at Jane Hogan Health on, on most of social media. So, yeah, I'm pretty active there. Okay. And I see you got a question.

Yeah. Hi. This has been, hi. Incredibly interesting and I just wondered if you'd heard of this before. So I've been kind of tracking what's been going on with me. So I'm the one with the new, newish sciatic pain. But what I've realized is that for some reason for the last like three, four, maybe even five January's, something happens. Like I have an episode with my back. And so I've seen like every practitioner under the sun. And I did start to hear a little bit about, you know, what you were talking about today. And my first reaction was like, okay. I think what I just heard these people say was that it's all in my head. And then I'm like, no, like, I can't think of it that way. Like, like I have to like, look at this in a different way. So I'm just wondering if you've heard that before where it's Like. Like, almost, like episodic and on, like. Almost like a calendar thing. And. And I don't know why. And if you have any other suggestions.

Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, I don't know, you know, your whole situation, everything. So I can. But I'll just like, what. What comes. What I always come back to is, like, what's going on emotionally? What's going on emotionally? Because what's going on emotionally is, you know, that's gonna affect our nervous system, which then the brain starts turning on protection in the form of, like, we really feel the pain. So, like, it certainly is not saying it's in your head, not that at all. But is there something that comes up for you every January that, you know, maybe it's even. Like, a lot of people sometimes will say, oh, it's the weather, and it might just be in January. You know, I feel crappy, because I. I just don't. The winters are long. Like, it might even be something. Or is there an anniversary. Like, is January an anniversary of something in your life that maybe is sad. Sadness or something like that for you? So, I mean, you don't have to answer these questions, but. Yeah. Yeah, often. And there's. There's a great book by Louise Hay. It's an old book called you can heal your life. And she talks about the connections between different, you know, different pains in the body or illnesses and the thought processes that are associated with it. I mean, I got the book right there. I have looked up sciatica before, but I can't remember exactly what it is now. But that's really interesting, too. Not that we really need to get in the head about it, like, and figure it out, because I think sometimes trying to figure it out creates a bit more stress. So it's kind of better to go, all right, I might. The sciatica is. Mike is talking to me, and the body's trying to talk to me with this. So I. I often. I didn't do this exercise today, but another exercise that's helpful is to imagine your. Your breath. So we were taking the breath to the some spot. Imagine the breath going through, like, that sciatic nerve. So imagine breathing it in, and it's going through the sciatic nerve. And the feeling you want to have about it is as if that area that's causing the pain, whether it's sciatica or for anyone else with any other pain or, you know, maybe it's tightness in your belly. Whatever it is, you want to think about it as if it was a small child. Or a pet that was hurt. And what would you do? You'd say, oh, come here my love, like, let me give you a hug, everything's going to be okay. I'm not here. Don't worry, don't worry, everything's going to be fine.

That's definitely not how I talk to it right now.

No, I mean we don't, we don't. Right. And I get it because I, when I was in the worst pain, I wasn't certainly looking at my knees and going, oh, you poor things. I was like, what are you doing to me? You know, so it's, it's like having that feeling of loving attention as if it was, as if it was a small child or pet that needed, needed, needed loving attention. And when you think about it, the, this, the, the myo, the TMS pain, the way he described it, and I think that there's some validity to this is that when the brain starts to turn on pain on some level, it's not prioritizing that area. So if we're putting our attention there, we're, it's almost like we're saying to the brain, loving attention, give this area loving attention. Send the oxygen, send the, whatever needs to go to that area, send it so that we can get it, you know, working again like it should. But if you can have that loving feeling towards it. Thank you.

I also put Anna, a website in the chat there which you know is based on Louise Hay's work, what Jane was alluding to in terms of certain things that show up in our body and how they can be related to some sort of emotional trigger. So look at the website because sciatica is there, listed there. So I don't know if, if, when you read it, I don't want to put in the chat, but when you read it, see if that rings true for you in terms of what the emotional cause of that pain may be. Right. So for example, like, I'll just give you an example here. Like multiple sclerosis, it says mental hardness, hard hearted, hard heartedness, iron will, inflexibility. So you know, this doesn't always have to be the case but it can give people maybe some further insight in terms of what that emotional, mental, emotional component may be when it comes to any sort of illness you're struggling with or symptom you're struggling with.

And it also gives a new thought pattern. Right. So rheumatoid arthritis was there and I remember it's like feeling resentment, feeling very put upon. Well, yeah, that's how I Felt when I was looking after my mother's. Had to look after everything. It was a huge responsibility. So it made sense. Now sometimes they don't make sense. I find with my clients and people, they're like, I know that doesn't. So then I will say, well, what does this mean to you? Like, if it's your hands, for example, I'd be like, what do your hands mean to you? Because on some level, like, and it might be about, for them, it might be about expression, like about doing something. So on some level their brain is going, it's not safe to express. Right. If that's what it means to them. So you could look at what does it mean to you as well.

Right. Wow. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Any other questions for Jane? We have time for maybe one more question. You can type it in the chat or you can unmute yourself. Questions, comments.

Oh, okay.

I think, I think you answered the ones that came in on from the chat. Let me just look back. So Dan was asking, how do you know if your nervous system is regulated or not?

Well, you could look at some of those behavioral things that I talked about. You could also look, I mean, obviously if you got pain or like a health condition, that's all also a sign. And then like, it's things like, do you startle easily? Right. You know, are you like kind of always on edge? Right. So, like, it, it's some of those kinds of things. Do you. I, I notice like a lot of times people have like, almost nervous, like, nervous twitches, we would call it. Like they're, they're always like fidgeting their legs or they're always like clenching their hands or clenching the jaw. So some little behaviors like that, like, it's just where you're, you're not relaxed. So those would be some signs.

Yeah. This is also a great little visual something called a polyvagal theory.

Yeah.

And so when you, you know, when you're in fight or flight, this is where, you know, some of these, some symptoms may occur. So blood pressure, heart rate, increase, fuel availability, increases, adrenaline, oxygenation. When it's, you know, so, you know, a lot of these, I guess emotions that you might feel are going to be rage, anger, irritation, frustration, panic, fear, anxiety, worry, concern. And then eventually for many of us, if we're in fight or flight too long, eventually we're going to go into the fight free state. So these are some of the free symptoms which can occur. So ideally, when we, when our nervous system is regulated, we're going to be more in this ventral vagal component here. And we're going to, you know, have a lot of these type of feelings. Right. It's not.

It's not.

It's not that these feelings are wrong. It's more so I think the amount of time that we spend in these states. Right.

The duration. Yep. For sure. Exactly. How could I forget this, Deepa? That the one of the big signs that your nervous system may be, you know, dysregulate. You're like, in fight, flight or freeze is your breath. Right. Breathing. You're not breathing into the belly. Right. So it's shallow. Shallow breathing, quick breathing, breath holding. So some of these things can also be a sign.

Yeah, exactly. The breath, as many of you may have heard us say, is the steering wheel of the nervous system. Right. So long, slow breaths through the nose is what's really going to help you regulate your nervous system better into that, you know, parasympathetic state.

Yep.

So thank you so much for being here, Jane. Let's all give Jane a very warm thank you and gratitude for being here and, you know, make sure you check out her work. Just amazing things that you've discussed with us all. We've all learned something new, I'm sure. So thank you. Thank you again, and we'll see you all next Friday.

All right. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you. Bye. Thank you so much. Thank you.