The Summer of Chiron

The moment I realized that the approach of my life going forward would have to alter if I wanted to have different results was after reading the late Dr. John Sarno’s book, The Mind/Body Prescription.

Dr. Sarno was perhaps the first mainstream MD to publicly devote his career to the resolution of chronic idiopathic pain through the reconciliation of the mental, physical, and emotional systems of the body. His book specifies the modality of therapy that he worked in tandem with the most, and why it was more conducive to symptom relief and lasting healing.

There was unquenchable anger at first when I realized that the previous forms of therapy I had completed were rather ill-suited for the nature of challenges that I was trying to overcome. It made perfect sense though, for whenever I employed the skills and tools that I’d learned with Cognitive behavioral therapy, the results were entirely ineffective.

That’s because I’d been instructed to basically ignore the physical signals from my body and mentally override any sensations with positive affirmations.

“Understanding and accepting the nature of TMS(Tension Myositis Syndrome) is an intellectual process, a function of the conscious mind.” — Dr. John Sarno

When I first had his book mentioned by two of my physicians in the same week, (synchronistically the same week he passed away in 2017 at the age of 93), I resisted, because I felt like they were accusing me of not doing the work in therapy, or being evasive about my past in some ways.

After reflecting on this new knowledge, I began looking at the previous experiences in therapy as building blocks as well as a lesson. I wasn’t starting from scratch, I knew more about the therapy profession, as well as it’s different subsets than I did when I was younger.

Not only that, I learned how to speak my mind and had the confidence to cut off therapeutic relationships that were not conducive to my needs, as I had previously done twice that year.

What a pleasant surprise it was to finally find a modality that was concentrated on the mind/body dynamics, and aware of how patients seeking therapy usually have a host of painful co-morbidities as well.

The Student Was Ready, so the Teacher(s) Arrived:

Once I identified what it was that I needed, that was half the battle, especially considering the vast array of options available today. I wanted someone who could help me address the emotional fallout that had come from chronic illness and guide me in becoming more grounded within my physical body.

I had been to providers at an Integrative Medicine clinic in my hometown, so I went back through my previous references, resourcefulness is a skill of mine! They did have a mental health provider, a psychiatric clinical nurse specialist, who had extensive experience in treating cancer patients.

Instantly, it was like I’d found a soul that understood all too well how the medicine can make you sicker, and the fear, anger, and hurt that comes with that. It was like the beginning of my personal Hero’s Journey as famed mythologist Joseph Campbell referred to it, where I had a fellow intrepid give me the match to light my lantern after it had blown out.

Now I can light a fire with two sticks and my bare hands, but I was tired at that point, and needed some inspiration, a reason to light the lantern again, for what was the point if the wind was only going to blow it out every time I tried?

How did we renew the spirit? Grace helped me stop the dissonance between the physical, emotional, and mental. Through biofeedback, also known as EFT, or tapping, I learned how not to try to shut down what my body was telling me, but instead, listen to and observe the signals.

The Emotional Freedom Technique, designed by Gary Craig, a Stanford graduate in engineering, stems from Thought Field Therapy, created by the late clinical psychologist Roger Callahan, PhD. EFT is a process in which the individual will tap on the various energy meridian points of the body. While repeatedly tapping, they say a mantra to the effect of, “Even though I am very ungrounded and fearful at this moment, I still fully and deeply accept myself.”

The unlearning process was an uncomfortable one to be sure, to embrace the feelings of uneasiness, as opposed to trying to shove them down and push them aside.

I have empathy now for those who have difficulty wrapping their minds around the simplicity of the technique, for some people spend their careers and entire lives on finding solutions to these questions surrounding health and peace of mind. It is hard at first to accept that maybe the answer wasn’t hidden behind some arcane maze this whole time, but hiding in plain sight.

“The Unseen Therapist is your spiritual healer within,” says Craig. Often takes a wounded healer to console us and remind us although the wound hurts, it doesn’t mean we’re going to die. Grace was like my Chiron, the legendary centaur who mentored all the great heroes of myth; they show us that we ourselves are the cure and the antidote.

Let me say, anyone who claims that any technique is the end-all; cure-all is either being disingenuous or thinking way too simplistically. EFT was a marvelous tool to have in my arsenal amidst all the health turmoil that was going on, but it doesn’t unlock the hidden thoughts of your unconscious automatically.

The Wounded Healer’s Requirement: Use Pain As a Teacher

Dr. Sarno was a pioneer, but he was the first to admit that he wasn’t a psychologist, and his at times reductive language shows just how unfamiliar he was with the therapeutic process.

When I first read the book, it seemed like it was harping on the repression of memories, which I firmly believed was not my case. Repression is not what the problem is; you can be fully aware of what happened in your background, but not willing to look at it or integrate it into your consciousness.

In my case, I continued to stay in situations that were toxic, particularly a Masters program that I hated, in a city that was not a good fit. Through this new set of skills, I was able to listen to my own heart and decipher what it was I was desiring, finally able to filter out all the noise for the first time in God knows how long. I decided to not go back to school that fall semester, irrespective of all the cultural drivel about being a quitter, another artificial construct we put on ourselves through societal conditioning.

“Even though these therapies are used for people with chronic pain and there is often a shared belief (on the part of the therapist and the client) that they can get better, there is also an underlying assumption that the pain is caused by a structural problem that is not curable. This, of course, has been reinforced by physicians who do not have an understanding that pain can be caused by neural pathways and therefore interpret pain as always caused by a structural problem.” — Howard Schubiner M.D.

Conventional psychology always accentuates the positive, and so we are conditioned to be as positive as we can. EFT seeks to find the negative, and smoke out the resistance to healing that those negative experiences are blocking. If you never look at the dark aspects of your life, how can you possibly learn from them and grow?

Pain is a teacher, but not everything you learn in his class may be categorized as positive, and that’s ok! Dilution is what happens when you inject positive affirmations, hiding the true essence of the energy you are experiencing.

It’s much more imperative that we be natural than positive, for things that are natural need no defense or excessive effort. They look at everything through the 3D lenses, dichotomizing every aspect of the human experience, and so they think that if you don’t focus on the positive, the only alternative is to focus on the negative.

In the higher dimensional levels of consciousness, another option is to transcend the negative, but you can’t do that if you pretend it’s not there.

“We are removing barriers to love’s presence.” — Gary Craig

In an hour-long interview, Craig speaks on the concerns brought by many psychologists over issues like secondary gain, or the reasons why some people don’t want to get better, and self-sabotage their healing.

The example he gives is someone in a wheelchair who is receiving more love and attention than they ever received from their cold, distant parents in childhood. Those motivations are subconscious, and uncovering such motivations as lack of parental love is an extraordinarily delicate process.

What EFT allowed me was the access to my inner peace, however fleeting so that I could make decisions based on authenticity rather than autopilot or conditioning. The revelation at how often I said yes to things that I despised came during this time period. The thirst for an answer as to why was what emboldened me to embark on the next part of the journey of unlocking my subconscious.

The Medical community fully embraces the research that stress has hazardous effects on our health, is EFT really such a radical departure from that? Dr. Sarno kept his distance from the alternative medicine movement, because he was committed to the belief that his work was in no way an alternative form of medicine. When we transcend the barrier between conventional and alternative, that will be how we know there has been a collective shift in the consciousness of humanity.

*Several names have been changed for privacy concerns.