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If you’ve read part 1 of Healing Sciatic Nerve and Back Pain, you’ll know that I’m dealing with pain in my sciatic nerve and possibly a bulging disc in my lower back.  This second part of the topic is going to go over what changes I’m making and what treatment has been effective for me.

Physical treatment

The physical level is usually where the focus goes when treating pain.  Allopathic conventions don’t suspect unrest in the emotional or mental realms too often.  I’m not one to skip out on modern medical practices, because in my beliefs about reality, there is credibility and they work.  To shun them and do purely alternative medicine would be foolish for me.  I know my belief structure well enough to know I can support myself in many ways and on many levels.

My first support came from my chiropractor.  I hadn’t seen her in years but she was glad (and sad) to see me again.  She knows if I’m coming to her office I’m having a bad day.  She did some diagnostics on me and determined I had sciatic pain and it was coming from my lower back.  The muscles in my gluteal area and left leg were like steel cables.  I needed some massage and time off my feet to let all that calm down.

The next support was taking time off work.  I hated doing this and really felt I was going to fall into financial lack, but I got my shifts covered for two weeks.  As is stands now it might be 4-6 weeks until I can be an EMT again.  I’d rather be working than have back/sciatic pain, but my health comes first.

My acupuncturist is the best guy in the world — he combines his talent in traditional Chinese medicine (he was trained in China too), a great sense of humor, and a love for geeky technology.  Really.  Who can stick needles in you and talk about graphics cards, L2 caches, and how many Japanese Zeros he shot down in his last online mission?  He also prescribed some herbs for me to take to support my back and gave me a list of foods to avoid that tend to increase inflammation.

One session where I came in with bad spasms he gave me a bottle of Formula 303. It is an all-natural formula to help with muscle spasms, tension, and stress.  The other herbs I’m taking are from Seven Forests, called Liquidambar.

I also saw a buddy of mine who is a doctor and he said I should take 800mg Ibuprofen 3x day for the inflammation and also gave me a prescription for a muscle relaxer to help with my spasms.  He recommended I go to physical therapy, even though it is quite expensive.   (Use your judgement on taking muscle relaxers and  Formula 303 at the same time.  I do, and I’m not sluggish or fuzzy at all.)

I see the chiropractor and acupuncturist once a week.  The acupuncturist is now doing electrical stims on me, and that is the cat’s jammies. I feel soooo good when I leave after a stim session.  I highly recommend them.

Treating the mind

In part 1, I mentioned mental pain.   I have a lot of non-supportive thoughts that are out of the moment.   These thoughts congregate and get stuck because I don’t see them or receive them.  Reigning in the mind is part of my therapy.   The mind works like a computer and seems to follow the GIGO rule.  That’s, Garbage In = Garbage Out.  Step one is to stop creating more mental garbage, and step two will be dealing with what’s accumulated thus far. 

I listened to the Power of Now again to gain some insight.  Here’s what Tolle has to say in Chapter 4:

When you learn to be the witness of your thoughts and emotions, which is an essential part of being present, you may be surprised when you first become aware of the background static of ordinary unconsciousness and realize how rarely, if ever, you are truly at ease within yourself.

On the level of your thinking, you will find a great deal of resistance in the form of judgement, discontent and mental projection away from the now.

On the emotional level, there will be an undercurrent of un-ease, tension, boredom, or nervousness.  Both are aspects of the mind in its habitual resistance mode.

So how can I free myself of these things?

The answer: Awareness

Tolle, again:

Make it conscious. Observe the many ways in which unease, discontent and tension arise within you through unnecessary judgement, resistance to what is, and denial of the now. …

Make it a habit to monitor your mental/emotional state through self observation.

“Am I at ease in this moment?”  Ask yourself this frequently.

“What’s going on inside me at this moment?”

I was getting caught up in what was happening outside myself and totally  ignoring what was going on the inside myself.

So I would pause many times during my day and ask myself, “how do I feel?”

“What am I thinking?  Is it about now or the future?  Is my body in any pain or discomfort.  Am I resisting anything in this moment?”

When I came upon a stream of thought about the future I would say to myself, “I’m not doing this anymore.  I’m focusing on the present, now.”   It is a very direct statement to myself about where I desire to focus my awareness. 

I do stay in the present more, but I do drift into future and past a lot.  The difference is I catch myself every time, where the thoughts used to be under the radar.  Now, I’m still creating thoughts that are not grounded in reality.  Does that matter?  It depends…

It depends on attitude.  When I catch myself out of the moment I don’t berate myself, “oh, you dummy you did it again!”  That is called non-reception, which means I’m not receiving the experience in the moment.  Another way to say it is the the experience in the moment is not OK.  Remember when I said the thoughts were getting ”stuck”?  They do that because I’m not practicing reception, which means I am the creator of this experience and I allow it to be as it is.  Throwing judgement on the moment just adds denial to it — more stuff to get stuck.

If an out-of-the-moment thought comes into my awareness and I receive it, there is no problem.  I’m not accumulating any more mental garbage.  The key here is to not exclude certain thoughts (say by forcing myself to have all positive thoughts), it is to receive everything I create and let them be as they are, without judgement.

The Emotional Body

While all my thoughts were piling up like cars on a California freeway in heavy fog, I wasn’t paying much attention to my emotional body.  When I’m not paying attention to my mental noise, the emotional body will produce feelings of unease to alert me to get back in the moment, get out of my denial, and see what’s going on.  But I was missing all the signals.  There was really no space for reception of the mental or emotional realities, I was just filling the space with mental junk, not awareness.

Back in 2004 when I thru hiked the Appalachian Trail, I had the largest emotional opening of my life.  Many hikers do and it opens the doorway to experiencing magic.  “Trail magic” is what its called by long-distance hikers.  It’s hard to put it into words but life starts giving you stuff without you even asking for it.  What you need comes to you without effort.

The emotional body is feminine.  Nature is feminine and thru hikers would find it hard not to have her rub off on them when they walk with her for six months.  When I got off the trail I was very open indeed, the sky was the limit, everything was easy.  Gradually I forgot about my connection to her as I merged myself back into “normal” life.  My emotional body took a backseat to my patterned responses to modern living.

My emotional body was screaming in pain and I couldn’t hear it.  It is supposed to flow like water and within me it became slow and sluggish.  Just like my mental body, I got stuff stuck everywhere.

(If I ignore the mental and I ignore the emotional, there’s only one place left to go — the physical.  And that finally got my attention.)

Getting her to move again when I cannot

If I could move, I could energize my emotional body easily — just go on a hike.  The memories would pour in and start a chain reaction of bliss.  But I cannot move too much — just a little bit around the house, that’s all.  I don’t want to make things worse by upsetting my back and put me in more pain.

Focus on the belly

The belly is the place in the physical body where the emotional body anchors in.   (The head is the place where the mental body connects to the physical form.)  Wanna see what’s going on in the emotions?  Focus your awareness on the belly area and breathe.   Soon you will get feelings in the body or the space outside the belly.  At first this didn’t work for me, I was too closed down so I tried to access my emotion from the point of pain within myself.

Focus on the pain

I used my awareness and traveled to my sciatic pain and to my lower back.  Torrents of emotion were there — layers of distress, anger, self-hatred, fear, helplessness, and sadness.  All these are waiting for me to experience them.  They are stuck there until I do.  It took me a week of focusing on the pain and coaching from friends and teachers to finally start crying.  I was finally feeling everything that had accumulated in that space.

The experience was very literal.  I cannot move.  And the emotions related to that were my frustrations about the lack of movement in my life and self-abuse for the lack of movement.  So many desires I wanted to fulfill, and I was hedging on many of them out of fear.  That was the message I was trying to bring to my consciousness.

It  is a good idea to talk to the parts of the body that are in pain.  There is a lot of expression that has to happen.  And once you let it out, the healing begins.

Journal the emotional body

This is a good practice in general, not just for people in pain.  When you channel your emotional body at first you have to go off of faith and just start writing.  The expression of the emotional body is in feeling and is can manifest in many ways.  It can be written, emotional, the feeling you should take a walk in nature, go play an instrument, rage, crying, drawing, etc.   She has many ways to express herself and for me the most comfortable way has been with writing.

She tells me what she needs to open up.  She encourages me.  Sometimes she’s angry that I cannot move. 

I will journal my emotional body daily and summarize at the end of the week.  I look for what denials I’m playing with in my experience.  Recognizing those I can then do a “course correction” and change a habit or just have more awareness to catch myself falling back into denial.

Connect to the Goddess and nature.

 Another great way to reconnect to your emotional body is through the Goddess.   Everyone, male and female, carries feminine or Goddess energy within them.  My friend Terri gave me a CD of her Goddess inspired chanting and told me to buy the Goddess Guidance Oracle Cards by Doreen Virtue.  This is a deck of 42 cards having beautiful artwork.  Each Goddess has a focus of feminine energy and by tapping into the Goddess herself, or into the attributes she represents (if connecting to Goddess is too foreign for you), you will awaken that energy in yourself and your emotional body.   Some Goddesses you’ll click with right away.  For me that was Mother Mary and Dana — very familiar energy especially from when I was doing healings.  And, some felt very foreign to me.  I know when I feel that way, the Goddess represents a part of me that I am afraid of touching.  It is a sure sign that I need to spend some time with that energy and my feelings around that energy. 

Nature heals.   How can it not?  It is the feminine essence in different clothes.  Long ago I was injured from an accident and had chronic pain.  I noticed that every time I took a walk in the woods, the pain would decrease greatly.  (And this was before I was into anything spiritual or transformational)  About 10 minutes after I exited the woods, my pain would return.

Another story is from my thru hike of the Appalachian Trail.  I was in Massachusetts and stayed at a friend’s summer home over the fourth of July weekend.  I had come down with chills, fever, fatigue, and joint pains on my three days off.  I knew I had classic Lyme Disease symptoms and it seemed that most everyone on the trail got it in 2004.  I went to the hospital and got a prescription for Doxycyclene. 

I was raring to get back on the trail so I dragged my tired, lethargic, and achy body back on the trail a day later.  Fifteen minutes, FIFTEEN MINUTES, after stepping back into the forest I had not one symptom of Lyme Disease.  I was awake, happy, warm, and had no aches or pains. 

So what I’m saying is, if you’ve got a lot of pain, don’t sit inside all day.  Get out into nature.  If that’s your backyard or Central Park, great.  Look at the clouds, the snow, the trees, listen to what you can hear and forget about the past and future.  If you’ve got pain, feel it — but stay in the moment.  I know back pain can keep you flat on your back for weeks. Play some nature sound CDs or watch a TV show that inspires you or makes you laugh, but, get out as soon as you can.  Nature is inspiring and it will lift your spirits and help you heal faster.

(Yes, it looks like there will be a part 3.  Plenty more insights to go around.)