Belief“...Another key study being focused on by scientists is the study of the placebo effect. Our mind's ability to add to the effectiveness of medicines and procedures. Right now they are saying,” at least forty-two percent more effective!” That's our power...”
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A doctor can't give this to you. There is no pill to take nor is there a treatment or therapy that can provide this for you. Only you can provide this for yourself. What I'm talking about here, is something that is the most powerful thing known to humankind. It is something that God gave to us from His own power. It is the power of Belief.
Once you put your heart, your soul, and every thought into your belief system it starts to take hold. This has been proven scientifically as well as religiously. Right now, there are studies going on linking thoughts and emotions. All of the new Mind-Body-Spirit books that are out there, are talking about it.
One of the studies being done is by physicists who are studying subatomic particles. They have broken apart atoms and are finding that inside them is another universe of matter, surrounded by a huge percentage of air. What it shows is that everything that we thought of as solid mass, everything on this earth including ourselves, is over 90% air! Manipulatable air!
They're also finding out that knowledge can be manipulated by thoughts, especially thoughts that have a lot of emotion to them. scientists are understanding that when we pray, or if we believe in something strongly, we create matter. We create atoms and molecules. We create an atmosphere that can be manipulated by us.
Another key study being focused on by scientists is the study of the placebo effect. Our mind's ability to add to the effectiveness of medicines and procedures. Right now they are saying,” at least forty-two percent more effective!” That's our power.
Two sides to the story
I find that as I’m talking to patients, things are getting better. I’m learning more and more along the way. These talks help me organize my thoughts about pain and what happens to someone who is lost in the revolving door of pain. The Pain Cycle has a negative downside, but it also has a positive upside. When you have chronic pain, you naturally enter this path. Like grief. There’s no way you can avoid it. You’ve got to enter it. If you try to avoid it, you just end up repressing the pain and its path, and it will end up affecting you even more. The Pain Cycle is something you have to go through, but you don’t have to go as deep into it as I did. You can learn not to do that. You don’t have to lose everything before you find your way out.
A lot of people ask me, If you’re in the negative side and heading down, how do you cross over to the positive side? There’s no easy answer. That’s the point where only patients can help themselves. In fact, you are the only one who can help you, and its because of a thing called Belief. Until you have Belief and you cross over to the positive side, that treatment and that knowledge is meaningless. It won’t help you.
You have to have the Belief that something will work for you, or that you have the power to get over the thing that is causing negativity. The Belief that there’s a higher power stands ready to help you. I meet a lot of people who are still on the negative side of this path. They take pills, they get shots, they read everything out there and ask questions, but it’s not going to help because their minds and hearts are not into Belief. They have to cross over to it in order to go up the positive side of the cycle.
Once they do that, all of the knowledge, all of the therapies, and all of the treatments out there can now help. With Belief, you can find the unique combination of the things that are designed to fit you and only you, and they will help you. Everybody is unique in what works for them. But it will only work if you believe. What I’m trying to tell people in pain when I talk to them, in the clinics or along the road, is, “whatever it takes for you to cross over and start believing in these treatments is what you need to do.”
Belief is like Surrender and Forgiveness. It’s something that you have to feel in your heart. You can’t think your way into it, you have to feel it. You can take steps to get there, but ultimately you have to feel it.
For me it was an epiphany.
Changing your way of seeing things
When I found out that I was lucky to be walking and that doctors thought I was a miracle, it changed my whole belief system. Suddenly I saw myself as a miracle rather than as a sufferer. I started thinking about things differently. I started really believing in walking, because I could do that. I started asking what I could do to preserve my walking. It changed how I was approaching the whole system. It also changed the system’s response to me. They no longer looked at me like, “Here he is to do an hour of therapy.” They now saw me as the Olympic champion of walking and they became my coaches. All of this came from that epiphany, that I was looking at things negatively and that I needed to believe in order to get out of the negative Cycle. So that’s one way to do it — if a person starts hearing how bad it could be, they might switch to thinking about it more positively.
Another way is to volunteer for something that afflicts you, maybe at a pain clinic, or in a nursing home. A lot of times, giving back to others who suffer, will instill the Belief and Forgiveness in you that you need to reinvent.
Before you can reinvent, you need to go through these three steps. Reinvention comes from this. It comes from the crossing over from the negative to the positive side. Think of an elevator that starts on a certain floor, the floor that is your life's stream, your normal path. When entering Pain, you take the elevator from the floor you're on, down, down down, as far down as you need to go, to gain understanding. To gain Knowledge.
You have to go to the bottom floor, to a floor called Surrender, to that point of “handing the keys to someone else”, to start the reinvention process. You don’t have to lose your identity, your family, and everything else to hit
bottom, though. That’s what normally happens because it is such a natural Path, but this is where Education can help. If you can stop swimming upstream and start Believing in yourself, there’s help out there! This is how you become empowered in your own treatment. When you have Belief, your doctors and all of the medical personnel surrounding you become assistants in your healing process. I’m a firm believer that you need professional help when you reinvent, but you’re the one who has the power. You're the one who needs to be in charge.
Reinvention
When you’ve lost your identity, your job, your home, when you’ve lost contact with friends and family, you end up feeling alone on an island, wondering who you are now. You feel like a disabled person and Pain runs your life. That’s your new identity.
Reinvention is a way of calling up your old identity and adapting to a new life, based on who you were before. If you believe that you can come back with your true identity and your real spirit, you can start using the specialists and they can teach you how to adapt your lifestyle to your disability. Strengths and weaknesses need to be faced and understood.
Right now, if you’re on the negative Path of Pain, you’re looking at the doctors as your saviors. You’re asking them, “Can you do something, anything, to take this pain away so I can get back to who I was?” That’s resignation at its best, and that’s where a lot of people get stuck. You need to move beyond this level. You need to take the elevator one more floor, to the Surrender point, so you can start your journey out of the negative.
Reinvention is a journey. It’s an evolution. I’ve been on my reinvention journey for a year and a half now, and I’m still learning. I’m still evolving. I practice reinvention everyday, and everyday I do it again. Every time I go for a walk, I’m reinventing. Every time I learn about my condition, or learn to allow myself to take it easy and not rush headlong into a good day, I'm re-inventing. My life now is tailored around who I used to be and who I’ve always been.
For instance, I love hiking, I love nature, I love teaching, I love learning, I love talking with people. This is me. This is who I am. Pain draws you off the path of who you are. I was talking with my daughter about this and she said “negativity is natural to us.” She’s right. Fear and doubt are what humans do naturally. We're raised this way and we have to fight that. Don’t blame yourself for being negative or for feeling doubt and fear. Negativity is a natural path to take. With Pain comes denial, anger, confusion, change, and depression. You have to accept this and understand this to come through it. Your mission cannot be one of self consciousness, of what others may think of you. It must be one of you fighting Pain. Reinvention is a way of fighting. It’s a way of laying down your arms and saying “I’m not going to fight that way any more. I'm going to learn a different way of doing it.”
There are things that I’m not over yet. There’s professional help that I need, now that I'm done with the walk. I know that this journey will keep going. But I honestly feel that I am a better person than when I first started this journey. It’s saying “I’m blessed to have been in pain” because I never would have become this person had I not been in Pain. I know it sounds crazy to say that. I know that people in pain cannot imagine themselves saying that. I know they wonder if my pain was, or is, as bad as theirs. This pain allowed me to learn things about myself that I never would have known. I know that I’m going to be doing a lot more adventures, a lot more work, than I did before Pain. I will keep adapting to my condition, keep taking the steps that I can, and keep Believing in myself.
I’m on a mission now and I’m going to keep going.
His will be done!