Archive for June, 2008

Wisdom from David Wise, PhD, author of "A Headache in the Pelvis"

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking with David Wise, PhD, author of A Headache in the Pelvis. I read A Headache in the Pelvis at a very important juncture in my experience with IC and vulvodynia. I had just started treatment with a vulvovaginal specialist and was not feeling any pain relief. My anxiety was through the roof and I felt panic nearly all the time. I was at my wit’s end and extremely terrified.

I started reading the book one afternoon and put aside everything else immediately. I read the whole book in one sitting and heard the faint but distinct voice of my Inner Healer. The book spoke to a deeper part of me than my logical mind or my emotionally stressed heart. I took in everything Wise wrote and absorbed it thoroughly. I was interested in the physical therapy techniques for dealing with pelvic floor dysfunction. However, it was the other message in the book that drew my Inner Healer to it with a magnetic force.

To me, the core message of A Headache in the Pelvis is about relaxing both the body and the mind through relaxation techniques, breathing techniques, and cognitive therapy or learning to truly understand how thinking shapes our emotional lives. (This goes far beyond “just relax and you’ll feel better,” by the way. This is relaxation in a way most of us don’t truly utilize or even understand. It is powerful and extremely healing.) I knew without a doubt I needed to learn and apply everything about these mental techniques. I studied the book itself and then worked my way through the recommended reading, making trips to the library and bookstores regularly. I knew I was onto something right for me – my Inner Healer was dead certain.

I told this to Dr. Wise yesterday and the ensuing conversation included an important point that I felt was necessary to share with you, no matter where you are in your journey to health. As we talked about the mental/emotional concepts addressed in A Headache in the Pelvis, Wise told me many of the people who come to his clinic or read the book do not take those ideas to heart. He was excited to learn of the healing effect they had on me, and correlated the healing process for pelvic pain to the process of losing weight. Many people want the quick fix, the magic pill, or the instantaneous result. Lasting weight loss takes time and lifestyle changes. The body cannot be rushed. Likewise, healing must include digging to the root of the problem to eliminate it forever.

This has absolutely been my experience. Had I simply done physical therapy, I know I would not have healed. Five seconds after I left the physical therapists’ office, I was taking my freshly relaxed muscles straight back to square one with each passing minute. The constant process of storing stress and emotion in my pelvic muscles was just that – constant. To undue the tension during an appointment was just a miniscule moment in time compared to the ongoing tension that wasn’t being undone in those muscles. It wasn’t enough.

My Inner Healer was extremely wise, as usual. She knew I needed to undo the process of storing tension in those muscles and really learn new ways to approach every aspect of my life. Only then would I be getting to the root of the problem. I am always so impressed with my Inner Healer when I look back and see her genius in retrospect. She took me through the somewhat long (roughly six months) and not entirely easy process of changing myself, and how I deal with life on the very deepest level. I won’t say it was a simple or quick process. However, the payoff was far greater than I could ever have imagined. Not only did I heal completely but my entire life changed for the better. My depression lifted, my creativity skyrocketed, and I became a version of myself I had only dreamed of previously.

The quick fix may have the allure of instant gratification, but the deep fix has the allure of complete health. I am grateful to Dr. Wise and his incredibly valuable, enlightening, and calming writing for starting me on the journey to this place of absolute, whole, mind-body health.

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Posted in Chronic Pain, Interstitial Cystitis, Life Coaching, Martha Beck, Mind Body Healing, Vulvar Pain, Vulvar Vestibulitis Syndrome, Vulvodynia, Vulvodynia Support | 2 Comments »

I Should Be Well By Now

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have time to be sick. I have a to-do list that never ends, scheduled appointments with clients, workshops to prepare and present, my family to care for, lots to do around my house, and the occasional spare minute for time with friends. Illness does not play into my plans whatsoever and never has. I can remember feeling so annoyed in high school when I caught the chicken pox from my brother – right during the last couple weeks of school. The audacity of him to share that illness just when I was trying to score A’s on all my finals!

If a minor cold or childhood illness can derail me, imagine what interstitial cystitis coupled with vulvodynia (and throw in a kidney stone or two) could do! My symptoms began in college, when I absolutely did not have time to worry about my body. I visited the student health clinic every so often, thinking I had a yeast infection or bladder infection, depending on the symptoms. I rarely actually had an infection, but the doctors would often prescribe something “just in case” and to alleviate the symptoms. I felt these symptoms were like a mosquito buzzing around my head, pestering me and annoying me but not really interrupting my determined focus.

It became harder to ignore the mosquito as the symptoms increased in severity. I remember sitting in the restroom and missing out on parts of my husband’s college graduation ceremony as I waited for my pelvic floor muscles to relax. The pain and frequency were becoming serious interruptions in my daily life. By the time I attended his Naval Officer Candidate School graduation ceremony six months later, I couldn’t be anywhere without a restroom. I drove back and forth between the restroom and the graduation ceremony several times, suffering the embarrassment and frustration simply because I had no choice.

I started seeking doctors and trying to figure out what was wrong with me, but it would be five more years before I truly found relief. Meanwhile, my symptoms grew steadily worse, until my life was no longer just interrupted. My illness became my life, and I stopped doing everything else.

I resisted my illness at first because I thought it would just go away. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t think it would hang around – it was just something to get through. I resisted my illness even more when I found out it had a name and was chronic. I resisted my illness with all my might when I had visited every doctor I could find and had not found relief. My mind kept saying, “I should be better by now. This shouldn’t be taking over my life. I should not still be dealing with this after so many years.”

I realize now I had a strict health timeline in mind. I could be ill with, say, a cold – for a week. I could suffer the stomach flu for a couple days. I could even put up with a more severe illness for a couple of weeks. But months? Years? Absolutely not. I had a life to live! I had things to do! I had important things to do.

The thing is, reality just doesn’t always line up with what I want. The reality was my illness had not gone away, and no amount of thinking “I should be better by now” was going to help. In fact, it made it worse. The more I thought that, the more upset I became, and the more upset I became, the more my anxiety affected my ability to heal. My illness had its own timeline, and until I surrendered my schedule, I was going to be very unhappy.

Interestingly enough, when I did stop fighting and allowed myself as much time as I needed to heal, I stopped feeling so much panic and fear. I decided it simply didn’t matter how long it took to heal – I was going to stop pressuring myself to be better, NOW. What a relief. From that mindset, everything felt much easier to handle. I could explore a variety of healing modalities until I found what worked for me. Without a self-imposed timeline for improvement, my body felt much more relaxed and my symptoms dropped a notch in severity. I was actually able to do more and feel less anxiety.

I still find myself railing against reality when I get the flu. I think of all the things I need to be doing, all the normal routines that are being interrupted, and I resist the experience like crazy. And then, I remember. Oh yeah – I’ve taken this class before, and clearly I need to dig out the notes and review. I stop fighting and just allow my body to do its thing. I give myself the gift of time, and in doing so, the gifts of peace and health as well.

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Posted in 1, Chronic Pain, Interstitial Cystitis, Life Coaching, Martha Beck, Mind Body Healing, Vulvar Pain, Vulvar Vestibulitis Syndrome, Vulvodynia, Vulvodynia Support | 4 Comments »

Harnessing the Mind's Healing Power

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

The mind is a powerful tool for healing, but knowing what to do with your mind and how to harness its abilities is another story altogether. When I first decided to study the mind-body connection and truly turn my mind into a healing tool, I read book after book, devouring the words of as many wise writers as possible. The more I read, the more I realized that the mind-body connection is one that truly cannot be severed – in fact, to call it a connection is in itself inadequate. The mind is actually within the body, throughout the body, and fully integrated into every cell of the body. To try to heal the body without looking at the mind is like trying to finish a puzzle with half of the pieces missing. Perhaps you can see the outline of the lake, the tops of the snowy mountains, and a cloud or two, but you will never fully grasp the picture as a whole.

To truly begin to unravel the complicated puzzle of my own physical illness, I had to open my mind to a new way of perceiving my whole being. I liked what I was reading from all these various books, but I had yet to fully grasp the truth of it within my own self. Luckily, experimenting with techniques that come from the mind and result in mental strength is a win-win proposition. I decided it couldn’t hurt to explore the power of my own mind and venture into new areas of understanding – it wasn’t like I was mixing medications. I set out to experiment with my own body and my newly awakened mind.

Needless to say, as you might have surmised from the general message of my blog, the results were astoundingly successful. From where I sit now, on the other side of the process, I can fully see and understand the true power of mind-body healing. I have more than just my excitement, conviction, and hope. Now, I have the final piece of my own learning puzzle: experience. From this perspective, I can share clear and hopefully helpful information with you. Having blazed the trail in front of you, I hope to shorten your journey by sharing the tools and understanding I gleaned from my own experience.

The whole equation begins with emotion. Many of us, my past self included, do not deal with negative emotion in a helpful, effective way. I spent most of my life trying to avoid negative emotion as much as possible. I hated hearing about misfortune, tried not to cry or “break down” in public, kept my emotions on a very short leash, and in general ran like hell from facing anything emotionally uncomfortable. Unfortunately, what I did not realize was the impossibility of truly escaping negative emotion. Emotion is part of the human experience, and negative emotion does not leave me just because I don’t want to face it. In fact, by trying with all my might not to feel it, I actually trapped it in my body.

Now before you shake your head and label me crazy, let me promise you this is not just a theory. Many very scientific, smart people are studying this concept and incorporating it into their understanding of healing. One of these is Les Fehmi, PhD, author of the book The Open-Focus Brain. He gives an excellent description of how emotions remain in the body, which I’ll summarize here. To keep from feeling an emotion, to keep from letting it enter your consciousness, there is only one thing you can do. You must tense and tighten a muscle or group of muscles somewhere in your body. Though this works like a charm – you won’t be dwelling on the negative emotion anymore – it has a major drawback. The very muscle where you are holding that tension becomes a holding spot for the emotion. You can think of emotion as having an energy – it is not “nothing.” If processed, that energy flows through your body and leaves. If it is not processed, that energy has nowhere to go. It remains locked within you, usually in the region of the body you have unconsciously chosen to clench.

As you might imagine, after many years of doing this, day in and day out, your body reaches a limit. First of all, holding a muscle in a contracted position for extended periods of time is clearly not healthy. Nerves lose precious blood and oxygen flow, muscles fatigue, skin does not receive the nutrients it needs to remain healthy, and pain settles in to stay. Your body has to work hard to keep up the emotion avoiding pattern because it actually responds to the negative emotion as though it is under attack. If you are afraid to feel a negative emotion, you are signaling your body to move into fight-or-flight mode to escape this perceived predator. So, muscles tense, heart-rate increases, hormone production is altered, and the nervous system remains on high-alert. None of this is conducive to health and healing – in fact, this is your body in breakdown mode. It takes massive amounts of energy to maintain the fight-or-flight state. Every system of the body can be affected from hormones to nerves to skin to muscles to mental acuity.

When I finally understood this connection, I could immediately see evidence of it everywhere in my life. To avoid negative emotions I spent every waking moment of my life in fight-or-flight mode, which, while adversely affecting my health, also led to constant anxiety. The negative emotion did not leave my body but remained trapped, building up to toxic levels. My body was begging me to accept negative emotions, allow them to be a part of my life, and in doing so, let them go. I was already working with Kathleen Barratt (see her website in the blogroll) and learning how to re-train my breathing patterns to allow full, oxygen-rich breaths back into my body. I discovered that breathing these full, complete breaths helped me draw my focus into my body, realize the places where I was holding tension, and release myself from the anxiety and fight-or-flight trap. Breathing also helped me to allow those emotions to surface, move through me, and leave my physical self at long last.

When I reached this level of understanding regarding my mind, body, and emotions, it was literally only a few weeks before my body began to show signs of healing. I knew my experiment was a success – I could feel it in every cell of my being. I could feel the healing in every breath I took, in every anxiety, tension-free moment, in every emotion that came bubbling up and out to be released. Soon, the vulvar pain and burning sensations faded away, the constant itching disappeared, the urinary frequency lifted, the unusual skin problems vanished, and my hormones returned to normal levels (my previous test results showed up as menopausal even though I was only 26). Now, I am equipped with the knowledge that remaining intimately connected with my emotions, my physical body, and my inner sense of self is the perfect formula for long-lasting health. The experiment continues and I constantly fine-tune my ability to be a whole person, not a mind distanced from its body. I can’t imagine living any other way now that I’ve discovered the fulfilling, energizing, and vivid life available to me.

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Posted in Chronic Pain, Interstitial Cystitis, Life Coaching, Martha Beck, Mind Body Healing, Vulvar Pain, Vulvar Vestibulitis Syndrome, Vulvodynia, Vulvodynia Support | 4 Comments »

The Passionate Life Coach

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

I’ve been writing about the mind body connection lately because I find it fascinating and compelling.  I see it as another helpful avenue to pursue on the road to healing.  I want to make it clear, however, that this is just a favorite topic of mine.  I used many mind body techniques to find my own personal healing, but I certainly don’t have all the answers for everyone suffering from pelvic pain issues.  As a life coach, I am trained to help people work through difficult emotions.  This training does include many aspects of forging a strong connection between the mind and the body, because this can further emotional healing.  The added benefit of forging this connection and working through the emotional upheaval is that is can often further pain reduction and physical healing as well. 

This is the beauty of working on the mind, emotions, and mind body connection – it only brings positive and good changes into your life.  You feel better mentally, feel more relaxed, and have more tools to use for difficult situations throughout your life.  This can only enhance the healing you are seeking from medical professionals.  It’s exciting to consider all kinds of treatments coming together as a whole to create healing.  When I was journeying toward health, I explored every possible healing modality and created a combination that worked for me.  I truly believe each person can find the right mixture of treatments, and I don’t see any single treatment as the magic bullet for everyone.  You are an individual, and your healing process will be completely your own. 

I’m going to continue discussing the mind body connection because I do think it’s important for you to know about it.  Perhaps you’ll read my posts and find some sort of relief from the constant anxiety, fear, hopelessness, or panic you’ve been feeling.  That is my hope for you, and the reason I am sharing every tool I’ve learned – both as a woman who worked through her own emotional pain and as a trained life coach.  I love sharing these powerful and life-changing tools, and I love writing.  This blog is a passion for me.  I am passionate about spreading a positive message regarding these painful health issues.  When I was wading through the internet, trying to figure out why I was in such agony, I read many scary things about these health issues.  At the time, I did not find anything written by someone who had returned to health, and much of what I read talked about the chronic nature of these diseases.  Every time I sit down to write, I imagine a woman combing the internet, looking for hope and something positive.  I remember the fear and hopelessness I felt, and the resonating sense of connection I experienced when I found someone with a positive message. 

The mind body connection has been explored by many different people, from medical doctors to psychologists to musicians to patients to writers.  Its origins lie in the Eastern healing modalities such as acupuncture, yoga, and ayurveda, to name a few.  Many people consider it an essential part of healing, and many people consider it hogwash.  There’s even quite a discrepancy about how to write the word/words mind body.  I’ve seen mind/body, mind-body, mindbody, and mind body, all used in published texts.  I haven’t yet decided my favorite, though I’m leaning toward mind-body or mindbody.  

I’m certainly no expert in the mind-body connection field, but I do study it constantly.  It is perhaps the single most fascinating subject to me.  I love the feeling I have when I live as a whole being, mind and body merged as one.  I love the messages my body gives my mind when they are communicating freely.  The whole concept has helped me with every aspect of my life, from physical pain to mental pain to emotional eating issues to musicianship (I’m a violinist and Irish fiddler).

The mind-body concept sometimes gets a bad reputation as another one of those “fluffy,” new-age ideas originating in California and slowly moving east.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  The mind-body concept is probably as old as humanity, and has been a part of many cultures including Celtic, Asian, and Native American cultures.  Though different cultures had/have different ways of utilizing the connection, the similarities are often astonishing.  Healers have traditionally incorporated mind, body, spirit, and Earth to help people return to health.  

I’ll be exploring the details of the mind-body connection in future posts, but today I wanted to introduce some of my “friends” who have published material regarding this topic.  As I unearthed more and more helpful information in my own healing journey, I came across many experts whose works became central in my own mind-body connection process.  If you’re interested in researching and discovering more on this topic, you might enjoy the works of Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. John Sarno, Depak Chopra, Dr. Ted Grossbart, and Dr. David Wise, to name a few.  Of course, my teacher and mentor Martha Beck has also written extremely useful information in her book, Finding Your Own North Star.  Her discussion about the Essential and Social Selves reveals a fascinating connection between our health, body, and mental happiness.  Happy reading!

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Posted in Chronic Pain, Interstitial Cystitis, Life Coaching, Martha Beck, Mind Body Healing, Vulvar Pain, Vulvar Vestibulitis Syndrome, Vulvodynia, Vulvodynia Support | 1 Comment »