[PODCAST 328]: Our Brains Have More Power Than We Think (How One Book Healed Me Almost Overnight) - Learn | Do

I recently healed the digestive problems I’ve had for the past six years and the plantar fasciitis I’ve been struggling with for the past two months, and it happened practically overnight by reading one book. (It’s called Pain-Free You, and it’s linked at the bottom, but stick with me, okay?)

One reason I’m sharing this today is because you might also have a health condition that can be healed by this book, or you may have a loved one you’ll want to share it with.

But another reason I’m sharing this is because the principle of learning, doing, and becoming applies to everything that we do here in this community. When we learn the right information at the right time, it will change our lives. Our brains have more power than we even understand, and I want you to feel the same energy, hope, and optimism that I am feeling right now.

I don’t want to make this whole podcast about my medical issues, so I will cover that part fairly briefly. I am also not giving medical advice, so please simply listen to this as my personal story, and then work with your own medical team to decide what is best for you.

I’ve shared multiple times on this podcast how, back in 2020, my body stopped digesting properly. I went through an intense time of stress, as most of us did during COVID — losing my dad before the shutdown and then having all the family here at home for so long. Then our business doubled (because people couldn’t handle being at home with their messes and finally had time to get organized) and our team expanded. But, subconsciously, the stress was just too much for me.

I kept going, and I didn’t know what was actually happening inside of my body, but all of a sudden, I got sick while eating pretty much everything/anything. I had every test done for gastroparesis, gallbladder issues, SIBO, swallowing difficulties, and on and on. I spent months and thousands of dollars trying to figure out why I was so sick, and every answer was that I was just fine.

I finally figured out that oil and butter were the main challenges, and I switched to an oil-free, plant-based diet and have been able to feel really good for the past several years.

The problem was that I couldn’t even eat at a restaurant if I wanted to. Every restaurant uses oil in their foods (even their plant-based foods) so I have been carrying thermoses with me everywhere I go, freeze-drying food to take with me on trips, and feeling a huge amount of stress every time I left my home because I didn’t know if I would be able to find food to eat. Traveling with Eric was always very stressful because I needed to have a kitchen, a refrigerator, a grocery store, and lots of time to food prep in the mornings before we went anywhere. And if we had a date night with friends, I would be pulling a thermos out of my backpack while they were all ordering food, and then we would have to explain why I couldn’t eat anything. It was fine, and it was worth it because I felt so good, but it’s been really hard to feel like every bite of food I ate would be dangerous.

On a totally unrelated note, I started walking a lot more a few months ago, and I was feeling so great! But then one morning I woke up and my left arch was super sore. It hurt with every step, so I did some online research and started stretching and using all the tools I could find to alleviate the pain. I bought new shoes and rolled my foot on a water bottle and did all the things the internet said to do, but finally I went to the podiatrist for support.
He prescribed an anti-inflammatory medicine and physical therapy, and let me know he could give me a cortisone shot or perform surgery if those things didn’t work.

For the next month, I did my physical therapy every other day, walked less, and iced and heated my foot regularly. It helped a little bit, but still, every single step was painful. I finally went and got a cortisone shot, hoping that would help, but it hurt so much I couldn’t even walk for a whole week, and once that wore off, my foot was still hurting. I started wondering if I was going to need surgery and if I would ever be able to move without pain. I watched dozens of videos on YouTube about how to cure plantar fasciitis, but it was just taking all my energy, and I could not figure out what to do.

Meanwhile, Eric is wondering why his 48-year-old wife seems more like an 80-year-old. He’s super patient with me, but he stopped even trying to plan trips for us because it was so stressful to take me away from my home and my comforts.

So that’s my situation. One day, as Eric and I were walking Sunny and I was limping along slowly, he was thinking about how I had come out of post-viral fatigue through brain training. You can listen to my podcast with Raelan Agle and I talk about it (linked below), if you want to hear about that. He asked if maybe my other health issues were related to that — maybe for some reason, my body kept coming up with reasons to make me sick or stuck.

When he said that, of course I felt a little defensive, because the pain and my symptoms were not just “in my head”. But I did wonder if that were true.
And you’ve probably had situations where you’ve wondered the same thing about pain that you or a loved one have been going through.

I had read the book The MindBody Prescription, and I had a thought that perhaps I should read it again. I went onto Spotify and clicked on the book, but then I noticed there were some related books, and one was called Pain Free You. I liked the title, so I started listening. I actually started skipping around in the first few chapters because I didn’t want the backstory (even though I did go back and listen to all of it eventually) — I just wanted to know what to do to get rid of pain.

It was this book that has healed my six years of digestive issues and my plantar fasciitis. As of today, I can eat anything, and I can walk without any pain. And it’s only been a couple of weeks since I found the book.

I definitely want you to go buy the book and support the author, because he has changed my life. But I’m going to give you a brief overview so you can get a picture of how it actually works. I’ve been telling my sisters and friends about this, and everybody has the same questions, and then they tell me I should share this as widely as possible in case other people need it too. So here’s what I tell them.

The core message of the book is that pain and symptoms are created by the brain to keep us safe. We have to teach our bodies that we are safe. I honestly don’t know exactly why I went into a quasi-fight-or-flight mode for so many years, but I think it’s mainly because of a lot of factors that were going on behind the scenes here in our business. I can’t go into detail because a lot of the information is private and involves other people, but anyone who runs a business can probably understand what I’m talking about. And given that my personality is more of a people-pleasing, accommodating one, it was not a great match for the challenges that I came up against. (That’s actually one of the reasons why I’m going to be talking more about entrepreneurship and business-building inside of our ARISE membership — because I want to show people how they can make adjustments to the way they run a business and earn an income in a way that doesn’t need to be stressful.)

Back to the book, Pain-Free You, I started in chapter 6, where he outlines how you can know if something is a real health issue or if something is caused by your brain. He has a checklist. He does have a caveat that you do want to get checked out by a doctor to make sure there isn’t something serious you’re missing, but if your doctors tell you there is nothing wrong, and if the criteria he outlines are true for you, you can feel pretty confident it’s something in your brain. In my case, I’ve been through all the medical testing and everyone said I was fine. My foot had been X-rayed, and the doctor said there was nothing wrong, and I fit many of the criteria that Dan outlined in Pain-Free You.

I won’t go through all of them here, but two of them were (1) that the pain or symptoms started out of nowhere — there wasn’t a specific injury or one event — and (2) the pain went on longer than was typical for healing. The author emphasized that the body is made to heal, and when pain becomes chronic and lasts for years and years, it’s not consistent with how the body actually heals. That made sense to me, and it explained a lot, because I’d been feeling so frustrated about the years I was suffering with no relief.

He then talked about visualization and believing that you could actually heal yourself. With eating, I started by putting some butter on a corn cob. I’d been eating dry corn for years, and I really just wanted some butter and salt and pepper. So I visualized myself multiple times throughout that day eating the corn and having no problems. With my walking, I visualized myself walking the dog with no pain.

Then he recommended that we start slow, and if we feel the symptoms or pain, we act indifferent — unbothered. We thank our brain for trying to keep us safe, and then we let our brain know that we are safe and that we don’t need the pain anymore. We also have to be consistent about it. We can’t relax and be confident on the first walk, and then freak out on the second walk when we have pain. We have to consistently teach our brain that we’re okay.

The night I ate the corn, I had a couple of symptoms pop up, but I just took deep breaths and told my brain that I was okay. My family was watching me carefully — I think they were all scared for me because of the years they’d seen me sick. They even asked me the next day if I was okay, and I let them all know I was able to eat the corn with butter without any problems at all, whereas in the past I would have been up most of the night completely sick.

With my walking, the first day I told my brain I wasn’t in pain, I probably had about 30 to 40 twinges of pain in my arch and my heel as I walked. Each time, I acted indifferent and unbothered, and I told my brain that I was safe and that everything was okay. The second day, I had about 12 twinges of pain, and the third day about 6. For the rest of the week I may have felt a little twinge here and there, but then the pain completely went away. I’ve been walking about 6 to 8 miles a day now with no pain at all.

Once I ate that corn, I told Eric I wanted to go out to lunch with him at a local restaurant where I hadn’t been able to eat for years. They have a special salad with rice and beans, both of which are prepared with some oil, and they have a salad dressing I love, which also has some oil. I was so excited to get to eat it. I pictured myself eating it without symptoms all morning, and then we went to lunch and I got my order and sat down.

After eating about a third of the salad, I just started crying at the lunch table. Eric said, “People might think I’m being mean to you.” But I just couldn’t stop crying because I thought I would never be able to eat at a restaurant again. And I also felt like the world had opened up to me — that I could actually travel without carrying every meal in my suitcase, that I could go out with friends again, and that any other pain or symptom that came upon me could be healed as well. It was like a rebirth, while eating a salad. 🙂 I still mostly eat my oil-free, plant-based menu because it just makes me feel great. I don’t love eating heavy meals, and I actually don’t go out to eat very often. But there’s been such a difference in just knowing my body doesn’t have to be afraid of eating food.

So hopefully I’ve given enough of an overview that you will go buy the book or listen to the audiobook: Pain-Free You. (I have Spotify Premium, which gives me 15 hours of audiobook listening each month, and I love it!)

But I also hope that what I’ve shared today will get you thinking about your own situation and what your brain may be doing behind the scenes. Perhaps you’ve been wanting to get organized and build your STEP system, but you just never do it because you feel stuck. That’s likely your brain keeping you safe, telling you that once you build a system, too much is going to be required of you because you’ll be so organized. Our brains are often wired with limiting beliefs that prevent us from actually doing the things that will bring us joy. It’s not a weakness — it’s protection. I was somewhat embarrassed to share my story about overcoming my pain because I didn’t want people to think I was just making up a bunch of sicknesses and keeping them in my head. But the fact is, I had no conscious idea that that was what was going on. And now that I feel so good, I just want to share it with everyone so they can feel the same way too.

When our brains try to warn us that we’re not safe, we can override that and say, “I am safe.” And “safe” doesn’t mean that there aren’t any problems. It can even just mean that I can manage and get by.

I have been going through some of my mom’s old journals, and I found this great quote by Robert Louis Stevenson: “Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.”

Seeing that in her handwriting was really sweet to me the other day.

If you’re going through “life” like I am–or like we all are–I hope you’ll feel the encouragement from us to learn, to do, and to become. It only takes small microbursts to reach our goals. And as we join together, we can feel more connected and supported in the process.

Much love!!

April

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