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Causes of Pain - Eastern Perspective

In Energy Medicine, there are only two main causes of chronic illness of any type.  That’s it!  Just two!  The first is energy depletion in the body and the second cause is energy imbalance.  Every health problem originates from one or the other.  It is that simple.  And to think, I spent seven years in medical school and never learned this until I went to acupuncture school.  All physical illnesses first manifest as energetic imbalances, often years before the first overt symptom.

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the symptom of pain often arises from a blockage of energy flow in the body.  Often the blockage of flow is preceded by a decline in energy reserves.  This energy is referred to as Qi, Chi, Ka, Ki or Prana.  In modern terms we can refer to it as Life Force, Vital Force, Subtle Energy, Life Energy, or Bio-Energy.  Even if you don’t understand the concept of Qi, just think about how you actually perceive it in other people. 

For example, do you know anyone who exudes vibrant energy and health?   This person likely has a good reserve of Qi.  On the other hand, I’m sure you can think of at least one person you’ve met that makes you feel tired just being in the same room with her.  That person has a low reserve of Qi.  The more Qi or vital force you have, the healthier you are.  The more balanced and free-flowing the Qi, the healthier you feel and the better your body functions.

 

Energy Depletion

Think of life force as the energy that makes all the processes in your body work – the feeling of being alive.  As an analogy, think of your body as a laptop computer for a moment.  If the energy in the battery wears out, the laptop stops working until you can plug it into the wall outlet right?

If your body’s energy battery is low, you’ll start manifesting symptoms of illness, including pain, because the body doesn’t have enough “juice” to heal itself.  Even infectious diseases can be traced to a weakened immune system that has resulted from energy depletion. In fact, when your energy is low, the body turns on its survival mechanism and any process that the body considers extraneous isn’t tended to.  In order to heal, you need to “charge” your battery.   In later chapters, I’ll be showing you just how to do that through energy tools and lifestyle changes.

So why does your energy battery get low?  Namely, it’s stress.  I bet you could have guessed that!   Generally, it is stress that has occurred over a prolonged period of time, often decades, that manifests in a low energy battery.

Stress can be viewed as endogenous, stemming from within the body, or exogenous, stemming from outside the body.  Exogenous stressors are things that we experience from our environment that drain our energy.  I’ll wait until I share the Western perspective to name exactly what those things are in more detail.

Endogenous stress comes from our response to the outside world.  Do you notice how some people just thrive on stress?  Before I became ill, I was one of them.  Whenever I had a deadline to meet or a competition to win, I’d savor the rush of adrenaline.  I’d feel alive.  Feeling stressed made me feel important, like I was contributing to the world.  If I became too relaxed, I was afraid someone might think I was lazy.  My self-esteem was so fragile that I couldn’t bear that label.  Thus I did everything in my power to keep myself stressed. 

The stress response is a protection response built into our survival genetics. When our bodies feel threatened, a whole cascade of reactions turns on to preserve our lives.  You may know it as the fight or flight response.  The fight or flight response is an important part of our evolution as humans because we wouldn’t have survived saber-toothed tigers, plagues and wars without it.  This response however wasn’t meant to be a daily event. 

Imagine yourself as part of an ancient tribe.  Most of the time you’d be playing, eating and having fun…until the food supply became low and it would be time to kill a beast to feed the clan.  As a hunter, your fight or flight response enabled the chase-and-kill to be executed safely and successfully.  Once the hunt was over, you’d settle back down into a relaxed state for many days or weeks before you were called upon to hunt again.

Now picture our modern lives.  The minute we wake up, we down half a pot of coffee; a stimulant, and the stress response begins.  Kids have to be dressed and fed for school while they are still half-asleep and whining.  We get stuck in traffic and pray we’re not late for work.  During lunch we catch up on email while eating. We rush home to make dinner and help our kids with their homework so we don’t miss the debut of the new “Transformers” movie.  While we are enjoying the movie, our pulse rises and our hearts race because of the exciting images we see on the screen.  Back at home, right before bed, we watch the evening news and hear about devastating floods, earthquakes and civil unrest.  Is there any wonder why our energy batteries are low?  Without an adequate and renewable source of Qi, the self-healing mechanisms of our body grind to a halt. 

I’ve witnessed in my medical practice a certain minimum level of Qi, or energy, that one must have in order for the body to keep repairing itself.  If the Qi levels drop below that crucial threshold, symptoms ensue.  Here is the key: if you start out with a full battery charge of energy but only get symptoms when it’s down to thirty percent capacity, how long do you think it took you to lose the seventy percent?  Honestly, it might have taken you decades.  The loss in energy charge can be slow enough to be almost imperceptible if you’re not paying attention.  If year after year, your batteries continue leaking without replenishment, your energy levels will diminish until you do pay attention.

 

Energy Blockage

All pain symptoms are due to the blockage of energy flow in the body, which is why ancient therapies like acupuncture and modern energy therapies work so well in treating it.  By increasing the flow of Qi in the area of pain, the body begins to heal the painful area on its own, thus reducing the pain symptoms.  I’ll be sharing with you various ways of promoting healthy energy flow in the chapters ahead.  Once you find the best tools for your body, you no longer have to suffer from chronic pain.

 

Energy Imbalance

It is well known in Traditional Chinese Medicine that energy imbalances can occur in the body and, if not corrected, can produce pain and illness.   Every single chronic disease has an antecedent energetic depletion and/or imbalance associated with it.  Often, the imbalances have been present for decades before a person manifests symptoms. 

Acupuncture training taught me that it was vitally important to improve the energetic balance in all the acupuncture meridians in order for my patients to heal; yet something was missing that I couldn’t put my finger on until recently.  In the past, even when using acupuncture and other holistic therapies, I was very successful in treating most people for pain and other issues that Western medicine couldn’t improve.  Yet, there were always a few patients, usually with the diagnosis of fibromyalgia, whose improvements were short-lasting.  These patients never seemed to “hold” their improvements long term.  It was frustrating for them and for me.

Finally years later…the answer!  This discovery has literally revolutionized how I evaluate and treat every new patient who walks into my office. 

The patients who could not heal had one thing in common: they weren’t brain balanced.   In Chinese medicine terms, brain balance is the balance of Yin and Yang energy in the nervous system. The energy in the nervous system is responsible for communication to other organs and systems in the body.  If every one of the twelve principle acupuncture meridians were balanced, it also means that the nervous system is balanced.  A balanced nervous system makes healing possible. In fact it is critical.

I use the term “brain balance” to mean nervous system balance.  It is a state whereby the right and left hemispheres of our brains are balanced and communicating with each other, neither side being “dominant” in function.  Brain balance is also a state where the stress and relaxation responses of the body are appropriately regulated and balanced. 

This is probably the most important point I’m going to share with you in this book: in order to heal chronic pain, restoring brain balance is absolutely the single most important thing we need to do.  Healing cannot, and I repeat, cannot occur when the brain balance is short-circuited!  If you don’t remember anything else from this book, please remember this one thing.  I don’t care how many acupuncture treatments people receive, how many chiropractors they see, or how many herbal remedies they take.  If they are not brain balanced, they will find that treatments will rarely work long term.  They might feel better temporarily, but they won’t heal.  Guaranteed.

I know that is pretty strong language, but I can’t emphasize enough the importance of this one pre-requisite to healing.  Now, are you brain balanced?  If nothing you’ve tried to relieve your pain has worked thus far, you probably aren’t.  In Chapter 6, I’ll be teaching you how to recognize brain imbalance and how to rectify it in yourself once discovered.  Correcting the imbalance is relatively simple and straight-forward when minimizing the controllable risk factors. 

The reason that ancient techniques like acupuncture have not been as effective at rebalancing the nervous system as in the past is because of our modern lifestyle.  Acupuncture was “invented” long before mercury-laden vaccinations, computers, cellular phones and food additives ever existed.  It is no wonder why we need to use complementary energy tools to counter the negative effects of our modern lifestyle.

The bottom line is this: energy depletion and energy imbalance (including brain imbalance) is responsible for the development of chronic illnesses including chronic pain. By managing your energy and rebalancing your imbalances, you’ll be well on your way to healing your pain!

 

Chapter Summary

         Energy depletion and/or imbalance and blockages are the cause of chronic pain and illness from an Eastern perspective
         Energy depletion is common and is caused by long-term stress
         Brain balance whereby the right and left sides of the brain are communicating well with each other, is crucial for healing
         Brain imbalance blocks the healing response of the body and could be why you are still experiencing pain
         Even acupuncture cannot rebalance severe brain imbalance that is caused by modern living which is why we require complementary energy therapies