The Simple Solution, Part 1: Healing

Part One: Healing

Most sickness is caused by fear and lack of awareness. Since fear is largely fear of the unknown – including death, the future and the dark – not-knowing engenders fear. Fear of emotions that, if acknowledged and placed in their proper context, would liberate. Fear of symptoms that, if ignored, would most likely pass (in cases of TMS). Where fear is not an obvious problem, sufferers are usually depressed and pessimistic about their health, often due to an underlying fear of disappointment, should they fail to heal. When misapplied, pessimism, skepticism and cynicism are simply defences against fear; anxiety disguised as sophistication. Typically, deeper emotions are repressed or suppressed by worrying about symptoms, which exacerbates those symptoms. In other words, the emotions are not felt or considered because the sufferer’s attention is riveted on her new ailment instead. The more emotions are buried, the more they are expressed through bodily and psychological symptoms. When the prognosis is dire, the patient’s fear and pessimism are seemingly confirmed by an authority figure. Things get even worse. Restrictions such as avoiding bending, running and eating gluten and rituals like icepacks, stretches and painkillers are adopted as a result of the fear and the underlying misconception that the body is ‘broken’ and needs to be ‘fixed’ via some physical modality. These rituals typically provide temporary relief, that is largely attributable to the placebo effect. Symptoms may shift. But overall, the condition continues to degenerate. By this point, the sufferer’s life has been severely curtailed.

Note that this series of unfortunate events all began with misperception. The cure for misunderstanding is knowledge. The unknown is not feared as much when it is known. Knowledge of TMS reduces fear, because if you know you have a benign syndrome that can be healed and you know there is nothing structurally wrong with you, or you have a structural abnormality that is not causing symptoms, then there is nothing to be afraid of. Lessened fear diminishes symptoms. Feeling better as a result of this new understanding, the sufferer is emboldened to resume normal activities like bending, walking and running. She is able to wean herself off the icepacks, pain medications and other rituals. Her condition improves still further. Full healing typically occurs when sufferers lose interest in symptoms. When they are too busy living their lives to care anymore.

The thousands of people Dr. Sarno cured by telling them to cease ALL interventions such as strengthening exercises, acknowledge that their symptoms were caused by unpleasant unconscious emotions and resume normal activities are living proof that his ‘knowledge therapy’ works. The knowledge that healed them is in large part contained in this book. Understand how something began and you understand how to end it. But the knowledge must not only be understood to be effective; it must be accepted as applicable to one’s own situation. That is why accepting or rejecting Sarno’s diagnosis of TMS was the main factor that determined whether his referrals would recover or not. Seldom have the consequences of failing to listen been so costly. Nevertheless, most of the good doctor’s referrals did not listen. Why? The unconscious itself is a stumbling block for many. They aren’t aware of it, so they don’t think it exists, or have no idea what is in it. It is also common to be deeply ashamed of socially undesirable emotions, which keeps them bottled up. Would you rather have emotional pain, or physical pain? Another obstacle is that TMS, by demonstrating the power of the mind over matter, doesn’t fit the prevailing materialistic paradigm in our society, so people reject it as inconsistent with everything else they have been taught. But the truth is, you don’t need to understand or believe in psychoanalytic concepts like the unconscious and repression, or depart from the dominant scientific worldview, to understand that stress, fear and negative expectations are bad for your health.

It is a commonly accepted fact in mainstream medicine that stress plays a major role in most chronic illnesses. Indeed, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study^[i] demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of ACE’s (early life stressors including abuse, parental substance abuse and abandonment) and the chances of developing a plethora of conditions, ranging from mental disorders like addiction and depression, to physical illnesses such as autoimmune diseases, ischemic heart disease and cancer. The recent Boulder back pain study testing pain reprocessing therapy – a mindbody method intended to reduce patients’ fear of pain – versus a control group given placebos, found that 66% of chronic pain patients were pain free or almost pain free after four weeks of treatment.^[ii] Dr. Howard Schubiner and colleagues have demonstrated that large percentages of patients suffering from conditions like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Fibromyalgia also respond well to mindbody treatments, including Emotional Awareness and Expression therapy.^[iii] It is a well-documented fact that some people with multiple personality disorder have one personality with allergies and other medical issues which are totally absent in their alter egos.^[iv] There are numerous studies demonstrating that significant percentages of individuals with common spinal abnormalities like herniated discs^[v]and osteoarthritis^[vi] have no pain or mobility issues, indicating that these ‘normal abnormalities’ are not the real causes of the pain; the problem is actually psychosomatic in nature.^[vii] But I don’t need to cite empirical studies to prove these points. I applaud the work of the researchers cited above, since these kinds of empirical studies are essential for TMS/mindbody medicine to become part of conventional clinical practice (as it inevitably will in the fullness of time), but you should trust your own experience more than what any scientist has found, what the media say or don’t say about what scientists have discovered or, for that matter, what an author like me writes in his book. Then, as Eckhart Tolle says, you ‘will be your own proof’.^[viii] I am not asking you to believe in anything you cannot test against your own intuition and experiences.

So, reflect on your experiences. Did your symptoms begin or worsen during a stressful period, or a period of relative inactivity?^[ix] My mindbody symptoms began due to school-related stress, worsened enormously following the diagnosis and death of my father, and degenerated still further during a period of unemployed stagnation. On average, does fear make your mental and physical symptoms better? Does it make any of your problems better, for that matter? For me, the answer to these questions was a clear no. Almost all of the sufferers I know have agreed with me that fear and negative expectations tend to be associated with an increase in symptoms. In a nutshell, the more they worry, the worse they get.

Interestingly, most of the people I have spoken to about TMS report that their symptoms worsened following their diagnosis. Why should this be so? Norman Cousins stated that everyone who goes to the doctor has two diseases. The first is the one that is diagnosed. The second is ‘panic’.^[x] I say that whenever a patient is diagnosed, there are actually two diagnoses that are made. The first is the one the doctor gives you, the second is the one you give yourself. For me, self-diagnosis was crucial. The same goes for prognoses. Being diagnosed, when the prognosis is bad or incurable, creates significant fear and negative expectations inside the patient – provided, of course, the diagnosis and prognosis are believed. It is nonetheless recommended that you get diagnosed to rule out any serious conditions, because there are many cases where swifter diagnosis and treatment could have saved the patient’s life or prevented unnecessary suffering.

But when I was provisionally diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis, Celiac disease and Crohn’s disease – autoimmune conditions considered to be incurable – I immediately felt much worse. I also worried a lot more about my health, after some initial relief that I now ‘understood’ what was wrong with me. My dad’s health took a nosedive following his diagnosis with Motor Neurone Disease (ALS). Changing my self-diagnosis from incurable autoimmune disease to curable TMS was pivotal in my recovery; it turned a mountain into a series of molehills. Fear diminished, confidence increased – and symptoms improved.

The book A Course in Miracles states that ‘all healing is the release from fear’.^[xi] Indeed, Doctor John Sarno knew all about the deleterious effects of fear. He explained that, ‘In the long run, fear and the preoccupation with physical restrictions are more effective as a psychological defense than pain.’^[xii] Jesus Christ said, ‘who of you by worrying can add one day to your life?’^[xiii] Anita Moorjani fully recovered from cancer her doctors considered to be terminal, with minimal medical interventions, that she believes didn’t help at all. She attributed her illness to fear of cancer, and her recovery to ‘living fearlessly.’^[xiv] Most mindbody practitioners, regardless of whether they suggest ignoring pain or accepting it, aim to reduce fear of symptoms. My severe illness, which saw me wheelchair-bound in agony and starved for months, was definitely exacerbated by fear. Fear of my grief, fear of my anger (which were repressed). Fear of food, which made me intolerant to almost every food. Fear of bending, which hurt like hell. Fear of walking too far, or too fast, which made my back and hips spasm. Above all, fear of not being able to heal – which made me sick, long-term.

It is usually more helpful to see fear as a distraction like pain than an unconscious content worthy of prolonged investigation in its own right, though there are exceptions. For example, after volunteering for the Air Corps in the Second World War, Doctor Sarno experienced ‘giant hives’ that were attributed to food allergies; consciously he wanted to ‘fight the Nazi’s’, but unconsciously he was understandably afraid of being wounded or killed, and this manifested via a mindbody process.^[xv] The symptoms resolved when he was reassigned to the Medical Department.

Sarno’s ‘food allergies’ are far from unique. The deceiver loves to blame arbitrary environmental stimuli for symptoms, making false associations and constructing dubious post-hoc explanations about what caused the issue in an attempt to set up conditioned responses. I associated dairy with explosive diarrhea, brain fog and bodily pains, but I wasn’t really allergic to food: I was allergic to the truth of my emotions. Chronic symptom onset can be associated with food, mould, injury or almost any other stimulus – but in most cases, these are merely pretexts used by the deceiver to create fear of the environment. The true causes are unawareness, conditioned negative expectations and unconscious emotionality. Inconsistencies in these ‘the environment (or body) caused my symptom’ hypotheses can be found pretty easily. For example, there may have been a time when you ate gluten without any reaction, even after the onset of perceived food intolerances. Indeed, Doctor Schubiner clarifies that the vast majority of so-called ‘allergies’ are actually conditioned responses, not ‘direct effects of the foods themselves’. Typically, nothing shows up on allergen tests.^[xvi] It is nonetheless a good idea to rule out a genuine allergy via medical testing before embarking on mindbody therapy, where feasible.

Needless to say, our constant bombardment with advertisements for pharmaceuticals doesn’t help the situation. As Steve Ozanich has observed, pain is catching. The vector is fear-inducing information, absorbed through the various screens that dominate the mise-en-scene of modern life.^[xvii] This explains why symptoms and conditions come and go like fads. As Sarno observed, ulcers were all the rage 100 years ago.^[xviii] Then came carpal tunnel syndrome and back pain. Now perceived food intolerances are the psychosomatic ailment du jour and ulcers are relatively uncommon. Does the structure of the human body shift every few decades, or is TMS a more likely explanation of these capricious symptom trends? Indeed, our materialistic culture’s fearful assumptions about health are largely to blame for rising rates of mindbody disorders.

Know that fear is not your friend. It is your enemy. It is causing the very problems it is ‘intended’ to protect you from. The lie of fear is, listen to me, or something terrible will happen. Fear whispers this in your ear, while secretly creating the very thing you dread. Why? Fear is a product of the deceptive egoic mind. The ego wants above all to get your attention so that you do not have to feel unconscious emotions and it can continue to survive in its present form. What better way to get people’s attention than fear? Ask Niccolò Machiavelli, or any tyrant: fear is the surest way to gain and maintain control.^[xix]

The ego loves limitations because it’s a form, and all forms have limits (or they would be formless). You have an identity as this, and not that. That is form, structure, outline. The ego wants to keep your mental vision away from the unconscious and the spirit, because if you were to make the unconscious conscious, the ego’s form would have to change – a kind of ‘little death’ and rebirth. That is, your self-image would necessarily alter to include traits, ideas, desires and emotions that were blocked or rejected because they are not consistent with who you think you are, and who society thinks you ought to be. This self-censorship occurs more or less automatically and unconsciously. The whole process is outside of your awareness, so you can hardly be blamed for it. Indeed, repression is a human universal, an inherent aspect of the normal psyche, so there is nothing ‘different’ about you if you have buried feelings. Even when people consciously choose to suppress a feeling, they are usually not fully aware of the consequences of doing so (otherwise they probably wouldn’t do it). The problem with this tendency to repress is encapsulated by Shakespeare: ‘There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’^[xx] By being denied, these excluded emotions, ideas and urges do not magically disappear. They just manifest differently. Whether that be as anxiety, addiction, depression – or through the body as tiredness, indigestion, pain and other physical symptoms.

What do we do with all this fear? Whenever I became afraid during my recovery, I used logic and evidence to argue the deceiver into submission. Once I had convinced myself, whenever the fears surfaced I thought ‘this is bullshit’ and ignored the fear and symptoms. I was able to do this because I knew the fear-voice in my head was fueling the problem. So I ‘othered’ it by calling it ‘the deceiver’. That is, I detached myself from the fear. I regarded it with utter contempt and was totally dismissive of it. This gave me the courage I needed to gradually build back up to normal functioning. Of course, fear cannot always be ignored. A good level of TMS knowledge and confidence are prerequisites for the successful resumption of normal physical activities. If you are not yet assured that fear of mindbody symptoms is misplaced, it may help to articulate the fear and refute it yourself with reference to the literature, your own symptom history or, failing that, seek out a mindbody expert who can answer your questions.^[xxi] Beware though, the deceiver will have you asking endless questions, if you let it.

Psychologist Carl Jung is reputed to have written, ‘where there is a fear of falling, the only safety consists in jumping!’ In other words, we should not shrink from what we are afraid of. Within reason, we should do, think or say it. That’s not true in all cases, of course. Let’s be sensible here. But going toward the fear was exactly what I did in order to heal. I ate ice cream, chocolate, cheese, pizza and bread. I bent over, touched my toes, did pushups and climbed mountains. All things I used to be terrified of. Things that would have disabled or hospitalized me at one time or another. And it worked. I made a full recovery by calling bullshit on fear. Of course, the deceiver didn’t go down without a fight. When I started running for the first time in years, I got a twinge in my hip. I ran faster and the pain disappeared. I was able to do this by knowing fear was bullshit, thanks to Dr. Sarno’s information. Indeed, the good doctor knew that resuming normal activities was absolutely essential for recovery from psychosomatic symptoms.^[xxii] This should be obvious. After all, if there are still things you can’t do, or special activities you must do in order to feel okay, then technically speaking, you are not fully recovered. And of course, resuming normal activities involves doing the very things you are afraid of, or that you have been avoiding because of the symptom. Naturally, all of this should only be done once serious conditions have been ruled out by your doctors, so there is no risk of doing yourself a mischief or ignoring a serious issue in need of urgent medical attention. It is also worth reiterating that I had to gradually build up to full functioning over a period of months.

Of course, there are certain situations in which fear is unavoidable. If a large dog is attacking you, for instance, chances are you will be afraid, no matter how awakened you are. But even in emergencies, fear is often unhelpful: everyone knows dogs become aggressive in the presence of fear. Well, people are like that too, insofar as they are more dangerous the more they are feared. So are ‘situations’ that may become the subject of a phobia, like exposure to heights, confined spaces and high-speed driving. Again, these hypotheses are not yet proven scientifically due to current materialistic empirical biases, methodological difficulties and lack of monetary incentives for the primary financiers of research to undertake such studies, so for now at least, you will have to test the truth of them against the record of your own life.

Why is fear punished so mercilessly? Because it’s wrong. Not so much morally wrong, as factually wrong – an honest mistake. We think it will help us, but it never does, expect perhaps in rare emergencies. God or (if you prefer) the universe, is trying to correct your errors by making you suffer because of your fear. Corporeal life is all about learning and development of the soul. Unfortunately, suffering is the only way most humans learn.

In short, Sarno’s message is that lack of awareness and fear cause symptoms. Knowledge eliminates fear and symptoms. Every mindbody ailment is healed when it is no longer feared thanks to a proper awareness of what is really happening in the mind and body. When you fully understand what I have just told you, then you will no longer be afraid, because you will know that when it comes to psychosomatic ailments, there is ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’.^[xxiii] Now, in my experience and that of Dr. Sarno, this awareness is usually sufficient for fear to be handled and gradually phased out by returning to normal functioning (most of Sarno’s patients healed in this way, without recourse to other methods). If it is not, then there are alternative techniques.

The Deceiver and the Enlightener

I have revised the deceiver and enlightener section from The Mind Solution: Healing TMS Pain with Doctor Sarno, because it was probably the part that most resonated with readers. It describes the day-to-day ‘headgame’ I used to frame and beat TMS:

Two inner voices battle for control of every mind, every soul: the deceiver and the enlightener. They are polar opposites, yet paradoxically interrelated. The deceiver distracts from the truth, the enlightener and the unconscious (including the shadow) via pain, symptoms of various kinds, worries, doubts, fear and temptations. If the deceiver cannot argue away the truth, it will try and simply make you forget it.

Anyone seeking a biological substrate for the deceiver would be best advised to look at the neocortex and the left hemisphere of the brain, which mindbody doctors and Iain McGilchrist respectively associate with the ego.^[xxiv] The amygdala is also heavily involved in producing fear, one of the hallmarks of the deceiver. The unconscious mind is commonly linked with the limbic system and the autonomic nervous system. The ANS is one of the deceiver’s favourite mechanisms for causing mischief. McGilchrist associates intuition – the enlightener’s primary means of communication – with the right side of the brain. For more anatomical detail, readers are referred to his work.

The deceiver strives to shackle us to matter and to time. The deceiver is the repressing aspect of the ego, the dividing, separating principle bound up with the I, the proverbial, ‘I don’t want to hear it’ that can’t handle the truth. The deceiver can be thought of as a little devil on your shoulder; it is not for nothing that the devil is called the father of lies. Those lies become real, if you believe them.

By contrast, the enlightener is more spiritual, more concerned with the formless, intangible aspects of life. As such, he is less popular than the deceiver, who is so ubiquitous in today’s world that many people mistake his voice for themselves, in a process Jung would call ‘archetypal possession.’ Archetypal possession can be shaken off merely by realizing what has occurred. There is much truth in the famous quote: ‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.’^[xxv] To cast out a demon, therefore, you know it for what it is when it appears. Before you are able to simply dismiss a thought or feeling as the deceiver’s shenanigans, however, you may need to debate ‘the accuser’ for a while and produce evidence against him in the courtroom of your mind.

The enlightener has some similarities with Jung’s wise old man/spirit archetype but can also be conceived of as the higher unconscious, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Logos, God, or a guardian angel. His role is to guide the soul toward enlightenment, by drip-feeding self-knowledge and truths to the conscious mind.

The deceiver and enlightener can also be thought of as having distinct radio frequencies. Tune out of the deceiver frequency and into the enlightener’s frequency. The enlightener’s voice is faint at first, but the more you listen, the louder it gets, and the easier it becomes to ignore the deceiver’s constant stream of negative chatter and sensations. Likewise, the more you listen to the deceiver, the harder it becomes to hear the enlightener. It is a matter of striving, of bargaining, of asking for one voice to predominate over the other. Knowledge, self-observation and experience of the archetypes also helps.

It is perfectly possible to hold written dialogues with any archetype, though this may be difficult for beginners who have yet to clear their minds. Jung recommended this practice to some of his patients, and Dr. Schubiner suggests a similar technique as part of his expressive writing therapy (writing to God, spiritual leaders and symptoms, to figure out how to dispel pain).^[xxvi] The enlightener can be accessed by automatic writing: that is, writing fast and ‘from the hip’, without thinking at all. The Word arises from a place beyond mind.

How do you know which voice is deceiving and which one is enlightening? Well, judge a tree by its fruits. The deceiver’s ideas will make you afraid, miserable, upset or uneasy. The enlightener’s utterances or presence will generally have a positive, calming or enthusing effect. If a consciously held idea, belief or attitude is making you miserable and causing problems in your life, try the opposite attitude on for size. Typically, you will feel better. The ability to change one’s mind is a hugely underrated skill. That which you dismiss is your salvation! Today’s ‘rejected stone’ is tomorrow’s ‘cornerstone’.^[xxvii]

An example from my own experience might help you to get a sense of how these archetypes work in practice. When I had a twinge, the part of me that thought, ‘Irreversible damage has been done to the spine. I’ll never recover, I have an incurable degenerative condition,’ was obviously the deceiver. ‘It’s TMS and will pass,’ was the enlightener’s firm rebuttal. Choosing the enlightener’s interpretation led to a decrease in my symptoms.

Symptoms and problems are distractions sent from the deceiver, but they can also be conceptualised as signals from the enlightener that something is awry in our lives, that it is time to change course or look within. Lurking beneath the fear and pain is the insight that can destroy the fear and pain. It is not necessary to psychoanalyze every last little mindbody twinge, however, which is why I prefer to frame symptoms as distractions.

It is impossible to serve two masters. That is no less true today than it was in the time of Christ. We all must choose the deceiver or the enlightener, Lies or Truth.

This mental framework has helped not only my health problems, but also my spiritual journey; the deceiver opposes truth in general, especially spiritual truth. Framing external troubles as ‘distractions’, withdrawing attention from them and continuing to act regardless, without too much planning or obsession about the strictly physical means by which problems are to be solved, is a good way to approach life’s obstacles. Generally, like Neville Goddard, I have found that the more attention I give to any problem, the worse it gets.^[xxviii] This is because the mind controls matter (more on this later).

Try-Hard With A Vengeance

Trying to heal is ultimately driven by fear. Fear that you won’t recover. Fear that you will get worse, unless you do x, y or z. When x, y and z are tried, more often than not the problem remains intractable, shifts to another location, or degenerates further. We all know someone with back pain who had surgery. The surgery was a success. The pain shifted to the right knee. Steroid injection. Then the left knee played up. Opioid medication. Then the sufferer got frozen shoulder. Physiotherapy, and a positive prognosis from the doctor. Frozen shoulder magically ‘melted’ following some ‘strengthening exercises’ as predicted by the ‘sagely’ medico, whose authority and wisdom were ‘confirmed’ (via the power of the sufferer’s beliefs – aka the placebo effect). Then migraines picked up the slack. And on and on it goes. Sarno called it the symptom imperative. I call it the hamster wheel to hell. So much frenetic activity, and you never get anywhere, because the root causes of the problem remain unknown. It’s like Sisyphus, the legendary Ancient Greek tyrant who was forced to repeatedly push a boulder to the top of a hill in Tartarus, only for it to come rolling back down again, for all eternity. My advice to Sisyphus would be to give up. The endless frustrating struggle to get up the incline is the punishment. Sometimes, the solution to all of this wasted effort is to stop trying. Not in a defeatist, I give up, kind of way. In a, ‘Now I have the right information, I’m going to get back to normal without further fear-driven efforts,’ kind of way. In other words, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you have a mild to moderate medically confirmed mindbody issue, you’re not broken, so don’t fix yourself, because there’s nothing to fix. It’s as simple as that.

I Tried That and it Didn’t Work

Only, for some people, it takes a little more effort to get to that place of certain knowledge. You know you are in this group if you have tried Sarno’s knowledge therapy, resuming normal activities and ‘not trying’ and they haven’t gotten you very far. Sarno organized his TMS patients in a similar way. Some people are not convinced, and unable to stop worrying, until they actually do something, whether that be somatic tracking,^[xxix] journaling or ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy) and feel better from using one of these psychologically oriented methods. When it comes to TMS, these methods are vastly superior to physical healing modalities like special diets, herbs, stretches or icepacks, because when sufferers obtain symptom relief from them, it reinforces the truth: that the illness is psychosomatic and reversible. When fear and pessimism are resistant to information alone, it is sometimes necessary to uncover the feelings the fear and symptoms are distracting you from, in order to defeat the purpose of the decoy and thereby alleviate the anxiety. This was definitely the case for me, on that walk with my mum and the first few breakthrough journaling sessions. From then on, I knew Sarno was right, there was nothing to fear, and victory was inevitable. The psychological methods are best envisioned as different means of attaining this level of certain knowledge and therefore healing, not as ends in themselves. That means it is generally preferable to avoid turning the method into a strict regimen and becoming overdependent on it to feel okay. If however you are making good progress with a routine, as I did, then I’m not going to tell you to stop cold turkey. Just bear in mind that the ultimate goal should be to gradually wean yourself off of mindbody methods. The reason for this is simple: technically, full healing has not occurred until all interventions have ceased. When the repair job is done, you put your tools down. Bear in mind that belief is an active ingredient in the methods you use, since they do not work very well if the sufferer has no confidence in the mindbody link. If you allow yourself to become overdependent on modalities, as I did, nocebo effects can occur if you miss a meditation, visualization or journaling session. The effect is to prolong the recovery and make it seem more complicated than it really is.

Better Out Than In

If you fall into the group that needs a method (because knowledge therapy didn’t work) you might want to journal. Now, when most people journal, they don’t break down their own defence mechanisms – egoic tactics to keep emotions repressed – with total efficiency. This is because, as individuals identified with ego, they are the ones doing the defending. They go to the surface events and emotions – typically current work or domestic stress – not the deeper layers. This type of journaling at least has the virtue of being quite easy. It works sometimes, especially when symptoms and repression are on the milder end of the spectrum, or current stressors threaten to evoke an earlier trauma. For example, if you ask someone out on a date and they say no, symptoms could be triggered by this relatively minor setback because you were abandoned by your parents as a child, and your rejection complex has been reactivated. You could try journaling about current minor and moderate stressors first, with a focus on the raw facts of what is going on (e.g. my boss dislikes me) and any emotions you feel. But since mindbody work is all about tapping into the emotions you don’t consciously feel, you may want to try writing angrily about these stressors. Always look for the anger and other ‘big’ unpleasant emotions like grief, guilt and shame. Sarno’s big idea was that repressed anger causes pain.^[xxx] He was absolutely right. Anger is especially liable to repression, because the social consequences of expressing and acting on it are dire. Most of us learned to suppress anger in childhood after our parents punished us – and our peers mocked us – for throwing tantrums. But I am not advocating a public meltdown; these emotions can be felt and expressed in private, where they are socially harmless. Write angrily even if you don’t feel it; it’s all about knowing the emotions are there, so feeling is good (preferable) but not essential to get an improvement in symptoms. And expressing often precipitates the release of the underlying emotions. If it doesn’t, don’t worry. I didn’t always feel my emotions while journaling, but it worked anyway. Just remember to destroy your journal pages when you’re done, especially if you’re writing angrily about people you live with! Verbally expressing emotions in like manner to a trusted friend or family member may also help, though it comes with the added risk of being misunderstood.

Go Deep or Go Home

Now, the above techniques have worked for a lot of people who need a method. But if they don’t work, the next line of attack is to go to the deeper emotions. Unless something truly awful is happening to you right now, chances are, the worst events in your life will have occurred in your past. The worst life events obviously generate the most emotions, which all experts in the field identify as causes of mindbody syndrome. So it’s simply a matter of mathematical probabilities: the present moment versus the decades of suffering in the past. Where do you think the most negative emotions are likely to be found? The kind of things we’re talking about in these difficult cases are usually traumas like emotional, physical or sexual abuse, humiliation, caring for a vulnerable person, bereavements, abandonments, divorces and other serious rejections from loved ones, as well as misdeeds like affairs that generate a lot of unconscious guilt.^[xxxi] Admittedly, it is not the severity of a life event per se that generates mindbody symptoms, but the degree to which the associated emotions are repressed. It is the unfelt emotions, the things nobody wants to talk about, that do the damage. The health outcome of a stressful occurrence is determined not by the event itself, but by whether or not we lose ourselves in the ensuing distractions. That is why it is typically unnecessary to make radical life changes – like getting divorced or changing your job – to dispel symptoms. And it is the deepest emotions pertaining to the worst events that are more likely to be repressed, because they are uglier, more overwhelming and more threatening to the ego than merely being peeved at your boss for criticizing you at work. The solution in many of these more intractable cases is to access those repressed emotions, to express them. If grief is the culprit, you can write ‘I miss_____[insert name here] terribly. I feel terrible grief for this loss.’ Anger can be expressed with sentences like ‘I am furious at so and so for such and such. If he were here in front of me now, and there were no consequences (because this is a fantasy), I would say to him, “You are an asshole!” I would punch him in the face.’ Understand that I am not encouraging actual violence or verbal abuse in any way. This is merely a means of privately using the imagination to express emotions for healing purposes. It sounds weird, but in a high percentage of cases, it works. Science and clinical practice bear this out.^[xxxii] Weird is simply what ‘normal’ people call that which they do not understand (and do not want to understand). What you think of as weird in others is what you cannot accept in yourself via the process of projection, a psychoanalytic term for the pot calling the kettle black. Being furious at others does not necessarily mean you are as bad as them, but it may indicate a degree of unseen (shadow) similarity that, if repressed, could cause psychological or mindbody issues.^[xxxiii] This type of work is similar to Nicole Sachs’ journalspeak. It is a shortcut to the insights gained through ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy) – created by Dr. Habib Davanloo and favoured by John Sarno’s psychiatrists – that is intended to rapidly break down defense mechanisms. Very often, emotional expression makes it easier to ignore the fear-voice in your head, because you have seen through the decoy tactics of the ego. If saying or writing a sentence gives you a feeling of relief, you’re on the right track. If it doesn’t, you may want to look at other life events and emotions or bolster your understanding of and confidence in the mindbody link via increased exposure to the information. This is the ‘body is a truth detector’ method outlined in my previous book, The Mind Solution: Healing TMS Pain with Doctor Sarno and it was instrumental in my recovery. Sometimes, emotional awareness may not improve symptoms because the emotion is incompatible with your self-image and arouses guilt. Indeed, anger is often anger-guilt, because rage is generally considered to be shameful and taboo.^[xxxiv] In these cases, it may help to acknowledge the guilt, accept the anger and come to terms with the fact that almost everyone has these buried feelings. Making ugly emotions conscious is nothing to be ashamed of; on the contrary, it is an achievement to be proud of, a major leap forward in one’s psycho-spiritual evolution. Repression is weakness; awareness is strength. If the emotional cause is not obvious after a reasonable amount of effort, and no relief has been obtained, stop. You’re overthinking it, searching for a mythical holy grail that may never be found no matter how hard you look. It is a strategy from the deceiver to keep recovery just out of reach. In these instances, fear is not repressing deeper emotions, it is keeping the problem alive by making you preoccupied with trying to solve it. Don’t worry, in-depth emotional work is not strictly necessary for recovery in most cases (this is what Dr. Sarno found, anyway) and searching for the causative emotion can be counterproductive if it becomes frantic and excessive.

Now, when you feel better because of mindbody work, make note of it. Use the symptom relief as evidence against yourself when you have doubts in the future. Don’t forget! So many people forget, even when the act of expression has alleviated or totally banished all symptoms. Then because of this forgetting – or the underlying need to forget/repress – symptoms return. When the ego cannot debunk an idea with its favorite helper – false, overly critical, pessimistic ‘logic’ – it defaults to simply erasing the memory. Indeed, Freud observed that forgetting was essentially repression in his seminal tome, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In such cases, it may help to go Memento by writing ‘I said this and felt so much better’. Or remove the need for the repression, which is always a fixed identity unamenable to change. The physical ‘rigidity’ of many back-pain sufferers is usually a symbol of their psychological rigidity (it certainly was for me). When psychological flexibility comes in, physical spryness often returns. If an ailment is regarded as a symbol of conflict, and properly decoded, it ceases to be a distraction and instead becomes a helpful message from the unconscious. Indeed, our entire outer worlds are full of distractions from, and clues about, our inner worlds. But I do not need to decode every twinge I get; ignoring pain usually works for me.

Forgiveness

Knowing who you are angry at (including yourself), what they did that made you so angry, and how angry you are is often enough to smash TMS even for those who need a method, but it is not enough to actually purge the anger and finally be free of it. For that, forgiveness is required. As Doctor Schubiner clarifies, forgiveness doesn’t mean you condone what the other person did.^[xxxv] Nor does it mean you need to have anything further to do with them. It isn’t really about the other person at all. It is about letting go of the anger that is destroying you from within, for your own benefit and increasing your sovereignty by no longer being controlled by conscious or unconscious rage. Staying angry at someone gives them power over you; forgiving them takes the power back. Pain is a distraction from repressed anger, but anger itself, when made conscious, is a distraction from deeper truths that will remain buried in the unconscious until true forgiveness occurs.

Indeed, forgiveness is a necessary precondition for oneness, because it is a form of acceptance. To reject someone or something they did is to create an opposition, and oppositions presuppose more than one entity: a subject and an object. They create resistance and inner conflict, even if this turmoil is repressed. Having an enemy strengthens your sense of identity as a distinct personality who is this, but not that.^[xxxvi] The more separateness, the more suffering. That is why Christ said that those who forgive shall be forgiven and ‘judge not, lest ye be judged.’^[xxxvii] Whoever you think your enemy is, the divisive human ego is the real ‘enemy’,^[xxxviii] wherever it appears; it plays us off against each other to reinforce the illusion of separateness, conceal its own malignity and perpetuate its own existence. By forgiving, you weaken the ego and take a giant leap towards wholeness. You must slay the dragon to get the gold.

The Power of Decision, Belief and Will

There are other techniques outside the conventional mindbody repertoire for ‘trouble healers’ unresponsive to information alone, and even for those going down the informational route who want to speed up the process. I wouldn’t really call them methods, since there’s not much activity involved. The first thing I did that was of any use in my healing journey was very simple. I decided I would recover. I couldn’t accept the alternatives; there was too much constant suffering notto recover and no other conceivable way out, because I responded so terribly to conventional medicine.

Deciding to recover was the easiest and hardest thing I did on my healing journey. Of course, it led to the divine bargain. I asked and I received – but before I asked, I had to decide to ask. You believe in things you don’t know exist. You want things you don’t have (and by wanting them, you tell yourself you don’t have them).^[xxxix] You choose things you already have or know you can get.

My decision was not so much a decision to impose an outcome on an unwilling body; it was more like I had to accept that I was always going to recover – that it was my fate. I just needed to stop resisting destiny, and cease tormenting myself with pointless doubt. Anyone who is fated to recover, need only recognize that fact to dispel their pessimism. The moment of recognition brings a wry smile and peace of mind; such feelings generally accompany the acknowledgement of important truths.

The more you know you have the power to decide, the easier the decision is to make. You must come to understand that our external world is dictated by our projected thoughts and emotions. Other people reflect back to us our beliefs about ourselves, and our own repressed tendencies. For example, honest, blunt individuals are often tricked by slippery liars. Hence the idea that whatever you hold in mind, will tend to manifest in the world. Broadly speaking, it is a correct one. But in traditional positive thinking, it is the conscious mind that is depicted as the creator. In reality, the unconscious mind is more often determinative; conscious thoughts primarily have attractive force insofar as the unconscious is programmed by the ego and its deep expectations. A lot of positive thinking fails because it is outweighed by a mountain of unconscious negativity arising from prior experiences.^[xl] The ego can override unconscious processes if the command is stern enough.

The creative power of the mind is frequently justified with reference to the quantum energy field, a recognized phenomenon in physics, a kind of ‘ether’ that connects all things and enables them to influence each other in strange ways. Quantum mechanics has demonstrated numerous times that the mere act of observing or measuring affects the outcome of experiments. The implication being, the mind of the observer influences the particles. Further evidence for the power of the mind over matter can be found in the distant healing literature – in which visualized intentions from healers in relaxed states significantly improved health outcomes for AIDS patients^[xli] – and the evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP) furnished by Russel Targ and Hal Puthoff. Indeed, ESP – the ability to perceive beyond the five senses, using the psychic faculties of the mind alone – was proven in the Cold War by SRI (Stanford Research Institute) international’s CIA funded studies. The chances of these results being coincidence have been calculated at ‘less than one in a billion.’^[xlii] Again, the most convincing evidence will come from your own experience; watch how fears and negative expectations have tended to manifest in your world. Notice how dreams^[xliii] and synchronicities relate to your life or anticipate future events.^[xliv]

Perhaps the most convincing personal evidence that reality is mentally generated (or at least psychologically influenced), are the recurring patterns in the lives of individuals and families. Look at any biography closely enough and you will see these intergenerational cycles, which affect individuals, families, nations and humanity as a whole. A boy was beaten by his alcoholic father. He grew up, developed a drinking problem, had a son and beat him mercilessly. A girl’s parents were divorced; she fell in love and suffered a bad breakup. Then she married a man who reminded her of her first love. He cheated on her: they divorced. Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, conquered most of Europe, invaded Russia, was defeated and exiled on the island of Elba. He escaped, conquered France, was defeated and exiled again, this time on the island of St Helena. His nephew Louis Napoleon became Emperor Napoleon III, was defeated in battle, lost his crown and was exiled to England. The process is unconscious – few people consciously want to re-enact their biggest traumas. These patterns are not merely behavioral on the part of the individual; external circumstances conspire to recreate scenarios from the past. If the universe were truly materialistic, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen nearly so often as it does – the most reasonable explanation is that the mind creates reality, and the mind repeats what it knows.^[xlv]Hence the saying, ‘history repeats itself.’

Because of the creative power of the mind, limiting beliefs can cause real physical changes in the body and the external world, especially when they affect behavior (for example, you are never going to get a job if you never apply for one due to a belief you are ‘unemployable’). In short, they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Some of the more common ones are, ‘I’m unlovable,’ ‘my relationships are always terrible,’ ‘I’m incurable,’ ‘I’ll always be poor,’ and that old egoic favourite, ‘It’s hopeless.’ These beliefs are often unconscious. Even when they are constantly reinforced by the ego, you did not consciously understand that they were actually holding you back, so can hardly be blamed for what happened. Listen, when you talk to yourself. How often do you say, ‘I can’t’? It’s these ‘I can’t’ statements, and the accompanying superficial apathy, that cover a deep well of despair, frustration, fury, grief and regret.^[xlvi] Together, these factors constitute an emotional blockage that may be projected out into the world and function as a force field, magically repulsing opportunities and positive developments from you, whilst attracting more of the negative you have previously experienced. This is a pretty depressing notion, but there is a silver lining. If limiting beliefs have shaped your life for the worse, then liberating beliefs and choices have the power to change your life for the better.^[xlvii]

You can let go of negative beliefs, desires and emotions. To let go of an emotion is to feel it completely, without labelling it with words or trying to modify, alter, suppress or rationalize it in any way. Just let it come up, and accept it as it is, warts and all.^[xlviii] Eventually, when it is not impeded by the ego, the last bucket comes up and the emotional well runs dry. At that point, the blockage is removed. This is quite different from journaling, but people have enjoyed success with both methods. As with so many things, it comes down to what works for the individual in question.

In some cases, lurking beneath the limiting belief and the associated energy charge of despair and fury at others, is a degree of self-loathing and the unconscious idea, ‘I do not deserve this [to get what I want and be happy].’ This is because some people are unknowingly punishing themselves with these beliefs. Sometimes they do this because of repressed guilt, sometimes they just have low self-esteem from a lifetime of being criticized or verbally abused.

But there is a deeper reason why we believe limiting ideas (including ‘I don’t deserve this’) and struggle to discard or change them. That reason is a psychological factor I call the will. The will is usually divided, just as the self is divided. This means, whenever anyone tries to do anything, there is a conscious will to achieve the goal, and an unconscious ‘negative will’ that strives for failure.^[xlix] The stronger of the two wills can be decisive in terms of what actually happens. But negative will is not all bad. It can force us to learn and grow stronger. And when our consciously selected goals are wrong, the negative will is right to oppose them. Unconscious negative will may be experienced as the deceiver’s distractions (symptoms, fear, pessimism, even external roadblocks). Freud invented the concept of ‘resistance’ to describe the reluctance of his patients to delve into the unconscious. The resistance to a consciously held decision or desire is unavoidable, because wants are forms, and every created form engenders opposition. Create light, you get dark. Make yin, you get its twin, yang. Create an ego and you get an unconscious. This means conflict. To clarify, I know that people do not consciously want to suffer or be sick and I am not suggesting otherwise or blaming anyone. The process I am describing is unconscious, i.e. beyond awareness.

How do we overcome the deceiver and the negative will? First of all, by becoming aware of them. You cannot win a war if you do not know that your enemy exists. Then you can apply the deceiver ‘headgame’ outlined earlier in the book. As previously noted, the more you understand the mind’s power, the less resistance you encounter while trying to realize your goals, because you know that most physically oriented (the material world is generally where the ego looks for excuses) limiting beliefs, doubts, fears and complaints are just distractions, mental illusions that may become ‘real’ if you believe them, but are quite harmless when ignored. The spiritually inclined may appeal to God; when the conscious will aligns with divine will, the spirit and other immaterial entities can help the ego to overpower negative will. Bargains, divine or otherwise, can help you unconsciously feel more deserving of your goal, because you will use it for good when you have it.

Addressing unconscious blockages to success or healing may also prove helpful. This is a difficult topic, but we cannot investigate or address the causes of the obstacles, if we deny their existence. Occasionally, but far from always, ‘secondary gain’ is at play. That is, some sufferers are getting hidden unconscious benefits from their symptoms, such as not having to perform work they dislike or receiving sympathy from relatives. Naturally, most of these people are unaware of what is going on; they aren’t malingerers scheming for time off work, they are simply victims of neglected unconscious wishes. Recognizing the hidden reward and resuming normal activities is sometimes enough to pull these folks out of the mire.

Some sufferers are afraid to heal, because if they do, they think it will mean that they were in some way ‘to blame’ for their illness. You can’t be blamed for not acting on something you didn’t know. That would be as absurd as blaming medieval people for not using penicillin.

Others do not want to admit that they made a ‘mistake’ by not discovering and applying Sarno’s message sooner. There’s no shame in admitting you were wrong to pursue other modalities. This is not just a ‘perfectionists with chronic pain’ issue. Most illness is stress-related, most people in the developed world suffer and die because of such diseases, without even discovering TMS knowledge. By accepting the truth and acting on it, you do not disgrace yourself; you demonstrate that you are an exceptionally fortunate and self-aware person. The years you spent in pain were not wasted, they gave you the motivation you needed to discover an important truth about the human condition. And remember, almost everyone who ever healed the mindbody way – including most of the famous practitioners – made plenty of mistakes first. One of the things that separates the success stories from the rest is that we were able to admit that we messed up. Would you rather be ‘right’, or healthy?

Another group lack the necessary conviction to heal because they are afraid of getting their hopes up and being disappointed. I overcame this fear by realizing that I had nothing to lose. Provided serious issues (not ‘normal abnormalities’) have been ruled out by your doctor, a mindbody approach is low risk and potentially highly rewarding. Reading, a relatively benign activity, is a key part of mindbody healing. (Not everyone with TMS falls into one of the above camps, of course).

I myself am no stranger to the negative will. The deceiver resisted my intention to heal with demonic intensity. The primary means of resistance was the idea that I didn’t have the power to choose; that ‘irreversible damage’ had already been done to the spine, and that the overall condition was an ‘incurable’ autoimmune disease. These pessimistic beliefs were almost overwhelming. As my condition became intolerably bad, my will to heal outweighed all opposition, which resulted in the decision to recover, a direct command to the biological unconscious that was so forceful and resolute it was eventually obeyed. Sticking to a decision in the face of resistance, especially during your darkest hour, often yields a breakthrough. When manifesting anything, it is imperative to keep going in the teeth of opposition, as this will eventually resolve the conflict, provided the goal is well-chosen.^[l] The caduceus of Hermes and the rod of Asclepios, our symbols of magic and medicine, both depict a staff penetrating through serpents. Among other things, the rod represents the will of the magician going through the serpents of temptation and fear and mastering unconscious forces to effect a transformation.^[li] These images have survived for centuries because they capture the essence of all healing and magic.

But sometimes the situation just cannot be helped, no matter how hard you try. You know something is unchangeable only after you have tried your best to improve it and come up short. In these cases, the matter can be safely attributed to fate. Acceptance may save you the frustration of banging your head against the wall. We do not have total power over our lives at any given moment. You obviously cannot change your parents, where and when you were born, what school you attended and other factors that have shaped your personality. Free will and determinism are basically the same, in that we get what we will – even when that is the opposite of our conscious wishes. Although everything is predetermined by the will, including our decisions, that is no cause for defeatism, since you do not know for sure how things are going to turn out or if your life is destined to change for the better (so in practice, we have to act as if our will is free).^[lii] Becoming aware of the unconscious is a means of reclaiming awareness and regaining power from the archetypes, but even when you understand it, the will is not always amenable to conscious control.

Letting Go of Desire

Because desires create obstacles and inner conflict, sometimes letting go of them paradoxically results in success. To surrender a desire, write out or visualize in detail what exactly it is you want. Feel the emotions you would feel if the fantasy were really happening, right now, using the letting go technique described above. Release the desire for whatever it is you want, the fear of not getting it and any lingering frustration you may feel about having failed to achieve this particular goal in the past.^[liii] This includes letting go of the decision that you already have what you want. Even though a decision is more potent than a desire, it is hard to not want something you have decided to get. After all, why would you choose something if you didn’t want it? And like anything touched by desire, decisions engender tension. Becoming aware of the reasons why you unconsciously don’t want your desire may also prove helpful here. For example, getting rich usually involves a lot of tedious work, temptations, skullduggery and bootlicking.

Once this has been done, shift your focus to something else. You know you have let go of a desire when you have stopped thinking about the issue and are indifferent as to the outcome. When your attitude is, ‘it’s okay if I succeed, and fine if I don’t’.^[liv] To be honest – and this really contradicts the law of attraction – assuming I would definitely fail has actually worked well for me in exam situations (though not when it comes to health complaints, which seem to worsen with pessimism or ambivalence), possibly by taking the suspense out of the situation and thereby enabling me to perform better under pressure. This has led me to conclude that fear can be more of a hindrance than pessimism. Generally speaking, the less you care about an issue, the less attention you give it and the easier it becomes to deal with. Sometimes it just disappears on its own, or you realize there never was a problem. Just don’t let your indifference inhibit action, if action is actually necessary for success. Indifference and purposive action are an especially potent combination, if you can pull off the balancing act. Letting go is a good option when you are not hell bent on a particular goal, you don’t need to succeed to keep the wolf from the door, or you wish to rid yourself of desires that don’t serve you, but it is not recommended for objectives that demand a lot of motivated effort (deciding or praying are better options in these cases). Even when it comes to your true purpose, it is sometimes possible to not obsess about the outcome of your endeavours, and just enjoy working on your passion. I am aware that there is an apparent contradiction here insofar as letting go is the opposite of the decision technique, but it has nonetheless worked for myself and others. My best attempt to explain why both methods have succeeded is that while decisions and willpower enable you to ride roughshod over obstacles, letting go tends to reduce those obstacles to a manageable size via withdrawal of attention, like a weed denied the sunlight of your consciousness. Even if letting go doesn’t result in success, at least you have found a measure of the peace that external achievements are intended to bring about, but never really do. The primary goal should be to rid yourself of harmful desires. If what you wanted then manifests in your life, that is a bonus. Trying to trick yourself into thinking you don’t want something with the secret aim of obtaining it is usually self-defeating; the unconscious is undeceived, and the tension remains. Freedom is not the power to satisfy your every whim. History has shown that those who possess such power invariably go mad. True freedom is freedom from desire: the greatest prize of all.

Anti-Faust: The Divine Bargain

The next unorthodox method I champion is called The Divine Bargain. Remember the old Simpsons episode, where Homer sold his soul for a donut from the devil?^[lv] Well, that was based on the legend of Doctor Faustus, about a man who gave his soul to a demon in exchange for knowledge and power. It was reckoned by the historian Oswald Spengler to be the defining story of western civilization, the civilization that sold its collective soul for technological convenience and creature comforts.^[lvi] Well, I figured, in the depths of my desperation, if Faust could strike a bargain with the devil – a fact I strangely never doubted – then why can’t I make a deal with Christ? In short, I did, and it worked. The divine bargain undoes the Faustian bargain and its ill-effects. It differs from regular prayer by offering something to God in exchange for the realization of your request. This approach transcends the selfishness of the ego via altruism, which taps into the power of the spirit and God. God is more concerned with soul development and the good of the whole than individual manifestations. Having a benevolent intention that could only be fulfilled once healing had occurred, won Christ over. My promise to tell my success story and spread the word, determined my recovery. Likewise, my podcast dream was definitely precognitive, because I have since made it come true by telling my success story on numerous podcasts. These things are possible because our linear perception of time is an artificial construct of the ego – as indicated by Einstein’s relativity theories – and the unconscious is a timeless realm where past, present and future coexist.

The key with the divine bargain is to make the prayer in a state of total faith, know your wish is already granted, then don’t think about the outcome, but busy yourself with something else instead.

The Bible is full of evidence for the power of faith. As Jesus said to the sick woman who touched his garment and was healed: ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well.’^[lvii] Then there was the case of the two blind men who sought out Jesus and asked to be healed. ‘Do you believe I can do this?’ Christ asked them. They said, ‘Yes, Lord!’ Jesus replied: ‘According to your faith, let it be done to you,’ and it was done.^[lviii] It is easier to have faith that Christ or God will grant your prayer, and that you deserve what you ask for, when your will involves a substantial amount of selfless giving.

If further evidence of the healing power of faith is needed, the sanctuary of Lourdes in France is the logical place to go. Ever since a young girl saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary there in the 19^th century, the area has been sanctified, and the waters from the natural springs have had incredible healing effects. 70 cases of miraculous healing at the sanctuary have been officially recognised by the Catholic Church and validated by the Lourdes Medical Bureau, a team of doctors who thoroughly investigate all claims. The criteria are extremely strict; among other prerequisites, the recoveree must not have had any other treatment prior to visiting Lourdes, and the healing must be almost instantaneous. There are thousands who were healed, but do not meet these high standards. The confirmed miracles include: a woman with severe rheumatic heart disease that would likely have proven fatal, a man who was blinded by a mine blast, and a boy who was paralysed and suffered from severe tuberculosis. They were all completely healed after being exposed to the waters. This kind of evidence cannot be dismissed out of hand by a rational and enquiring mind.^[lix] I should note that prayer and the divine bargain are not essential to heal; plenty of atheists have healed the TMS way.

A final word of caution. The techniques of decision, prayer, letting go, bargains and visualization are effectively magic, and magic comes in dark and light varieties. Light magic is intended to help others. Dark magic is selfish; practitioners are willing to harm others to get what they want. ‘Win-win’ scenarios are benign but if you try to manifest anything that harms another in any way, it will rebound on you. All is profoundly interconnected on the level of the spirit, and we all have a spirit. What you do to your neighbor you do to yourself, because the neighbor is a projection of your unconscious characteristics. At the deepest level, he or she is you. Hurt him or her, you hurt yourself. This is especially true when it comes to magic. Hence Jesus said, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’^[lx] This is part of karma, and one mechanism is unconscious guilt and self-punishment for perceived bad deeds, as well as unconscious self-rewarding for good ones. Even psychopaths have this unconscious guilt, which is why they frequently indulge in self-sabotaging behaviours. But guilt and self-loathing are not the whole story. A broader definition regards karma as lessons that still need to be learned rather than merely as punishments for misdeeds, but it can certainly seem like a penance, since lack of understanding invariably results in suffering. Karma may be overcome by acknowledging unconscious guilt, learning the necessary life lessons from your experiences and acting accordingly. Of course, this is harder to do, the more you violate your own code of ethics, or the one by which you judge others.^[lxi] If you have really broken your own rule, you will find it very hard to admit, even to yourself. But I am not claiming that all suffering is due to karmic punishment; in fact, the nicest people often suffer the most and the worst individuals usually enjoy the most material pleasures and rewards. This is because the latter are ‘of the world’,^[lxii] so the world loves them. That is their ‘consolation’. But contrary to much of our cultural programming, material rewards are not all good; they come with temptations and present obstacles to gnosis that tend to keep the rich shackled to matter (though it is possible for them to escape). Many nice sufferers or ‘goodists’ are simply ‘not of this world’, and their suffering is God calling them back to Him; a prompt to turn inwards and ultimately transcend painful materiality (without recourse to suicide, of course). The prodigal sons who are destitute and feeding pigs are closer to reunion with the Father than those who are still squandering their inheritance.

Finding Your True Purpose: The Secular Bargain

There are also secular ways of looking at my divine bargain. I was stuck in a rut, unemployed and writing thrillers no one read: the unconscious wanted to bring me to where I am now (spreading the word about TMS and spirituality), and that was only possible due to the illness, which catalyzed my inner journey through the work of Sarno, Jung and others.

If you aren’t religious or spiritual, you can make a ‘secular bargain’ with yourself, to do something good or enjoyable if and when you recover, as a motivating force. If you can’t think of anything, promise to share your success story; that will inspire others in the same boat. Now, most people don’t need to upend their lives to heal, they just need to understand that their lives upset them. But sometimes it is easier to heal, if you have an exciting or inspiring purpose to fulfil when you are healthy, because illness can be a sign that we are unhappy with our current situation and unconsciously want a change of direction in life. Working on passion projects can help people to forget their TMS (and therefore improve the situation): the mind can only focus on so many things at once. Psychologist Dr. Lawrence LeShan believed that finding their true purpose was the best way for terminal cancer patients to mobilize their immune systems. This often entailed a complete U-turn, a radical upheaval in life circumstances. Astonishingly, approximately half of his late stage cancer patients are reported to have gone into remission with this approach.^[lxiii] The simplest way to find your true purpose is to ask yourself, if I was healthy and had no limitations, what would I really want to do with my life? Answer quickly before the ego has time to censor your response. Think back to what you wanted to do as a child. Or ask your higher self what you should do. One hallmark of a true purpose is that, unlike an egoic purpose, it is not dominated by selfish desire or attempts to gain approval from others. Another sign is that you have a natural talent for the subject; it fascinates you and makes you enthusiastic.

Overview

In summary, the TMS healing process can be broken down into the following points:

1.     Understand and accept the TMS information.

2.     Recognise, refute (with reference to evidence) and ignore the irrational fears of the deceiver.

3.     Gradually resume normal activities, starting with the least feared action and ending with the most feared, ambushing yourself when it is time to reintroduce something (provided serious issues like cancer have been ruled out by your doctors).

4.     If the above steps did not work, or lingering issues remain, provided there is a good degree of confidence in the mindbody link and your ability to heal (if not, return to step 1, or see step 6), some light emotional expression around current stressors and surface emotions may help. Sarno found that steps 1, 2, 3 and sometimes 4 were enough for most of his TMS patients to heal.

5.     Failing that, it is possible to bluntly explore the deeper emotions surrounding older traumas. Some may need psychiatric guidance for this phase. If you know you have a lot of trauma and are eager to process it, or have severe mindbody symptoms, it might make sense to jump into this stage before or during your resumption of normal activities. Try not to become overdependent on expression for pain relief.

6.     Other options are aimed at bolstering the will to heal and may be pursued in concert with the above steps or as a last resort. These include: addressing unconscious blockages to healing, letting go of limiting beliefs, making an informed decision to heal, the divine bargain (for the spiritually inclined) and finding your true purpose. Actual changes to align with the true purpose are typically unnecessary for healing ­– awareness of neglected wishes is usually sufficient – but can be very important for your life.

 Read the next part: Or buy the book in paperback or ebook formats from amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Solution-Enlightenment-Presence-Imagination-ebook/dp/B0CY5YGWS8/ref=sr_1_5?crid=1R8E1UENI232S&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.OtSlFirkQN_SAiF_KQ77BWu9JgmS0aM6BmFNsBIcggEAOLURtUerNJQ4KXIQiIGwxQA9PSVuNXDTCt_XLsbe0MTC_dlw52Ph-wtFq0yU1izM9DLApCb16hrrqdkmd6Y63vFlhvcb5m3gHZ04iNbXbt6xim8YKCUc_rTmmQP_3_e4YXduM6cxV72zBvID3cxTRZxkXK70Fh5V5sy-nxpPbhFhAg88Jlp2TrBD54JAFqc.UlOA6jgAliq3IyzX6BIsmr0dv6IPL2bvkIyWVaiuwKc&dib_tag=se&keywords=robert+ensor&qid=1786265052&s=digital-text&sprefix=%2Cdigital-text%2C208&sr=1-5&xpid=tXDS19y1UjW6M

^[i] Felitti VJ, Anda R, Nordenberg D, et al. 1998. Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. Am J Prev Med. 1998 May;14(4):245–58.

^[ii] Gordon, A, Ashar, Y et al. 2022. Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for patients with Chronic Back Pain: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry. Jan 1; 79.

^[iii] Hsu, M, Schubiner, H, Lumley, S, Stracks, J, Clauw, D, Williams, D 2010. Sustained Pain Reduction Through Affective Self-Awareness in Fibromyalgia: A Randomized controlled trial. J Gen Intern Med. 25 (10).

^[iv] Putnam FW. 1984. The psychophysiologic investigation of multiple personality disorder. A review. Psychiatr Clin North Am. 1984 Mar;7(1):31-9.

^[v] Jensen, M et al. 1994. MRI of the lumbar spine in people without back pain. N England J Med. 331;69-73.

^[vi] Min Son et al. 2020. Absence of pain in subjects with advanced radiographic knee osteoarthritis. BMC Musculoskeletal disorders. Volume 21. Article no. 640.

^[vii] Ozanich, Steven Ray. 2011. The Great Pain Deception: How Faulty Medical Advice is Making Us Worse. Silver Cord Records, Inc. (1^stedition).

^[viii] Tolle, Eckhart. 2010. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. New World Library.

^[ix] Sometimes periods of downtime (including vacations, retirement and unemployment) can precipitate symptoms, which fill the mental vacuum to prevent accumulated repressed stress from surfacing in what Dr. Sarno called ‘Holiday Syndrome’. In other words, ‘the devil makes work for idle hands.’ Sometimes, simply recognising what has occurred and going back to work or taking up a fascinating hobby is all that is needed.

^[x] Ozanich, Steven Ray. 2011. The Great Pain Deception: How Faulty Medical Advice is Making Us Worse. Silver Cord Records, Inc. (1^stedition).

^[xi] Dr Helen Schucman. 2007. A Course in Miracles. Foundation for Inner Peace.

^[xii] Healing Back Pain (Reissue edition): The Mindbody Connection. 2018. Grand Central Publishing.

^[xiii] Matthew 6:27.

^[xiv] Moorjani, Anita. 2022. Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing. Hay House Inc.

^[xv] Sarno, J. 2001. The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain. Grand Central Publishing.

^[xvi] Schubiner, Doctor Howard. 2017. Unlearn Your Pain: A 28 day process to reprogram your brain. MindBody Publishing. Pleasant Ridge, MI; 3^rd edition.

^[xvii] Ozanich, Steven Ray. 2011. The Great Pain Deception: How Faulty Medical Advice is Making Us Worse. Silver Cord Records, Inc. (1^stedition).

^[xviii] Healing Back Pain (Reissue edition): The Mindbody Connection. 2018. Grand Central Publishing.

^[xix] Machiavelli, N, Bull, G (Trans.), Grafton, A. 2003. The Prince. Penguin Classics.

^[xx] Shakespeare, William. 1992. Hamlet. Wordsworth Editions; Annotated edition.

^[xxi] Dr. Dan Ratner of the Crushing Doubt podcast has long been a champion of this ‘question and answer’ approach to eliminating doubt about TMS.

^[xxii] Healing Back Pain (Reissue edition): The Mindbody Connection. 2018. Grand Central Publishing.

^[xxiii] To quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

^[xxiv] McGilchrist, Iain. 2019. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press; 2^ndedition.

^[xxv] Charles Baudelaire, quoted in the movie, The Usual Suspects (1999).

^[xxvi] Schubiner, Doctor Howard. 2017. Unlearn Your Pain: A 28 day process to reprogram your brain. MindBody Publishing. Pleasant Ridge, MI; 3^rd edition.

^[xxvii] Psalm 118:22. ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’

^[xxviii] Goddard, Neville. 2022. At Your Command. GED Books.

^[xxix] I am not an expert on somatic tracking. For those interested in healing with this technique, I recommend renowned mindbody coach Rebecca Tolin, who contributed her brilliant success story to The Mind Solution. https://www.rebeccatolin.com/

^[xxx] Healing Back Pain (Reissue edition): The Mindbody Connection. 2018. Grand Central Publishing.

^[xxxi] The first time I journaled, I followed Sarno’s advice in The Mindbody Prescription, looked at his list of stressful life events and wrote about those which applied to me. The events were graded according to how much stress they typically generate. Here is a partial reproduction of the list that appeared in Sarno’s book: bereavement, divorce, victim of sexual, emotional or physical abuse (including bullying), victim of another crime, parental abandonment/not knowing one or more biological parents, incarceration, parental alcoholism or drug abuse, birth of a child (especially traumatic childbirth), being fired, marriage, business failure, demotion, new home, change of job. I would also add pet ownership and home renovation to that list. If you cannot think what stressors are fuelling your symptoms, you could go through the applicable life events from that list systematically, although you risk making it harder than it has to be with such an approach, especially if you check a lot of those boxes. Try not to overdo it. The life events generally perceived as the most stressful are toward the start of the list, and those seen as less stressful on average are toward the end. Bear in mind this is only a rough guide: the stress generated by a particular life event depends on the individual and their precise circumstances.

^[xxxii] Schubiner, Doctor Howard. 2017. Unlearn Your Pain: A 28 day process to reprogram your brain. MindBody Publishing. Pleasant Ridge, MI; 3^rd edition.

^[xxxiii] Ozanich, Steven Ray. 2011. The Great Pain Deception: How Faulty Medical Advice is Making Us Worse. Silver Cord Records, Inc. (1^stedition).

^[xxxiv] Hawkins, Dr Daniel. 2014. Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. Hay House Inc; First Edition.

^[xxxv] Schubiner, Doctor Howard. 2017. Unlearn Your Pain: A 28 day process to reprogram your brain. MindBody Publishing. Pleasant Ridge, MI; 3^rd edition.

^[xxxvi] Tolle, Eckhart. 2010. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. New World Library.

^[xxxvii] Matthew 7.

^[xxxviii] Holiday, Ryan. 2016. Ego is the Enemy. Portfolio.

^[xxxix] The word desire is derived from the latin desiderate which literally means, to feel a keen desire for something you lack. Experience shows that we achieve our goals despite desire, not because of it; that the more we consciously want something, the harder it usually becomes to attain. The purpose of this frustrating tendency is to show us the futility of overvaluing ephemera. Source: Hawkins, Dr Daniel. 2014. Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. Hay House Inc; First Edition.

^[xl] Ibid.

^[xli] Fred Sicher, Elisabeth Targ, Dan Moore and Helene Smith. 1998. “A Randomized Double-Blind Study of the Effect of Distant Healing in a Population with Advanced AIDS”, Western Journal of Medicine 169.

^[xlii] Targ, Russell. 2012. The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities. Quest Books.

^[xliii] Whilst the precise meaning of images encountered in dreams is determined by the significance of that symbol to the individual, the unconscious is partly collective, so there is a certain degree to which meaning is uniform. The following is a brief outline of the meanings of common dream symbols and omens. Water represents unconscious emotions. Fire represents passion, intuition, lust and anger. Children, eggs and beetles stand for rebirth. Animals symbolise the shadow/id; the baser instincts of sex and aggression. Eagles and phoenixes represent enlightenment. Fish may symbolise Christ. Black cats mean good luck in the UK, and bad luck in the USA. Owls represent magic, wisdom and the underworld. Trees stand for growth of the personality, or the potential for growth. Death can vary in meaning from repressed desire for a ‘petit mort’, to the metaphorical ‘death’ that precedes a rebirth of the personality. Sometimes, of course, dreams are meaningless nonsense or actively misleading. In other cases, they are totally literal and even anticipate future events. Jung believed dreams had two levels of interpretation: an external layer depicting the dreamer’s feelings about others and their current life situation, and an internal layer, in which the figures in dreams represent something inside of the dreamer.

^[xliv] The term synchronicity, coined by Jung, is a meaningful coincidence that cannot be rationally explained, like seeing a black cat before a luck-related incident. The ancients called them omens.

^[xlv] Tolle, Eckhart. 2010. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. New World Library.

^[xlvi] Hawkins, Dr Daniel. 2014. Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. Hay House Inc; First Edition.

^[xlvii] The common denominator across most recovery stories, whether the sufferer healed via surgery, meditation, diet or another means, is some degree of belief that healing would occur, and belief is obviously a mental phenomenon. This is not to deny that certain medical therapies and drugs outperform placebo in placebo-controlled studies.

^[xlviii] Hawkins, Dr Daniel. 2014. Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. Hay House Inc; First Edition.

^[xlix] Wilson, Colin. 2015. The Occult. Diversion Books.

^[l] Kremmerz, Giuliano. 2019. The Hermetic Science of Transformation: The Initiatic Path of Natural and Divine Magic. Inner Traditions.

^[li] Ibid.

^[lii] For more on the free will/determinism debate, see The Spirit Solution: Lessons Learned From My Spiritual Journey.

^[liii] Hawkins, Dr Daniel. 2014. Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. Hay House Inc; First Edition.

^[liv] Ibid.

^[lv] The Simpsons. Season 5, Episode 5.

^[lvi] Spengler, Oswald. 1991. The Decline of the West. Oxford Paperbacks.

^[lvii] Mark 5:35.

^[lviii] Matthew 9:27–31.

^[lix] Ewing, J. Courevans. Do You Know About These 10 Amazing Miracles Of Lourdes? Online article. Lourdes official website: https://www.lourdes-france.org/en/the-miracles-of-lourdes/#:~:text=While%20more%20than%207%2C000%20cases,miraculous%20was%202%20years%20old.

^[lx] Matthew 7:12.

^[lxi] The Christian ideal of ethical behaviour is difficult to realise from a state of egoic belief, but it is the natural consequence of knowledge.

^[lxii] John 15.

^[lxiii] LeShan L 1989 Cancer as a Turning Point: A Handbook for People with Cancer, Their Families and Healthcare Professionals. EP Dutton.