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The Simple Solution: The Keys to Healing and Enlightenment with Doctor John Sarno, Carl Jung, TMS, Presence, Active Imagination, Doctor David R. Hawkins, Hermes Trismegistus, Buddha and Jesus Christ

  • 1 day ago
  • 24 min read

Following his incredible recovery from a severe illness, Robert Ensor has written this book to combat information overload by simplifying the hard-won lessons he has learned about healing, manifesting and spirituality.



The late Doctor John Sarno revealed that most pain and other chronic symptoms were not caused by physical abnormalities, but by stress hidden from sufferers’ awareness, along with fear of the symptoms and the associated physical restrictions. Dr. Sarno’s catch-all term for stress-related ailments like Fibromyalgia, chronic back, neck, knee and hip pain, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS), Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), indigestion, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and more was The Mindbody Syndrome (TMS).



Part 1 of this book provides an efficient step-by-step guide through the TMS healing process from the perspective of a mindbody coach who has fully recovered. The author clearly explains what TMS is, how he healed many of the common mindbody symptoms, how confusion, fear and lack of proper information are at the root of so many modern health complaints, as well as Doctor Sarno's core concepts and how they have been successfully applied.



Part 2 is mainly focused on spirituality, though it is relevant to healing. The teachings of sages ancient and modern, including Christ, Hermes, Buddha and Carl Jung are concisely summarized and interpreted, so the reader can easily comprehend their timeless wisdom and put it into practice. The mysteries are revealed here with stunning simplicity. And as Occam’s razor is often stated, ‘The simplest solution is usually the correct one.’



The Simple Solution: The Keys to Healing and Enlightenment contains some highlights from The Mind Solution: Healing TMS Pain with Doctor Sarno and The Spirit Solution: Lessons Learned From My Spiritual Journey arranged for concision, though most of the TMS part of the book is original content. Copyright © 2024 Robert Ensor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.The author’s moral rights have been asserted.First Published March 2024.


 

For my parents.

 

That’s always been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end, because once you get there, you can move mountains. – Steve Jobs

The simplest solution is usually the most effective. – Paraphrasing of Occam’s razor

Simplicity brings more happiness than complexity. – Gautama BuddhaBrevity is the soul of wit. – Shakespeare

Less is more. – Mies van der Rohe

Keep it simple, stupid. – Unknown

Error is complex. Truth is simple.

 

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank my mother for her constant support and keeping me alive during my recovery. I must also express my gratitude to Steve Ozanich for helping with my recovery via his book, The Great Pain Deception: Faulty Medical Advice is Making Us Worse and leading me to several other key books. This book was inspired by the short, clear books of Dr. John Sarno, which were crucial to my recovery. But none of this would have been possible without the direct intervention of Christ. His ministry continues…

 

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, therapist or a healthcare professional – merely a concerned layperson – and nothing in this book should be considered medical advice. Nor should it be considered a substitute for diagnoses, prescriptions and treatments from qualified doctors. This book is intended for informational purposes only. If you have symptoms, I recommend that you see a doctor to rule out anything serious. It is also recommended that you only undertake any of the methods referenced in this book under the supervision of your physician. Some of those methods involve talking about stressful life events; if you have a diagnosed psychosis or other psychiatric condition this should only be done with the supervision of your doctor or psychiatrist.


Table of Contents

 

 


 

Introduction: Information Overload

 

There is too much information out there. Don’t get me wrong: the internet can be used to find the truth. The books of all the great teachers and thinkers are available cheaply or for free. This is a privilege unknown to previous generations. But we all know that most people do not use the internet to find the truth. Overall, the information technology revolution has created more ignorance than enlightenment. That is largely due to the confusion that comes with everyone having a voice, the scientific materialism that has run amok for the last couple of centuries and the concomitant over-specialisation of knowledge and skills. Everyone knows their tree; few can see the forest.

The book is split into two parts: healing and union. Some readers may only be interested in one part, which is fine, but the spirituality section (union), while not directly about TMS, is nonetheless related to the topic of healing. In fact, it has implications for health that go beyond the scope of Dr. Sarno’s published work. Part 1: Healing draws upon The Mind Solution: Healing TMS Pain with Doctor Sarno but is mostly original content. Part 2 is mostly derived from The Spirit Solution: Lessons Learned From My Spiritual Journey, particularly the actionable steps in the final chapter. For the full story of my spiritual journey, readers are referred to that title.

Though there are great resources out there, it can take decades of seeking to sift the wheat from the chaff. I have written this book to simplify the hard-won lessons I have learned about healing, manifesting and spirituality, because I am tired of all the confusion and suffering out there. Most Americans live with at least one chronic disease.[i] Around one in four have a mental disorder.[ii] The situation is similar in Europe. Clearly, we have been getting something wrong. I recovered from my illness the hard way; the information I am presenting here can be seen as ‘cheat codes’ to the game of life, although superior efficiency isn’t really cheating. I don’t have the biggest platform or the loudest voice. I am not a celebrity, a doctor or a therapist. In any case, the message ought to be more important than the messenger. This book will find everyone who is ready for it (and some who aren’t!). It can be no other way. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. When the teacher is ready, the student appears.

The brevity of this book is possible because the truth is simple, a fact that was pointed to by Albert Einstein, when he said, ‘if you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.’[iii] It was also indicated by William of Ockham, whose maxim, ‘plurality should not be posited without necessity,’ is frequently paraphrased as, ‘the simplest solution is usually the correct one.’ Clarity eliminates the excuses for not awakening. The ego makes life seem complicated to hide the truth from us, because the ego is not the truth. Nothing could be simpler than truth. It is so stunningly simple that few can see it. Humans are like the fish who do not know what water is; it is taken for granted, as it surrounds and pervades them all their lives. The fish who knows the ‘living water’ is the Christ.[iv]

Obviously, a book of this length may be criticized for lack of detail and supporting evidence. By way of justification, I would point out that there are many long books chock-full of detail, evidence and examples, which I recommend to those readers who feel the need for ‘more.’ The purpose of this book is different. The goal here is to combat information overload by distilling everything down to its purest essence.

That being said, I have done my best to observe Einstein’s dictum to ‘make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler!’ Experience has shown that one size may fit most, but it does not fit all. As a pragmatist, I submit to whatever works best in a particular case, regardless of dogma. This book is therefore structured like a decision tree, in that certain methods are introduced only if the easier ways have failed. The solution to the problem of too much information is an algorithm; a means of extracting the relevant from an overwhelming mass of data.


About Me

 

In the previous book in this series, The Mind Solution: Healing TMS Pain with Doctor Sarno, I outlined how I developed and recovered from a plethora of mindbody symptoms. For new readers, here is a brief recap, to let you know who I am and what I have been through.

As an extremely unpopular child, I gave up on trying to fit in, rejected the blind conformity of my peers and developed a steadily growing list of food intolerances, aches and pains. Osteopaths noticed my spine was slightly curved, blamed me for slouching on chairs and unwittingly created a self-fulfilling prophecy that I would be ‘disabled before I turned 30’ if I didn’t straighten up.

A bright spot in my otherwise dim education was my psychology A level, where I learned about conditioning. I remember being taught about Pavlov’s dogs.[i]

 ‘In the experiment, the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov kept a kennel of dogs. He presented them with food and rang a bell at the same time. The dogs salivated and ate. Then Pavlov rang the bell without presenting any food. The dogs began wagging their tails with excitement and salivating, even though there was no food. They had come, via a process called conditioning, to associate the bell with the food. This association was so powerful it elicited an involuntary physiological response: salivation.’[ii]

 I also learned about the placebo effect. Basically, a placebo is a sham treatment with no active ingredients whatsoever, that creates a positive effect on health through the patient’s positive expectations. An example of a placebo is a sugar pill administered during clinical trials. Its opposite, the nocebo, is defined as anything that produces a negative effect on health through negative expectations. I was also taught about Freud and the unconscious.

 ‘The unconscious is everything in our minds we are not aware of. Repression is the process of pushing a feeling, desire, idea or memory from consciousness into the unconscious. According to Freud, this consisted of the id, or the repressed animal instincts (especially sexual desire) and the superego. The superego is a kind of hypersensitive, guilt-ridden conscience, that is partly conscious and partly unconscious. The unconscious was contrasted by Freud with the ego, your conscious personality, or who you think you are as a separate individual. The superego and the id could be understood via psychotherapy: laying down on a couch and talking to a therapist.’[iii]

 I studied a poorly chosen degree at university, developed hand and wrist pains (in unconscious protest against the tedium of studying subjects I wasn’t interested in), and embarked on an autodidactic odyssey to fill the chasmic gaps in my education.

My dad died of ALS in 2012. I repressed much of the grief surrounding this trauma. My back pain, gingivitis, fatigue and other symptoms worsened shortly after his death. Under the influence of Nietzsche, I became a pessimistic nihilist, believing in a deterministic world of meaningless pain in which only the strong (read: repressed) survive.

In February 2019, my back went severely getting up out of a chair. The pain persisted for weeks, so I went to an osteopath. She provisionally diagnosed me with Ankylosing Spondylitis.[iv] I unwisely believed her, and this self-diagnosis became a self-fulfilling prophecy of gradually worsening symptoms.

I didn’t bother going to see doctors, for several reasons: I wasn’t pleased with what they did for my dad (who died of ALS); I had previously gotten nothing but terrible side effects from their prescribed medications; but above all, I knew that they thought autoimmune diseases were incurable and I couldn’t accept that prognosis. Having read a lot of misguided diet books, I embarked on a version of the paleo diet intended to control my apparent autoimmunity and possibly reverse the disease through starving ‘bad bacteria’, healing my ‘leaky gut’ and thereby reducing inflammation. In other words, nonsense. If you disagree with that verdict, read on (and be willing to judge a tree by its fruits)…

Things got much worse in the winter of 2019/2020. I had a bad reaction to an antacid gel and my appetite almost vanished. Digestive symptoms worsened. I feared food so much, and was so intolerant to so many different foods, that around this time my diet was pared back to approximately 1,000 mostly liquid calories per day.

At my worst, my symptom list included: gingivitis, lordosis, wisdom tooth-related infections, anal fissure, haemorrhoids, severe carpal tunnel-like hand and wrist pains, urinary pain, anxiety, depression, severe brain fog, IBS-like diarrhoea and constipation, probable severe autoimmune disease, gluten, lactose, soy, starch, nightshade, onion, nut, egg, and artificial sweetener intolerances, chronic fatigue, chest pain with accompanying shortness of breath, neck pain, chronic low back and hip pain and insomnia. Because I had associated the worst pain of my life with getting out of bed, I ‘had’ to sleep in a sun lounger. Or rather, I believed I had to, and my belief became a real physical restriction via the nocebo effect.

I grew frustrated with my doctor and the medical tests he recommended. I refused a Celiac test, because eating gluten would have upended me at the time, believing as I did that gluten was horrendous. My back and hips hurt so much I went to hospital in a wheelchair for an ultrasound that showed nothing – another waste of time. I was referred to a dietician but could barely eat anything, so – waste of time. Eventually I was referred to a gastroenterologist, who wanted to do an endoscopy (shove a camera tube down my mouth), but I didn’t fancy it and was quite relieved when the procedure was cancelled due to the lockdown. I was fed up and frustrated with conventional medicine. With one exception,[v] every time I saw a doctor, I felt worse because of the fear and negative expectations engendered by provisional diagnoses, prognoses and other concerned noises (I had to believe their hunches to actually get a nocebo effect, so I cannot blame them). Also, they would probably have wanted to put me on anti-inflammatories or biologics, and I couldn’t even handle a basic painkiller without (ironically) experiencing crippling pain as a side effect. When I explained all of this to doctors, they didn’t know what to say and just defaulted to recommending prescription drugs, as per their training. So when you really think about it, mainstream medicine was never a realistic option for me. I wanted to go it alone, so I did, with my mother’s constant support.

I got sick of being sick. I decided – against all my pessimistic and anxious tendencies – that I was going to heal, because I couldn’t stand the idea of being disabled and tormented for life. Note the subsequent effects of this decision and the fact I chose to recover. I didn’t hope I would recover or want to recover. I absolutely refused to accept any other outcome. From that point on, failure was not an option. I declared war on my disease and was willing to stop at nothing to defeat it.

I wasn’t a Christian at that point, but pain had made me desperate. I did a divine bargain. That is, I prayed to Christ in the following way: ‘I will spread whatever message you want me to spread, if you show me the way to recover.’ I meant it and, on some level, I knew this was my destiny.

Then amazon recommended me a book by Dr John Sarno called Healing Back Pain. I saw in the reviews that some people had healed merely by reading the book. As an avid reader, who was intolerant to almost all pills, health foods and herbal remedies, a reading cure was one of the few options remaining to me. I figured I had nothing to lose. As Dr. Marc Sopher says, ‘you can’t get side effects from reading a book.’[vi]

I bought the book, but it was left unread on my nightstand because I couldn’t accept that my pain was solely psychogenic, Dr. Sarno was talking about bad backs, and I thought I had an autoimmune disease. Really, of course, these were bullshit excuses. Like so many people, I was repressing the truth because I wasn’t ready for it yet.

I did however read the Book of Matthew. Reading the stories of Christ’s healing miracles enabled me to identify the crucial role of belief and the spirit in healing and gave me hope that I too could heal. I also read Carl Jung and came around to his idea of life’s purpose being the struggle towards ‘wholeness’. Inspired by his quote, ‘where your fear is, there is your task!’[vii] I began walking short distances with my mother, leaving the house for the first time in months. To my surprise, I found I was able to build my way up to walking 2.5 miles at a time.

Around this time, I had the dream that changed my life. In the dream, I was on a podcast, holding up Sarno’s book and saying, ‘diet is ok, but this is better.’ After that dream, I finally read Healing Back Pain.

Sarno’s term for psychosomatic ailments was The Mindbody Syndrome (TMS). I quickly grasped Sarno’s thesis and related it to my own situation: provided I understood that my pain and other symptoms were distractions from unconscious emotions and was willing to confront my fears by resuming normal activities like walking, eating and running, the decoy strategy would be defeated, and the pain would diminish. Sarno noticed that most of his chronic pain patients were perfectionists or goodists (nice). They were irritable, self-critical, driven, worriers and people pleasers. In short, their personalities engendered a high degree of anxiety and repressed anger. People healed by reading Sarno’s books, because TMS is caused by lack of awareness and can be healed by absorbing the right information, provided it is regarded as applicable to one’s own situation.

I extrapolated Sarno’s idea to other chronic illnesses, and other distractive behaviours like drinking, promiscuity, addictions, desires, greed, ambition, etc. Based on Jung’s theory of archetypes – innate inner unconscious personalities that control human behaviour – I personified and ‘othered’ the inner distraction-making factor, calling it the deceiver, a kind of devil within that used fear and physical symptoms to direct attention away from the unconscious and all the unpleasant feelings and truths that had been buried there in the course of a typically repressed English life lived according to the unspoken commandment, ‘keep thy upper lip as stiff as possible.’

Sarno was one of the few doctors I had encountered who actually reassured me instead of making me afraid. But it was not until I applied his insights to my own life and began thinking about suppressed memories and the associated emotions, that I almost instantly began to feel better. From that point on, merely reading the books diminished my fears and improved my condition.

I made great strides. My appetite improved. I could walk farther and faster. Rejecting my self-diagnosis of autoimmunity and thinking of myself as a TMS patient emboldened me, because unlike Crohn’s etc. TMS has a positive prognosis (most of those who accepted Sarno’s diagnosis went on to heal). The burden of disease, whether real or imagined, was lifted from my shoulders. I reread Sarno’s books again and again to recondition my brain and ditch all of the medical misinformation I’d picked up over the years.

Then I got hit with the symptom imperative. The symptom imperative is defined by Sarno as the process whereby symptoms shift, or new ones appear, as the original symptoms subside.[viii] My right foot swelled up. Then the left. I knew instantly it was symptom imperative because the good doctor described the phenomenon so well.

I started journaling about the grief surrounding my dad’s death, and my feet deflated inside 10 minutes. At that point, I knew I had it beat. The cat was out of the bag. My appetite improved enormously. I began eating rice with no reaction – a big deal for me at the time.

Nonetheless, it took me 15 months in total to gradually reintroduce all foods (including dairy and gluten) into my diet with no intolerance reaction. I found that catching myself off guard by not announcing my recovery goals helped enormously. If you have a plan, then the deceiver (ego) has a plan to foil it.[ix] Obviously, the mind is listening to everything you say, because it is the one speaking. By making no agenda, but building back up to normal activities impulsively, I caught it off guard. Ambushing myself worked. I could run, lift weights and eat anything I want – all without symptoms.

I read more Jung, including his seminal Two Essays On Analytical Psychology and Psychology and Alchemy. I began to integrate my shadow. Jung defined the shadow as the part of the psyche that is rejected from the ego as unacceptable. It is then repressed or suppressed into the unconscious and is often symbolized in dreams as various animals or antagonistic same sex figures. It is typically projected onto others whom we dislike.

By this point, I was 97% healed, but retained some residual insomnia and tiredness until I revisited Steve Ozanich’s book, The Great Pain Deception, and realised that even journaling and visualisation were rituals that prolonged suffering by drawing attention to the problem (of symptoms). I learned that relying on externalities to make me feel good automatically gave externalities the power to give me symptoms. For example, visualisation kept symptoms at bay, but if I skipped a session, I’d be hit with insomnia and fatigue. I came to understand that certain knowledge of the ability of the spirit and mind to heal the body was paramount above other factors like emotional expression in healing, since these methods only work if the sufferer accepts that their problem is fully psychosomatic and truly understands the mindbody link.

I am now a mindbody coach and author. My first client, Ozzy, was a tremendous success. He came to me with confirmed Ankylosing Spondylitis. After four hours of consultations he reported that his symptoms were 80% gone. He is now fully healed.[x]


 

What is TMS, Exactly?

 

The conditions for which mindbody doctors recommend an exclusively mindbody approach are usually the more obviously psychosomatic complaints defined by Dr. Sarno as TMS or TMS equivalents. These include but are not limited to: anxiety, depression, addiction, chronic pain (including most herniated, ruptured or bulging discs, most osteoarthritis, most stenosis, spondylolisthesis and scoliosis, ‘pulled’ muscles, partial tears or ruptures of tendons and ligaments and repetitive stress injuries), endometriosis, whiplash, frozen shoulder, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, hay fever, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, perceived food intolerances, Raynaud’s, psoriasis, indigestion, heartburn, eczema, TMJ (temporomandibular joint), insomnia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, brain fog, Fibromyalgia, migraines and similar conditions.[xi] People have healed almost all of the conditions listed in the above sentence using mindbody knowledge and methods; the anecdotes are too numerous to recount in this short book, but can be found peppered throughout Dr. Sarno’s books, the websites of mindbody practitioners, the success stories subforum of the TMS Wiki,[xii] the Thank You Doctor Sarno website,[xiii]amazon reviews for TMS books and the wider mindbody literature. Part of the reason my own success story is relevant to sufferers is that I recovered from so many of the common mindbody symptoms.

In The Mind Solution: Healing TMS Pain with Doctor Sarno, I found and shared six success stories from people who were diagnosed with autoimmune diseases, four of whom have healed completely or almost completely with mindbody information and methods. When it comes to autoimmune diseases, there is limited scientific evidence showing that cognitive behavioural therapy, journaling and mindfulness meditation can lead to significant improvements in symptoms.[xiv] But it is important to remember that if even one person can heal a given condition with mindbody information and/or methods, whether it occurs in the context of a peer-reviewed study or not, this obviously means it is possible for the condition to be healed. The significance of this fact cannot be overstated, and it is often lost on ‘trouble healers.’[xv]

TMS was changed by Dr. Sarno from Tension Myositis (and Myoneural) Syndrome to The Mindbody Syndrome in an effort to broaden the diagnosis from the realm of chronic pain to include any psychosomatic disorder. Now, even mainstream medicine acknowledges that psychological stress is a major factor in common severe diseases like heart disease and cancer. The idea that some things are TMS, and some things aren’t, was exploited by my deceiver to give me ailments that weren’t commonly recognised as mindbody. These symptoms generate more fear and doubt than TMS pain because they have a comparatively worse prognosis. This is what happened to me when my feet swelled up.

All of my symptoms were TMS, because all resolved when I believed they were TMS. But for a while there, it was like playing whack-a-mole with my symptoms, in that every time one was quashed, another rose up someplace else. If I’d allowed one of these moles to scare me by wondering, ‘is it a harmless mole, or a wolverine?’ I might still be stuck with massive feet!

Because of my experiences, I understood Steve O, when I read the following in his book: ‘I assume that every symptom I have is TMS until proven otherwise because I believe everything our bodies express is due to an unconscious process from conflict (not including dietary deficiencies, or external factors, of course, such as asbestos exposure or anything vile to the system).’[xvi] Doctor Sarno himself wrote the following: ‘It is my impression that virtually any organ or system in the body can be used by the mind as a defense mechanism against repressed emotionality. These include disorders of the immune system…’[xvii]

TMS is thus, or at least has the potential to be, a unified theory of most chronic medical complaints. It certainly satisfies Occam’s razor, by requiring a good deal less rules and hypotheses than competing theories.

Of course, even if a condition is caused by the unconscious, that does not mean it will definitely be healed. That depends on the individual. The more severe the condition, the harder it is to recover from and the harder it is to believehealing can occur. So I certainly understand why mindbody doctors advise conventional medical diagnosis and treatment for serious diseases (whilst sometimes suggesting mindbody treatment as a complementary therapy). Mindbody work isn’t for everyone. It is therefore important to go to your doctor and get diagnosed so you know what your options are.

 

Let’s Get Physiological (No Yawning!)

 

‘How can the mind influence so many different bodily systems?’ I hear you asking. Well, the mind and brain can influence all bodily systems. This is explicable with reference to current models of biology. Dr. Sarno believed that benign oxygen deprivation of the nerves and muscles was the physiological mechanism of TMS.[xviii] In recent years, the idea that most chronic pain is caused by misfiring neural circuits in the brain has been gaining traction and a solid body of empirical evidence, under the aegis of Dr. Howard Schubiner and colleagues[xix]. After all, you cannot feel pain without a nervous system, the nervous system is obviously connected to the brain, and the brain is the biological seat of the mind, with the frontal lobes and the left brain associated with the ‘conscious mind’ or ego and the autonomic nervous and limbic systems typically seen as housing the unconscious.[xx] This makes sense, when you think that the ANS’ regulatory functions like heart rate, the immune system, circulation, respiration, homeostasis and pupillary response are involuntary or ‘unconscious’, i.e. not normally under your conscious control.[xxi] The nervous system is profoundly interconnected with, and has been proven to strongly influence, the immune, endocrine, digestive, genitourinary, circulatory and respiratory systems.[xxii] And the limbic brain, the physical substrate of the id or shadow, the repository of powerful unconscious emotions, is connected to the nervous system. This is neurobiology 101. Now, the immune system is important not only in autoimmune conditions, but also in infectious diseases like colds, and the development of cancer, when it is not powerful enough to nip invaders or mutations in the bud. As Louis Pasteur, inventor of germ theory, said on his deathbed: ‘the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything.’ By the terrain, he meant the immune system, which is involuntary or ‘unconscious’ and heavily influenced by the brain. So, in a nutshell, the brain/nervous system is the command and control centre of the body, interacting with other bodily systems and malfunctioning when the unconscious is overtaxed by stress. This explains how TMS methods have healed most chronic health complaints in various bodily systems, including asthma (respiratory), chronic pain (nervous), IBS (digestive), and hay fever (immune).

I do not place too much emphasis on the brain in my work because the brain and nervous system (like other body parts and systems) merely reflect what is going on in the mind. It is possible to reconcile the more recent neuroscientific approach to mindbody symptoms and the original ‘pain is a distraction’ perspective of Doctor Sarno, by realising that neural misfire is a physiological manifestation of a psychological distraction. Change your mind, and you automatically change or ‘re-wire’ your brain. This explains why psychologically oriented methods like Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation ‘re-train’ the brain and therefore heal mindbody syndrome. The brain is also sometimes retrained merely by assimilating mindbody information, which brings a sense of ‘safety’. ‘Hypervigilance’ or being ‘stuck’ in fight or flight mode, are associated with TMS, but it is important to remember that these are just neuroscientific terms for what happens when you are afraid. When the sufferer ceases to fear symptoms, the fight or flight response ends. This can happen instantaneously. I have seen people get rid of some, most or all of their symptoms within the space of a few minutes. Sometimes the relief is lasting. It does not always take a particular number of weeks or months for the brain to be retrained.

The order of causation for mindbody symptoms is therefore: 1. Mind – 2. Brain/nervous system – 3. Body. Psychology is above neuroscience and biology is downstream from both, because the brain is the interface between mind and body, the physiological substrate of the mind. Proof that the mind is not identical with the brain, comes from accounts of out of body and near-death experiences. Perhaps the best example is the case of neurosurgeon Doctor Eben Alexander. While Alexander was in a coma, his brain was largely shut down by bacterial meningitis, yet during that time he experienced an amazing journey through a heavenly realm in which he rode on a butterfly’s wing with a beautiful girl. He also learned a lot of deep spiritual wisdom from a deity he called Om. According to neuroscience, Alexander should not have been able to learn, dream or experience such meaningful visions in that state, because the relevant brain centres were not functioning. Against the odds, Dr. Alexander emerged from his coma and went on to make a full recovery. He subsequently found a photograph of his biological sister, whom he had never seen before (Dr. Alexander was adopted) and recognized her as the girl he had communicated with during his near-death experience.[xxiii] He came away from the episode with the conviction that the brain, rather than creating consciousness is in fact merely a ‘reducing valve for consciousness’, a filter that narrows our awareness to help us focus and survive while we’re in our physical bodies.[xxiv]Further evidence that the mind extends beyond the brain, comes from the evidence for psychic abilities such as distant healing and ESP (more on these later). If our mind was solely restricted to the brain, it would be impossible for certain individuals to have psychic powers, to know what is going on in locations many miles away. And yet, there is strong empirical evidence that such abilities exist. Then there are the anecdotes of normally functioning individuals with brains so small that, according to mainstream neuroscience, they should be severely impaired.[xxv] These anomalies indicate that soul and brain are not coterminous.

Hopefully, this might clarify the ongoing debate between those who advocate the neural circuits explanation and those who adhere to Sarno’s original oxygen deprivation hypothesis, and the slightly confused sufferers caught in the middle. As Doctor Sarno himself suggested, I see no reason why both physiological pathways (and more besides) cannot be used as defence mechanisms against repressed emotionality.

Now, some will object that genes and diet have been empirically shown to play a role in certain disorders. I am not questioning the evidence, but rather, the meaning of the evidence. Having witnessed how fear of food made me overweight and intolerant to so many foods, I believe that in large part, the health effects of diets, positive and negative, can be attributed to placebo and nocebo effects. In other words, to an unknown extent, diets make people healthier and sicker according to their beliefs about how food affects the body. How else to explain why I am far healthier now, eating plenty of junk food, than I was in 2018 when I was eating less (and ‘healthier’) calories, and in 2019 when I adopted a strict paleo diet? You could attribute my results to increased exercise, but I don’t exercise much more than I did before my condition collapsed in 2019. Now, don’t take this as carte blanche to eat anything you like. At present, it is just another unproven hypothesis (which ought to be tested under empirical conditions), and even I am pretty sure that eating a truly awful diet full of sugars and trans-fats would have disastrous health consequences, regardless of what people believe about food and the mindbody link. It is therefore recommended that you stay within the mainstream nutritional guidelines set by your physician or the health authorities.

Having noticed how whatever symptoms I feared the most tended to manifest and worsen, I also cannot help wondering if the reason certain diseases run in families is not merely due to genes but also because of the fear attached to those particular kinds of illnesses within that family. Does the concept of hereditary disease itself, with its percentage likelihoods of inheriting the dreaded gene, accidentally engender self-fulfilling prophecies in the minds and bodies of certain individuals? The TMS literature is filled with anecdotes of healthcare professionals unwittingly eliciting nocebo responses from sufferers.

Sarno has shown that TMS is correlated with a perfectionist personality, but that perfectionists can heal TMS by improving their awareness of the personality-body link and their repressed emotions. What if the cause of hereditary disease is not genes per se, but inherited personality types who generate and/or repress high levels of stress, combined with self-fulfilling prophecies of doom? If this hypothesis is correct, prevention and healing could be possible as in TMS, if these individuals are made aware of the role of personality, repression, and the mindbody link. I cannot prove any of this, of course, but isn’t it worth testing? Recent evidence from the field of epigenetics supports these hypotheses. Indeed, science is demonstrating that genes can be turned on or off owing to stress and environmental influences.[xxvi]

 


Introduction endnotes

[iii] Einstein: His Life and Universe. 2008. Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition.

[iv] John 7:38.


About Me and What is TMS? Endnotes

[i] Cardwell, Mike & Flanagan, Cara (2009). Psychology A2: The Complete Companion. Folens. ISBN 9781850082897.

[ii] Ensor, Robert. 2023. The Mind Solution: Healing TMS Pain with Doctor Sarno.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Autoimmune diseases are conditions in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues, causing inflammation. In the case of Ankylosing Spondylitis, the cartilage of the spine is typically the primary site of inflammation.

[v] Doctor A from The Mind Solution: Healing TMS Pain with Doctor Sarno, who suggested that my illness – especially the association of food with symptoms – was psychosomatic, although I couldn’t accept it at the time. She also didn’t rule out the reversal of symptoms I hoped for.

[vi] Marc Sopher, 2003. To Be Or Not To Be…Pain Free: The MindBody Syndrome. AuthorHouse; 1st edition.

[vii] CJ Jung. Letters of CG Jung: Volume 2 1951 – 1961. Routledge. 1st edition.

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

[ix] The deceiver is the repressing faculty itself, the more malignant, TMS-generating aspect of the ego. There is some overlap between the two concepts, but they are not identical because it is possible to have an ego that is not controlled by the deceiver.

[x] For Ozzy’s full success story in his own words, see my website (https://www.robertensor.com/success-stories) and the YouTube video titled Healing Ankylosing Spondylitis, Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Crohn’s Disease using your mind.

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

[xiv] Penberthy, J.K.; Chhabra, D.; Avitabile, N.; Penberthy, J.M.; Le, N.; Xu, Y.R.; Mainor, S.; Schiavone, N.; Katzenstein, P.; Lewis, J.E. Mindfulness based therapies for autoimmune diseases and related symptoms. OBM Integr. Complement. Med. 2018, 3, 1–11. Bombana et al. 2019. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy improves quality of life, anxiety, depression, coping in patients with SLE: a controlled randomized clinical trial. Advanced rheumatology. Smyth, JM et al. 1999. Effects of writing about stressful experiences on symptom reduction in patients with rheumatoid arthritis or asthma: a randomised trial. JAMA.

[xv] A Steve Ozanich term.

[xvi] Steve Ozanich. 2011. The Great Pain Deception.

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

[xviii] Sarno, Dr. John. 2007. The Divided Mind: the Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders. Harper perennial; 1st edition.

[xix] For a summary of this evidence, I recommend the following title: Schubiner, Doctor Howard. 2017. Unlearn Your Pain: A 28 day process to reprogram your brain. MindBody Publishing. Pleasant Ridge, MI; 3rd edition.

[xx] Schubiner, Doctor Howard. 2017. Unlearn Your Pain: A 28 day process to reprogram your brain. MindBody Publishing. Pleasant Ridge, MI; 3rd edition. Doctor Sarno also suggested that the hypothalamus may play a role in TMS and stress-related autoimmune disorders. Source: Sarno, Dr. J. The Mindbody Prescription. 1999. Warner Books Inc; Reprint edition.

[xxi] While the unconscious undoubtedly has a biological substrate, I prefer a broader definition: it is literally everything you are not aware of.

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

[xxiii] Alexander, Dr. Eben. 2012. Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Piatkus; Reprint edition.

[xxiv] Ibid.

[xxv] Lachman, Gary. Wilson, Colin (Foreword). 2003. A Secret History of Consciousness. Lindisfarne Books.

[xxvi] Maté, G 2019 When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Ebury Digital; 2nd edition. Lipton, B 2015 The Biology of Belief 10thAnniversary Edition: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles. Hay House Inc.




 
 
 

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Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor. Nothing you receive from me is intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis, and/or medical treatment of a qualified doctor. If serious symptoms arise, seek immediate medical attention. This website is intended for informational purposes only; reading the website does not make you my client. Serious or structural issues should be ruled out by your physician before embarking on mindbody work.

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