FOR THE PAST six years, I’ve thought my body was broken. Not a day went by where I didn’t feel consumed in some capacity by chronic back pain. As a healthy young man in my twenties, I simply could not comprehend it. I did practically every physical treatment besides surgery, and nothing helped.

A couple of months ago, I hit rock bottom. From there, I could only go up; it was time for my life to shift completely.

Through a truly remarkable sequence of events that can only be described as fate, I came to realize that the pain derives from repressed emotions.

I have what is known as TMS (the mindbody syndrome), a process where the brain creates actual pain in the body to distract you from unconscious emotions. The only way to heal TMS — which very much of chronic pain is — is to first realize you have TMS, and that there is nothing physically wrong with your body.

If you’re in chronic pain, you’ve probably been to the doctor, the chiropractor, acupuncture, physical therapy, alternative medicine, Rolfing, the list goes on. If nobody can figure out what’s going on with you, that’s your clue. An acute injury or illness is one thing. These should heal in a reasonable time frame.

With chronic pain, which technically is when a condition lasts longer than six months, there’s something else taking place in the body.

To understand this more deeply, I highly suggest reading the work of Dr. John Sarno, the Godfather of TMS healing. His philosophy posits that to heal the body, you must rebuild the spirit, restore the mind, and unlearn the pain.

You can listen to his book Healing Back Pain here for free. Dr. Sarno passed away in 2017. Many have carried on the mindbody healing concept Dr. Sarno pioneered, such as Jim Prussack, who has an awesome video that you can watch here for a quick introduction to the world of mindbody healing.

The following concept actually comes from Jim, and it’s one that is saving my life. Once you realize that what you’re dealing with is TMS and not a physical abnormality, the next step is to face the symptoms.

Face the emotions.

Face the pain.

Welcome it in instead of fighting, or freezing, or fleeing, which I’ve been doing for the last six years. The pain is just emotion, and all emotions are okay. Once we accept, embrace, and face what we feel and who we truly are, the physical symptoms will lift.

So many of us are fighting the pain. I sure as hell have been. By fighting the pain, I was fighting who I am. I’ve been fighting my physical pain, trying to make it go away.

I’ve felt frozen, which is when your emotions — your life — overwhelm you. You feel you can no longer move. It’s feeling absolutely stuck with worry; I’ve been worried for the last six years when thinking about the chronic pain.

How did this happen to me? Am I gonna be in back pain for the rest of my life? How do I get over this?

You might try to flee. That is distracting yourself and running from your problems. You don’t acknowledge what is really there. You’re in pain, but you’re pushing it underneath the surface. You’re just trying to run away.

For the past six years, I’ve had reoccurring dreams of running. They may have started before that, but I don’t really remember. In the dreams I’m running far and I’m jumping over things and running from people trying to get me.

It’s exhausting. I’m just running and running. I haven’t had that dream since I started this spiritual work. I’m not running from myself anymore. I’m going inward, hunting my emotions, my shadow, my pain, instead of letting them hunt me.

Maybe you’re numbing what you feel, which I definitely did. When I would drink alcohol, the pain would subside and I’d forget about it for a while. And then it’d be worse the next day.

The only way to heal is to face our pain.

But I’ve realized that this is not just about the back. Or the knees. Or the headaches or stomach pain — all TMS symptoms. It’s so much bigger than that.

Physical symptoms in our body are echoes of what’s happening in our lives. Facing our symptoms and emotions daily in ways both big and small teaches us how to face life.

And facing life — not fighting, or freezing, or fleeing — is the only way through. No life is without problems, but the only way to get through them is by facing them. We’re gonna get beat up. We’re gonna fall. But we keep moving through. Eventually, we get to where we truly need to go.

Allow what you feel. Invite the emotion, the pain, the feelings in. Embrace them, your shadow, the fullness of you. Knowing the darkness of life makes the light worth striving for; knowing the darkness in yourself makes you more complete.

Light needs darkness to truly shine.

Five Daily Steps to Heal

We all wear masks. We can hide our true selves from others by trying to look a certain way, projecting the type of person who we wanna be seen as.

But we can’t lie to ourselves. There is no inner peace if we’re living a lie, and inner peace is everything. Inner peace is surrendering to what we feel and who we are; it’s facing ourselves and this world, no longer running.

I still have sensations in my back. This is a process, not an overnight fix. It took me six years to get into this position, which means my brain is completely riddled with neural-pathways causing me to believe that there’s pain. I have to unlearn it all, which I’m doing every day through meditation, calming the nervous system, and, most of all, by rewiring my thinking.

Step one: what is this?

So when I feel the sensations now, the first step is just asking, what is this? The pain is not coming from my back, but my brain is conditioned to believe it is. It feels like the pain is there. The pain is real, and can be debilitating — but pain is felt and created in the brain.

Recognize that this is TMS, which means it’s just an emotion. So ask yourself, what emotion is this? Am I worried right now? Am I angry? Am I sad? Anxious? Why?

The emotions we feel toward our symptoms were already there to begin with, yet the physical pain supplants their aim.

So if I’m feeling angry about the physical symptom, I ask myself — okay what am I actually angry about right now? The same thing with worry, or sadness, or frustration. It’s all there in the unconscious, and we don’t necessarily have to fix anything — only recognize our emotions.

Step two: relax

The second step is to relax, which Jim can help you do here. Relaxing the nervous system, calming down, gets us out of the fight-or-flight state, which the body is so used to and is what is actually causing the chronic pain. So understand that it’s TMS, and then begin to relax your body. Breathe four seconds in, four at the top, four out, four at the bottom. Let go of the tension, little by little.

Step three: allow all emotions and sensations

The third and most crucial step is to allow.

Allow in what you’re feeling. That is to face it. That’s embracing it. Instead of running from the pain, trying to make it go away, fighting it, embrace the emotion!

Say I’m angry. Yeah, I’m fucking angry. Let’s go. What am I angry about? Let’s figure this out instead of running, fleeing, or telling myself I’m not angry.

Allowing the emotion is the only way it’s gonna move through you. If you keep trying to push it away and run from it, it’s just chasing you. Invite it in. Give what you’re feeling the green light.

Come on in. I know what you are. You can’t harm me. You’re just an emotion. Let’s see it. Let’s see what you got.

It’s liberating to see your emotions and the pain this way. The pain is not the enemy. It’s a window within.

Allowing is doing the opposite of what your brain has been doing for however long you’ve been in pain. For the past six years, pain would come and I’d either fight it, I’d run, I’d try to distract myself, or I’d fear it tremendously. That only perpetuates the vicious cycle.

When we do the opposite and say come on in, it takes the pressure off. There’s nothing we have to do. I don’t have to put up these fists and fight back anymore.

And the brain’s like, the hell is happening? I haven’t seen this before.

To heal, you must show your brain that these emotions are okay. That the symptoms and sensations are okay. Once the brain gets that message, the sensations lift.

Feel it to heal it. Let it work its way through you. Process it.

Step four: shift your attention

Once you allow the sensations and emotions, you want to shift your attention to something else. You don’t want to just focus on the sensations. That’s what makes it worse. So acknowledge them. Bring them in. Say, whatever you want to do, do. It’s okay.

I can allow these feelings to pass through me. All emotions are okay. But then, once you understand what it is, distract yourself in a positive way. You realize what it is, but then you gotta just move on with life. You gotta keep living.

Step five: live your life!

That’s the fifth step — live. Get back to everything you’re doing. Slowly but surely, get back to working out if this is taking away exercise for you. Get back to living life. This step is mandatory.

We go our whole lives with so much information stored in our body.

Our past, our childhood, our traumas, our hurt. It’s all in there in our unconscious. When we’re just thinking all day about our stress and what we have to do and who pissed us off, none of it has anywhere to go. It’s just constant rumination.

That energy has to physically leave your body, which is a sort of paradox with chronic pain: one of the best ways to release emotion is through physical exertion. But when you think your body is broken, that’s taken away from you.

For the past six years, this mental battle crushed me more than the physical pain. I wanted nothing more than to release what I felt through exercise, yet I thought I couldn’t. If I tried, I would often get flare-ups, which obviously sucked. But doing nothing but walking even for months at a time didn’t make the pain go away, either.

I would often break down emotionally; I’d cry to a friend, and then slowly build myself back up, time and time again.

Once you understand that your chronic pain is TMS, you gotta exercise again to release that energy. What movement gives you — joy, endorphins, sweat, release, gratitude, peace, strength — far outweighs the symptoms which will inevitably arise as you get back to training again.

Little by little, you show your brain that exercise is fine; that moving your body like a human being is fine! Playing, picking things up off the floor, hanging, and sitting in a goddam chair.

You keep pushing no matter what you feel; eventually the brain will get the message. The pain will go.

Yet, possibly the greatest challenge on this journey — and in life — is patience. We want the pain to end. We want things now. We want to be free.

But you are free. There is nothing wrong with you. You are okay, and your body is exactly how nature meant it to be. But the nervous system needs work. The spirit needs love. The mind needs deep cleaning.

This will take time — so forget the timeline and cherish the journey of healing your life, as one day, you’ll look back, and you won’t remember the pain. All that will remain is the sheer wonder of what you made it through.

The battles waged and won. The brave souls who helped you, even if they couldn’t truly understand your pain. You won’t remember the hurt of falling, but the strength in rising, again and again, with tears in your eyes and rekindled fire in your heart and soul. And love is all that will remain, and you will be grateful, fucking grateful, for the pain. In the words of Sigmund Freud:

We Need To Talk

The other ways to release energy in the body are through journaling and through talking.

If you haven’t expressed your emotions in a while, I highly suggest taking a walk and just do a voice recording as if you’re talking to somebody. That’ll make you feel less crazy than if you’re just talking to yourself — but we’re all crazy, so who the hell cares?

I’ve been making YouTube videos where I’m just talking to the camera and it’s been highly therapeutic for me, although I am going to therapy as well for the first time in my life. It’s changing everything.

It feels so good to get this stuff out. We need to flesh out our emotions, our past, who we are and long to be. It takes time. A good therapist helps you see those patterns and helps to unravel the map of your life so you can finally see it, probably for the first time, like me.

Everything has become so much clearer. There’s no going back. I stand on the precipice of being an entirely new person, and I seriously can’t comprehend it; I am so damn grateful for what this pain has given me. Perspective, wisdom, and, in the end, so much love.

Face it. Embrace this wild human experience. There’s so much within us we can’t possibly understand that extends far, far beyond the physical. I wasn’t ready to understand this before. I had to get to exactly where I am.

Now I’m here. I am ready to evolve.

There is so much that’s possible in life through nothing but the power of our thinking.