Okay I may be a little bit slow on the uptake, but I just discovered Napster — and with it, a never-ending soundtrack for natural pain relief.  Napster basically works like cable television, supplying a vast selection of music, for a monthly fee of something like $11.

One of the best features is that you can create distinct playlists.  To me, that translates into the ability to create a series of Dancing with Pain® classes. I’ve been putting them together for myself and, after a little more experimentation, I will begin offering them at local gyms and community centers.

The ability to download a seemingly endless supply of music has let me reacquaint myself with songs that I have loved passionately over the years.  Here’s the chronic pain perk:

When I play music from my teenage years and early 20s, especially that which I have not heard in the past decade or two, the songs bring back physical sensations from that time. As such, the music takes on another dimension of power to heal — viscerally reminding my body what it feels like to be free of pain.

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In August 2007, I was going through crazy rough patch with my mom, and I was in a state of spiritual distress.  A friend in Santa Cruz invited me for a weekend retreat.  This friend — whom I had met at a freestyle dance gathering — had very calming energy, along with a deep capacity for intensity. We sat on the rooftop of her home, against the edge of a tree grove, as I poured my heart out and cried.

I shared with my friend all of the layers of brokenness I was feeling — in my body, my family, and the world, and I wondered aloud about the interplay between these layers of brokenness. Concentric circles of trauma carried somewhere in my heart, psyche, or cellular level:

The 4000 years of humiliation and persecution of my Jewish ancestors. The oppression and uprooting of my paternal family, Jewish refugees from Iraq. The racism they experienced after resettling in Israel. The sense of homelessness my father experienced since immigrating to America.

The daily doses of energetic assault against girls and women and the constant underlying threat of physical and sexual violence against us. The various levels of abuse in my immediate and extended family. The denial, blame, and punishment I faced in my quest to speak truth about and heal the wounds of that abuse. The alcoholism throughout my maternal family and its impact on my mother and, by extension, me.

The carelessness of random strangers, doctors, and body workers who injured me, refused to treat me, or ridiculed me as I struggled to heal — leaving me spinning in a confusing maze of pain and suffering. The numbness of our society. The pathologizing of people who radically embrace their spirits. The lack of socially-acceptable spaces to express and release raw emotions.  

All of it.

The complementary and alternative medicine communities recognize the relationship between mind, body, and spirit.  Often, however, I find that people in these communities promote a simplistic, reductionist formula for that relationship — rather than engaging with the patience, openness, and intelligence necessary for understanding the nuances and complexities of that relationship. 

In addition, I find that there is a lack of socio-political awareness in these communities — i.e., recognition of the interplay between the micro and macro levels of life experience. 

As a result, I feel hesitant to share an honest exploration of the many contributing factors to my healing or lack thereof. Just because I experienced abuse in my childhood does not mean that my pain is a psycho-spiritual manifestation of that abuse. It does not mean that I subconsciously willed a car to crash into me or that I subconsciously chose doctors who did not properly treat me.

We live in a world with complex, inter-related dynamics – including drunk driving and poor health care.  Pointing to one emotional or psychological piece of a person’s puzzle, and declaring it as the sum total of that puzzle, is both inaccurate and unhelpful.

Through my own personal discoveries, encouraged by the validation of cutting-edge healers, doctors, and bodyworkers, my orientation is no longer one of looking at a particular ailment (like ankle pain), trying to figure out “the cause” of the problem, and then setting out on a mission to fix it. 

For the record, I think this approach can be effective if a very specific, isolated issue rears its head against the backdrop of an otherwise clean bill of health, and if it is treated early on. Had doctors taken me seriously and respoded appropriately from the beginning, that approach very well may have prevented me from living with chronic pain for over a decade.

Today, however, that approach doesn’t work for me. There there have been so many contributing factors to so many different issues that are now connected in a complex, inter-dynamic web.  So my orientation is one of looking at every aspect of my life and doing my best to ensure that all of me is imbued with vibrant health and well-being.  I trust that the more I embody this vibrancy, the more my body naturally will come into alignment and heal.

Embodying this vibrancy means nourishing myself through a healthy diet, regular exercise, positive friendships, daily meditation, fulfilling work, and the exploration of diverse modalities of theraputic movement, be it dance, Feldenkrais, qi gong, physical therapy, or whatever. 

It means dancing light, love, and healing into the physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental realms of my individual self, into the relationships with my family, and into my social life and political activism.  It means an ever-more radical commitment to truth, authenticity, and my own inner voice. 

It means risking the disapproval of others, handing it all over to G-d, and trusting the healing process.

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While my mom was in the Intensive Care Unit, she received outstanding treatment.  Not only were the nurses and doctors competent and efficient, but so many of them were downright loving. I felt safe every night when I left my mother in their care.

Then a nurse whom we’ll call “S” came on the night shift.  I went up to him and introduced myself with a friendly hello.  Not only was his response cold, bordering on hostile, but something about him felt downright creepy.  In addition, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was intentionally trying to intimidate me, given the way he was moving when in my proximity and the way he was responding to my questions.

To his credit, he was the one nurse who let me stay while changing my mom’s bed and moving her to a different position.  (Since my mom was unable to move, the nurses had to move her body every two hours, so that she would not get bedsores.) 

As part of this routine, “S” took off my mother’s leg pads (which pumped up and down every couple of seconds, to keep my mother’s blood circulating).  He then threw them on the floor, along with the sheets. While the sheets went into the soiled linen bin, “S” began picking up the pads and moving them back in the direction of my mother’s legs.

“Those were on the floor,” I protested.  “The floor is clean,” he replied. “It gets washed all the time.” Are you fucking kidding me?  A hospital floor?  Clean?

Here’s the thing, and it’s the same damn thing I have dealt with in every messed-up doctor interaction: When we are patients, we are vulnerable. Our health and very lives are in the hands of the doctors treating us. It doesn’t necessarily matter how we question something – ie, sweetly or antagonistically.  Many doctors get ticked off that we’re questioning them at all.

And the last thing you want to do is antagonize a doctor.  Or in this case, a nurse.  Especially when your mother is going to have to spend the whole damn night in his care. So I chose my words carefully.  “It doesn’t seem hygienic,” I answered. “It’s standard procedure,” he insisted. 

What could I say to that?  I had not been in the room when any of the other nurses changed my mom’s bed.  For all I knew, they all were throwing the damn pads on the floor.  So I didn’t say anything but cringed inside, as “S” put the pads back on my mother’s legs.

I’m too tired to continue writing now, but I will continue the story tomorrow.

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A few months ago, I recorded a conversation with Anasuya Batliner — an extraordinary cranio-sacral therapist, acupressure practitioner, and nutrition counselor — about issues related to energy healing, the right and left brains, and the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Loolwa Khazzoom: A conventional doctor would scoff at me if I were to say that just their hands being around the vicinity of my body could cause me pain.  But when I say it to you, it’s a no-brainer. You respond by moving your hands somewhere else, like above my body, and continue working with me.

I don’t know what exactly you do with your hands, but with my eyes closed, I feel you’re moving things around in my body. It’s a very physical sensation. It could look like voodoo to somebody who’s just standing on the outside – like, “What? You’re just waving your hands around this person. Nothing is happening.” But it’s tangible. It’s real.  

What is that energetic exchange? Why is it that some of us can feel it viscerally; some of us can even see it; but some people are just like, “You’re making that up” – implying that they have no consciousness about it?

Anasuya Batliner: I think it’s helpful to look at the left brain/right brain model, to understand why some people can’t see or understand it. The left brain is going to say, “That’s just voodoo, because I need things to be factual. I need to be able to articulate something clearly in order for it to be real.” 

The right brain has more of a flow with things. Energy falls much more in the right-brained way of understanding the world. It can feel and sense energy. It just goes, “Oh yeah, that’s it.” 

There are two sides to our brains, and it’s not that one is good and one is bad. When each side can accept the other, it’s better for us. If my left brain can take a break from rationalizing things away, then I can experience more energy healing, more vibrational sensations.

LK: In a previous interview, you talked about how sunlight, water, and air are things that go into the foods we eat. They get converted into calories, which is an energy form that is tangible even by Western scientific measurements. 

Similarly, when I give myself permission — when I’m “tuned in” — I can feel my body shifting and changing. I can feel my pain levels going down, by absorbing the energy of the sun, the earth, or a tree that I’m hugging. Please talk about how that works.

AB: My left brain would like to say that there’s a shift between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic is the part of our nervous system that is more tuned into alerting us to danger. It’s constantly scanning the environment outside of us, to keep us safe and ensure that we respond appropriately.

It’s connected to the fight-or-flight response. When we’re feeling pain, I think that system gets activated more. The parasympathetic system, however, is a little bit more connected to some of the automatic mechanisms, like breathing and digestion.

If we’re in the sympathetic mode, it’s harder to do deep breathing. It’s harder to digest food. But when you take time to tune into the sunlight, to tune into the earth — to tune into those energies – then you allow more of those parasympathetic functions to happen more easily in the body. I think that’s part of why you may have less pain: You’re making that shift from sympathetic to the parasympathetic.

LK: So when I’m in the parasympathetic, that’s the part of the body that’s more at ease – that’s more in tune with nature?

AB: I don’t know if it’s the part of the body that’s more in tune with nature, but it does control the more automatic things — digestion, breathing, and so forth. If we’re always in sympathetic mode, it means that we’re in that fight-or-flight mode. You don’t really need to digest your food if you need to do fight-or-flight. You need to be able to contract your muscles. You need to be able to move quickly.

If you’re in the sympathetic mode, you’re more likely a lot to have contracted muscles.  If you’re in the parasympathetic mode, however, things like digestion are more important. So the energy shifts from reacting to the outside environment to allowing the physiological things that need to happen inside the body to happen.

LK: It’s interesting, because I’ve been reflecting on how stress from certain family members has been affecting my ability to heal. It’s my intuition that in order to move more towards the parasympathetic, I need to let go of a lot of stuff from my family, because it’s keeping me in that fight-or-flight place.

AB: I think that if we got that fight-or-flight mechanism activated early on in life, the switch gets almost locked on. It’s harder to turn it off, because we’re geared for combat of some sort. It’s like our body is doing it’s darndest to keep us safe, and it has equated being in that sympathetic mode to keeping us safe. So some of the other functions fall by the wayside.

LK: I’ve been reading these books that resonate with what I was intuitively moving towards in my own life: They suggest that in order to facilitate healing, you have to look at all of the aspects: Who are the people in your life? Is your job causing you stress? You have to look at all of these different factors, to move into a place of health and wholeness.

It seems that orientation is related to energy healing: You have to look at the energy field around you, in every single dimension of your life. What is causing you distress? What is promoting healing?

AB: Right, I agree. You can eat the best food and take the best supplements. But if you’re always working; if have a very stressful job; and if you never really have any rest time, that setup can work for only so long.

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Loolwa Khazzoom: What are your general guidelines for treating a chronic pain condition?

David Simon: There are many different causes for chronic pain. Before anyone treats pain just for the sake of relieving it, you want to know what’s causing that pain. Assuming that someone has a disorder for which there’s no easy medical fix — like some kind of arthritis — then you begin a process of trying to relieve yourself of that pain, starting with the most non-invasive and then gradually working their way to more invasive approaches.

Nobody wants to live with pain, and people will do anything that’s required in order to get out of pain. So let’s take a common problem — chronic lower back pain. Over time, most people get back pain, because mechanically we’re not that well designed to stand up on two legs, against gravity, our whole lives. So it’s quite common that as people reach their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond, they get degeneration in their discs and bones — resulting in chronic discomfort.

Usually people will first get an evaluation from their doctors — their family doctors or an orthopedist. More often than not, the response will come back that you have chronic degenerative arthritis, which will not benefit from a surgical approach. So from a medical perspective, that usually that means trying various types of anti-inflammatory medications or other types of anti-pain medications.

From a more holistic perspective, we know that a person’s perception of pain has as much to do with their overall sense of wellbeing as it does with any particular irritation in a joint or in a nerve root. So the first thing that we suggest for people with chronic pain is that they learn how to quiet their minds and relax their bodies — through a combination of meditation and relaxation techniques, stretching and yoga practices, and gentle, calming breathing exercises.

These classic techniques from the yoga tradition — meditation, breathing exercises, and postures — can often both raise a person’s pain threshold and also improve circulation, reduce muscle spasm, and improve flexibility in the area that’s causing the pain.

LK: Have scientific studies validated these approaches to natural pain relief?

DS: There is increasing scientific understanding that our interpretation of the sensations of pain is as important as whatever is causing the pain. For a condition like fibromyalgia, where people complain of pain throughout their muscles and joints, we now believe that the primary problem is actually in the brain: The pathways that modulate pain are, in a sense, letting too much traffic through those pathways, so it’s as much a brain problem as it is a muscle or a joint problem.

We also know that any technology that helps to increase the brain’s natural production of pain-relieving chemicals, called endorphins, will help to reduce a person’s perception of pain.

There are a fairly limited number of studies looking specifically at the role of meditation, yoga, and massage on pain. The reason they tend to be limited is that it’s difficult to control for these studies. It’s difficult to round up 100 people with the same type of pain, asking half the people to do nothing and the other half to only do yoga. The people who are willing to participate in these studies are generally not just going to sit around for six months doing nothing.

But the studies that have been done have suggested that people who take a more active role in their own pain management — through exercise, for example – end up increasing the body’s production of natural pain-relieving substances and lowering the perception of pain. Flexibility-enhancing, strength-enhancing, and cardiovascular-enhancing activities have been shown to improve a person’s mood, and mood and pain go hand in hand:

When someone is in a lot of pain, they’re more likely to feel depressed or anxious. Conversely, when someone is depressed or anxious, their pain threshold is lowered — so that the same level of pain is perceived as being more serious.

LK: What are the biomechanics of how meditation, exercise, and yoga work?

DS: We think that meditation works by changing the neural circuits in the brain. Whenever we put our attention on something, it becomes more prominent in our lives. So if all day long someone is thinking about their pain, their pain, their pain, then that becomes their life.

When people learn meditation, they learn how to shift their thought processes. MRI scans have shown that during meditation, different parts of the brain light up. The parts of the brain involved with pain become less active. So on a physiological level, we know that our attention influences what parts of the brain are dominating our awareness.

Regarding movement like yoga or exercise, pain begins with some neurological problem: Maybe someone lifted something too heavy, for example, causing some mild herniation of a disc that began to irritate a nerve route. So the first phase is direct irritation of the nerves.

Often what happens is because of that irritation, the nervous system sends signals to the muscles, to try and stabilize the area causing pain. The body then thinks, “If I stop moving so much, I won’t irritate that part of the body.” But there is a secondary source of the pain — chronic muscle spasm. When the muscles are in spasm, circulation to those muscles is impaired. The muscles then hold on to these toxic byproducts of metabolism, irritating the nerves.

So often, even though the muscle spasm is secondary, it becomes the primary source of the pain over time. The swelling of the disc — the nerve root irritation – subsides, but the muscles continue to be in spasm, causing ongoing pain. So the current theory is that through stretching, physical therapy, yoga, and massage, we’re able to reduce the muscle spasms and allow circulation to be restored. As such, we can reduce the secondary cause of pain.

LK: We’ve discussed meditation and movement. What is another effective means of natural pain relief?

DK: Sleep is another important component. It’s another one of those negative circuits, or vicious cycles: Pain keeps you from sleeping well, then poor sleep lowers your natural production of pain-reducing chemicals. We recommend starting with non-pharmacological approaches to helping a person sleep:

Before bed, treat yourself to a self-massage, a hot bath, relaxing music, aromatherapy, or mind-quieting herbs. The whole idea is to help a person get deep rest, following which the pain level is reduced. Focusing on the secondary effects of chronic pain and showing improvement in those areas can often reduce the perception of the primary pain problem.

LK: What about diet?

DS: There are direct and indirect effects of diet. People are overweight to begin with, or as a result of pain, they find it difficult to exercise. And so, unless they adjust their caloric intake, it’s easy to start gaining weight, which only worsens the underlying pain problem. So on the first level, it’s important that people eat properly. It’s also important that people are conscious that if they’re reducing their level of activity, because of the pain, they also have to reduce their caloric intake.

On the second level, there’s some evidence that certain foods are more pro-inflammatory and other foods are more anti-inflammatory. We recommend that when people are dealing with chronic pain, they become aware of the research on how different foods — particularly certain fatty acids — can either enhance the production of these pain-inflammatory producing chemicals or can reduce it.

The main evidence is for Omega-3 fatty acids, which are generally not as high an intake in the standard Western diet as in other cultures. The highest concentrations of Omega-3 are found in flaxseed, cold water fish, and to a lesser but still significant extent, in walnuts.

You want to make an effort to reduce the intake of foods that are higher in the Omega-6 fatty acids, which are the more pro-inflammatory fatty acids — predominately present in animal sources of fat. So if people are eating a lot of red meat, we encourage them to move towards a vegetarian or vegetarian-and-fish diet, then add flaxseed and nuts as a way of taking advantage of these anti-inflammatory, natural chemicals.

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