Radical Health Rebel
Welcome to the Radical Health Rebel Podcast, where Leigh, a renowned Functional Medicine Practitioner, CHEK Practitioner, CHEK Faculty Instructor, Active Release Techniques® Therapist, Emotion Code Practitioner, author, and podcast host, takes you on a journey to achieve optimal health, wellness, and happiness. With his extensive training and years of clinical experience, Leigh provides a truly holistic approach to health that has proven effective even when other methods have failed.
Join us every week for insightful discussions and expert interviews focusing on chronic pain, gut health, and skin health. Leigh's diverse background and passion for holistic healing brings you valuable knowledge and practical tips from leading experts in the field. Whether you're struggling with persistent health issues or simply looking to enhance your well-being, the Radical Health Rebel Podcast is your go-to resource for achieving a vibrant and healthy life. Tune in and start your journey to radical health today!
Radical Health Rebel
113 - Unlocking Pain Relief Through Meditation with Matthew Zoltan
Unlock the transformative power of meditation in managing pain as we sit down with former yogi monk, Matthew Zoltan, on this episode of the Radical Health Rebel podcast. Discover how Matthew's incredible journey—from a shearer and horse breaker to a massage therapist and yogi monk—has equipped him with unique insights into the mind-body connection. Matthew reveals how extensive meditation practice allowed him to observe pain without fear, uncovering the profound information stored in our pain and illnesses. Through real-life stories of individuals who overcame chronic injuries and conditions, we explore the immense potential of mindfulness in reclaiming one's life from chronic discomfort.
We discussed:
0:00
Meditation and Pain Relief Insights
5:05
From Monk to Massage Therapist
14:32
Mindfulness and Pain Management
18:04
Understanding Pain and Healing Process
26:44
Healing From Trauma and Pain
33:17
Sitting in Stillness to Heal
44:55
Understanding Chronic Pain and Healing
1:00:18
Rediscovering the True Self
1:11:52
Understanding Pain and Healing Bonds
1:21:09
Healing Pain Through Physical Awareness
1:34:09
Healing Trauma Through Natural Meditation
You Can find Matthew @:
Website -
https://www.undoapp.com
Telegram community - https://t.me/undoapp
Instagram page - https://www.instagram.com/undo_app/
LinkedIn page - https://www.linkedin.com/company/undo-natural-meditation-app/
YouTube page - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUvl2CYCRBWK2UqKHtdOGdw
TikTok page - https://www.tiktok.com/@undo_app
Don't forget to leave a Rating for the podcast!
You can find Leigh @:
Leigh website - https://www.bodychek.co.uk/
Leigh's books - https://www.bodychek.co.uk/books/
Eliminate Adult Acne Programme - https://eliminateadultacne.com/
Radical Health Rebel YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@radicalhealthrebelpodcast
It's very misunderstood and therefore one of the things is that people avoid pain, any discomfort, any pain. They want to avoid it and not realizing that that is actually something that you only want to avoid it because you are in your conditioned mental reaction to it, mental reaction to it, so you're not really able to experience a sensation of pain or even distress as it really is once you react to it.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Radical Health Rebel podcast. I'm your host, lee Brandon. This work started for me several decades ago when I started to see the impact I could make on people, helping them to identify the root cause of their health problems that no doctor could figure out, including serious back, knee, shoulder and neck injuries, acne and eczema issues, severe gut health problems, even helping couples get pregnant after several IVF treatments had failed. And it really moves me to be able to help people in this way, and that is why I do what I do and why we have this show.
Speaker 2:In this episode, I sit down with Matthew Zoltan to explore a topic that affects so many of us chronic pain. But rather than just managing it, we dive deep into how meditation can be a powerful tool to combat and even overcome pain. Matthew shares his insights on the mind-body connection, the science behind meditation's effects on pain perception, and practical techniques that anyone can use to reclaim their life from chronic discomfort. If you're tired of pain holding you back, this episode offers a fresh perspective and real solutions. Stay tuned for a transformative conversation. Matthew Zoltan, welcome to the Radical Health Rebel podcast that's coming on the show. My pleasure, thank you. Yeah, it's great to have you on, matthew and, to kick things off, could you share a little bit about your own journey, your background and your history with meditation and helping people eradicate pain via meditation?
Speaker 1:okay, okay, I can talk a lot on pain today because I've got a very broad understanding of pain, which I would say originated from my interest in pain in my late teens. Not because I was particularly suffering from anything, but I was working as a shearer of sheep and a horse breaker, so pain was pretty much a daily event in my work life and so I befriended it, if you like, and got quite interested in the nature of pain at that early age. Plus, I think I was massaging as a hobby in my later teens as well, so that massaging was also giving me some interest in pain, because I'm working with people's pain in pain, because I'm working with people's pain. But the real beginnings of understanding a lot more about what we nowadays term as the mind-body connection with pain and the information that's stored in our body and in particular, in our pain and in our illnesses, in these conditions, was something that started to happen after about I was about 18 or 19, I decided to become a yogi monk and about four years into that I was, or three or four years into that, I was meditating a lot, you know, like eight, 12 hours a day, and I found myself, whenever pain occurred in my body that I just sat with it stayed with it because you know, when you're sitting that long, you do get pain occur.
Speaker 1:And as I sat with the pain, I also found it necessary to drop all techniques, because once you are meditating for that long, techniques they merely distract from the deeper experiences that are happening naturally.
Speaker 1:And so in these processes I would feel pain in my body wherever it happened to be, is I would feel pain in my body wherever it happened to be.
Speaker 1:And then as that pain dissolved, so I learnt to just sit with it, not be frightened of it. And as that pain dissolved, most of the time or very, very often, the story or the cognitive memory associated with that particular area of pain in that particular area of my body would come back to me. So I'd just have memories come back to me from my life when this or that happened to me following the relief or release of that held pain, and so that gave me a good insight into okay. So pain is information in the body and it's also very, very specific, meaning that the part of the body that's affected by the pain and what you use that part of your body for will tend to throw up information or memories of particular how should I say associations with that action and the action of that part of your body. So I went from there until I was about seven years, as a monk basically, and there was a big change that happened.
Speaker 2:How did you get into being a monk? Like what led you down that path?
Speaker 1:So I was going very well in my life before being a monk. I was happy and you know, there was no real problems that I wasn't able to deal with. I was, you know, I had money, had a nice girlfriend that I was living with at the time, and I just decided I want to learn to meditate because when I started doing massage, I noticed I became more sensitive to the energies of heat and so on in your hands, as you do when you do that sort of work. I became more sensitive to the underlying or deeper internal sensations of what felt like more subtle energies in people than I normally would, and I just wanted to understand it more. So I thought I'll go and learn to meditate because, don't forget, at this point I had lived a very physical existence, I hadn't been introduced to anything spiritual or anything religious. Luckily, because it left me free to make my own way and find out things for myself from my own experiences, out things for myself from my own experiences, and so I found that that gave me an indication that I'd like to have better understanding of what actually are the functions that I can sense going on inside my body and all through me and around me, and so I went to meditate and the interesting little sidetrack but still a probably important one is I attended this course and on this course they taught a particular technique of meditation.
Speaker 1:This was with a group of monks and it was a technique to bring to the had a belief system as a Hindu or a yogic tradition. So they believe in the this, that there is a soul that resides in the um, in the center of the brain, basically around the pineal pituitary gland they commonly call a third eye. So it was a belief um system that I'd never heard of before because I hadn't been in contact with any belief systems. But what I had was a technique, basically a form of hypnosis that they would use on their students when they first came for introductory courses, which would bring you into the actual experience of what they were saying existed in your brain to be you as a soul. And so I'd never experienced this before because I'd never even considered it and also because I'd never been hypnotized. So I'd never been. I call it a type of hypnosis, even though they call it meditation, but they induced an experience in me which then I could continue to induce in myself.
Speaker 1:But what I learned from this as the years went by, was this was an experience that was induced by repetition of a meditation technique which is thought-based, so it's an idea technique which is thought-based, so it's an idea. So the more you repeat an idea through meditation or just through some desire to experience something, then the more you will manufacture the, the thought-induced condition that fits with that idea and that belief. And what that does is gives you a sense of well, for for me at the time, it gave me a sense of oh, this is not just a belief, this is real, this is a fact. So it makes, because you've had some experience from doing this, even though it's entirely conjured by your thought process, so it's imaginary, because you have an experience, whereas in a lot of situations you don't you. You, you think that you now know this, so your belief actually becomes backed up by this, this experience that the repetition of any belief will bring into a person yeah so this got me, got me in yeah and um and uh.
Speaker 1:This is where I, you know, I continued to meditate with this group this as a monk, actually, for the next seven or so years, um, until I went through a big change in myself where I wasn't. It wasn't a change that was caused by anything I was doing that I could understand. It was a change that came about through its own volition. And in hindsight only did I understand that change, which was that my body was going through a rejection of all this indoctrination that I'd been heavily imposing on myself through these techniques and through the belief system that I was following. And there was this type of reaction in my body that went on for a couple of years actually, which was a rejection. I understood after a while of the tensions that had built up in my body through various disciplines of the monk and various suppressions of the monk and various imposing of ideas. And one of the biggest problems with it was that taking on that belief of myself, because the first thing they said to me is you're not a body, you're a soul I go, oh really. So taking on that belief and then practicing a meditation or hypnotic technique that would induce the experience of that. Belief actually induced the experience of disassociation from my body, and that is really where the harm of this approach, I discovered, was causing my body to react. So, luckily, my system eventually reacted in a way that was very physical and after a period of time nearly two years actually I just found that the whole sense of myself as the monk or the ideas that made up this persona, if you like, of the monk just basically fell away completely and I just stopped relating to it, and so at that point I was able to leave, but leave without any. I enjoyed the life as a monk, but it ended up. I got to the bottom of it and from my understanding that anything that was so, it helped me understand a lot about the nature of belief and thought that, whatever you repeat, you definitely create an experience of that. But the experience is you've got to be very careful with those because they can be very much delusional. Yeah, so that was that, I suppose.
Speaker 1:And then I went off and next thing, I just opened a clinic to get back into massage, and then things changed a lot from there, because I was able to look at this experience of massaging people from what I'd learnt in those long meditations of how the pain and illness in your body or the injuries in your body are very much tied in with underlying or repetitive behaviours and traumas and so on.
Speaker 1:And so I discovered, and I think I wrote one of the first books, actually in my late 20s on, on mind body medicine, you know, and um, it said it was a long time ago back in you know the 80s or something. I can't remember exactly, um, and yeah. So I went on to work with people in the massage industry, um, as a osteopath and masseur, but a very unique approach, you know, because I was basically just deep tissue massage and osteopathy, but I would also help people understand what I was sensing was going on in their behaviours, in their life when I was working on them that I suggest would see and sense as being a part of their ongoing pain and repetitive problems. And so I got a lot of success and I was really, really busy and I did that mostly for about the next 30 years, along with a few other things that of course I did along the way. But we can go to that, go into that, um, but anyway, yeah, go into that as you talk.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's interesting one of the first things you said.
Speaker 2:You know, when you were, you were actually meditating and you know, just holding still can cause pain in the physical body and I can relate to that because I think it was about nine, nine years ago I did a vipassana meditation meditation retreat. Yeah, and you know, obviously you're in while you're there, you're probably I don't know exactly how many hours, but you're probably meditating somewhere between six and eight hours a day, yeah, and two out, you know, in two hours stints and you know, just trying to hold any position still for any period of time, eventually something's going to start to hurt. But when you're sat cross-legged, you know, within about I used what my experience was within about 30 minutes both of my legs would go numb right and obviously you're cutting off the blood supply. So, because your legs are cross-legged, um, okay, and then you know, you know you've probably got about another 90 minutes of meditation when you can't feel your legs you know, and then obviously, your, your spinal erector muscles are having to hold you upright as well, so eventually they're going to start to tire.
Speaker 2:But obviously, you know, as part of the, as part of the meditation, is that you know, you, you acknowledge that there is pain in that area, but that it will pass, and it normally passes when you finish the meditation, right when you stand up and the blood starts flowing again. Yeah, um, so I I that certainly um, resonated with me when you said you know, when you're in a meditative position, you start to feel physical pain. So, uh, so, yeah, so another thing you mentioned, uh, earlier was what you thought pain is. Could you go into more detail in terms of what your view of pain actually is?
Speaker 2:42-year-old Chris came to see me whilst training for his first marathon. Initially, chris wanted manual therapy on his calf muscles, which were taking a pounding from his long runs. I did recommend to Chris several times that he really needed a full exercise, nutrition and lifestyle program so he could complete the marathon in the quickest time and to minimize his likelihood of injury. However, six weeks from his first race, chris suffered a debilitating back injury that meant he was unable to walk and was devastated that all his hard work had gone down the drain. Chris hobbled into my treatment room the next day to see if we could salvage the situation. I suggested to Chris that he do what I recommended all along and if he did he'd probably have a 50% chance of completing the marathon. So I've gave Chris a full physical assessment and then devised a comprehensive exercise, nutrition and lifestyle program and full credit to Chris. He gave it 100%, totally dedicating himself to the program.
Speaker 2:Days before the race, chris came to see me for a final tune-up and to ask whether I thought he was ready for the race. I suggested he start the race but to stop if he felt any back pain, as there will always be other races. I received a text message from Chris the afternoon of the race to say that he completed it in three hours 42 minutes and he had no pain and had little to no muscle soreness. Chris has since gone on to run multiple marathons in impressive times. So if you're suffering from back pain that's preventing you from doing something that you love, why not arrange a consultation with me at wwwbodycheckcouk so I can show you what's causing the problem and how you can get back to performing at your best. Now back to the podcast.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a few different phases of pain that I think it's important for people to understand, just to get through life, because pain is a really big part of life and it's a correct sensation. It's not an enemy. But what's happened with um? Probably a lot, a lot of the fault is to do with therapists and medicine. Um is that, unfortunately, most therapists and medics don't really understand pain because they haven't investigated that for themselves, which means they haven't used their own body and their own life, including the pain in that body and in your life, as their own laboratory.
Speaker 1:So pain is a very personal thing. It's something that is only known because you feel it. Now, one thing about feeling is that I cannot feel what you feel as I feel, the way I can feel myself. So I know how I'm feeling right now, the temperature on my skin and whatever. You know how you're feeling right now, but me feeling me and you feeling you are very different. So I am able to feel my own existence and the condition it's in, but you can't not really. You might have some sensitivity to me and I can't really feel you in the intimate way in which I can feel me. So the only way I can really gain an understanding of such a thing as pain is through my own process. A real understanding of pain has to come through my relationship with pain and how I process it and how I deal with it.
Speaker 1:But most people have been taught to avoid pain and in all of our cultures pain has been seen as an enemy, as you probably know well. So it's very misunderstood and therefore one of the things is that people avoid pain, any discomfort, any pain. They want to avoid it and not realizing that that is actually something that you only want to avoid it because you are in your conditioned mental reaction to it. So you're not really able to experience a sensation of pain or even distress as it really is once you react to it. Because once you react to it, you exaggerate it and you add your imagination to it or you add your bias to it or your fear to it. And unless you can come into contact with your pain as a sensation that it actually is in your body before you react to it mentally, emotionally, mentally then you're not really going to know that pain as it truly is. You're only going to know it once you've messed with it through your reaction about it, your reaction to it. So the only way to really know how it is to feel and be you, and for the professionals to do that as well, is they have to investigate this for themselves. But I don't know very many people in the healing profession who have, so all they've got is what they've been taught about pain, and what they've been taught about pain is from other people who haven't investigated their pain and haven't got to understand pain for what it really is, and so it's the blind leading the blind, and it's a real problem.
Speaker 1:So I would start off by saying the first phase of pain is obvious, and that is when you're hurt, you, you feel pain, and that pain is you being harmed or you being uh, it's a warning to you. Know, do something about what's harming you, or to get away from what's hurt you, yeah, um. So if you, you, you become harmed in some way, that harm is felt in the body, if it's an injury, that harm is felt in the body, and that feeling of that harm is only the very first instant of being harmed, and the second phase of the pain is telling you something quite different. So if you're harmed, there's a lot of information in there Get away from it. You know, just try not to continue that harm. But once you're harmed, you're still feeling pain, but the pain you're feeling now is healing pain, not harming pain. Yeah, so you get hurt and that's harmed you. Then you're left with, you're not being harmed anymore. You're now feeling the effects of being harmed, which is you're feeling the pain of your condition following being harmed, and that pain is not an indication to be frightened or to get away from that pain.
Speaker 1:That pain is pain that is necessary for healing, and so this is a part that people often, very rarely realize that this is the pain I've got to feel. Nothing is hurting me right now, so now I've got to feel this pain. And so if I feel this pain, this actually helps the body process, the healing process. So if I avoid a pain, then I can suppress and override, whether it's so-called psychological pain or physical pain. If I avoid it, I'm interfering with the healing process, whereas if I'm feeling it I mean really just feeling it as it is, not thinking about it, but feeling it. I mean really just feeling it as it is not thinking about it, but feeling it as a sensation in me then this brings all the body's attention, if you like. I don't mean mental attention, but on every level the body starts to respond to the hurt part or the damaged part starts to respond to the hurt part or the damaged part, and it responds to itself in pain. But if you're blocking that pain or you're avoiding that pain or you've exaggerated that pain through your reaction to it, then you're confusing the whole issue of the second process of pain, which is the healing pain. So if you feel the healing pain, you will feel that all the way through to the healing part of that pain process is over and it will gradually get less and less and less.
Speaker 1:Feeling that pain is not only healing the hurt, but it's showing you that you as a body are able to get over what's just happened to you, whereas when you interfere with that healing pain you don't have your own lived experience of how you're as a body, as a living organism. You're completely capable of being harmed and of responding to and healing that harm within yourself. And when you let yourself go through that process, it doesn't just enable the body to heal faster from something that's happened in the form of harm, but it also helps you realize that this harm turned into well-being again. This damage healed itself. And once you see this whole process, and especially the lived experience of a process like that, is able to complete the healing process of, not only do you get over what's happened to you but you get over your fears of that type of thing happening, because you see that you can recover from it quite easily, that the body can recover from it quite naturally, so you don't get left with this bias, association, with a bit of hurt or a bit of harm.
Speaker 1:And so this leads into what I would call the third phase of healing, which is, whatever shock, whatever false association, whatever confusion, whatever bias you have created or any ideas that you create about the pain being your enemy or, on a deeper level, whatever association that you have formed, even with that part of your body and that sensation in that part of your body after being harmed there, only by getting to the point where that is fully healed, to recover the ability to begin experiencing that part of your body in its natural healed state, which is a completely comfortable and healthy sensation for you to feel, as opposed to a sensation that is locked in a viewpoint of frozen trauma. You know I've been hurt and I always relate to that part of my body with a bit of fear now, or I relate to being touched by a human being intimately with terror, because that happened to me when I was a child and it wasn't right. So I have to be able to get to a point where I can be later on through the whole healing process. I go through the phase of being harmed, the phase of healing the pain, but there's also that phase of resolving any past, any association with the sensation in the area that was caused, that was treated incorrectly or abused. So I'm going into a bit of depth there. I hope I'm not losing people, but it's like that's very important because that's how you then recover fully from an event of being hurt to the point where you're back to how you were before you were hurt, rather than now left with a mental association, with a natural sensation in your body or a mental association with a part of your body that is fear-bound and apprehensive, and you become apprehensive around using that yep. So that's a little bit on pain. Um, healing that pain is um, feeling it, yeah, to be able to feel it, um, and it's interesting.
Speaker 1:One thing I will say is I have discovered that only our mental state is concerned about pain. So we've learnt mentally, we've learnt from other people around us and whatever Other people in our life experience. We've learnt to be frightened of pain, but the body is not frightened of pain. The body doesn't take pain, Apart from harm being done. Yes, it will try to protect itself, but the body's response to pain is to heal, is to recover, and you can see that as soon as you're hurt, the energy to that area accelerates and the recovery of that area is brought about without you having to do anything. It's just the natural response of any animal to itself. If it's hurt, it will begin to heal, and we don't have to do that.
Speaker 1:It's something beyond, I would say, that's something completely beyond our mental understanding and comprehension. This is an understanding that only the animal of us has. Yeah, only only the only the body can heal itself. Yeah, um, and we don't. We don't understand it in the way the body mentally. We don't understand it in the way we understand it physically. Yeah, and that physical understanding is not a word based or a thought-based understanding. It not a word-based or a thought-based understanding. It's a sense-based or feeling-based, a knowing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and therefore you're not in reaction when you're feeling pain, you just know you're in pain, but you're not like you are. When you're thinking about it, you're thinking I don't want this, whereas when the body is in pain, the body is more intelligent than that. If it's in pain, it goes. Well, I'm in pain, it's irrelevant whether I want it or not. It doesn't even come about. It's like I'm in pain and I accept that fact and I respond. But I'm not saying the body thinks in those terms of words. I'm just saying that seems to be exactly how I found the body me as a body respond whenever pain is. This, it's just information I've got pain there. So what choice do I have when I'm in pain? I don't have any choice other than to feel it. Yeah, any choices I. We'll only suppress it, exaggerate it. We just either suppress it, exaggerate it or actually I would say the mental reaction to a pain is the suffering of the pain. As a body, in the body, we don't really suffer even extreme pain. We only begin to suffer it once we start fighting it, resisting it and complaining about it and wishing it wasn't there.
Speaker 1:So this is where you brought up that thing about your Vipassana retreat. If I may, I might just mention something quickly to respond to that. Then we'll have the next question. So that was very interesting, because what you've said there is quite typical of um, thought-based meditations, um, where they're using a meditation technique and for person, they typically use body scanning. You know, so you scan, so you, you're thinking about your body. In other words, yeah, um, so you, you may not be in a complicated way thinking about it, but still it's still a disassociated state, meaning that you're not really just receptive to what is going on in the body and going with that, you can't, because you're concentrating on it and concentration is thinking. Even though it might be wordless thinking, yeah, it's still thinking and question me and challenge me on this as you feel the need.
Speaker 1:So when you sit in a traditional approach to meditation, it's typical that you will feel you end up in a fight with your pain and it's almost like you sit with the pain because you want to resolve it and, as you correctly said, you feel the pain until you stand up and finish meditating, whereas this causes suffering, suffering of the pain, and it is the resistance without meaning to, you're resisting pain. I think the Zen technique of labeling pain is very similar it it causes the pain, but in the other way, it causes the pain to feel less, because when you, as soon as you think about the pain, you are creating a disassociation from it into the word that describes it. And so as soon as you're thinking about, like if you're sitting in a hot tub of water and you're enjoying the bath, the only way to really have the full sensation of the hot water is to shut up and feel it. But as soon as you start drifting off into some story or some thinking that you're worried about to the degree that you think to the same degree, you start to disassociate from the feeling, you lessen the feeling of the hot tub of water. Thinking about our self in meditation and where we have maybe a goal, like Vipassana meditation being a Buddhist approach to meditation, there's underlying goal of enlightenment. So to improve on yourself. So if you're having a goal to improve on yourself, or you're trying to feel better than the way you are, or you're trying to heal yourself of something the way you are, or you're trying to heal yourself of something, unintentionally, you are criticizing the way you are by trying to improve yourself, you are fighting the pain you're in by trying to fix it and you are misunderstanding the condition you're in when you're trying to heal it. So this is very subtle to get at first, because you've had all that time on the retreat.
Speaker 1:So what's the alternative is, don't use a mental technique. If you just sit still, physically still, nothing else, and just wait a while, and what's going to happen? What's going to happen is you're going to start feeling things throughout your body, simply because your thinking will quieten down a little bit and also simply because you are actually physically staying still. And when you physically stay still, without realizing it, you're not acting on those underlying urges to move away from any discomfort. And these habitual underlying urges to move away from any discomfort cause a person to just wiggle and move around a bit when they're sitting still. And if you don't act on those urges, so you get away from just thinking and come back if you feel the urge to move, if you stay with that urge to move, you'll feel it, and actually the pain that is causing that urge to move is not known to you until you stay still long enough to actually feel wow, I've got pain here. So you're not causing the pain by sitting cross-legged, or you will be if you're doing it as a discipline, but if you're simply sitting still, without the intention of healing anything or fixing anything or changing anything about yourself at all, so why else would you sit still is just to get to feel the, the to know yourself exactly as you are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, however that happens to be, how do I, how does it feel to be me today? Okay, it's a very different approach because you're totally receptive to what it's like to be you. You're not trying to improve or change you. Uh, you're not trying to achieve anything, and to me, that is that that's when meditation really begins, and then you can.
Speaker 1:You can sit with that and whatever the body is holding from your life experience, the effects of your life that are held as memory is the memories which are held as tensions in the tissues of body, and more so too, but it's just a basic holding of memory. You hold a bit of tension in there, so their memory is held there and, as you, if you can sit with that without trying to get rid of it, without reacting to it, and if you do react, or if you do resist, feel the resistance as part of what you need to process, and as that resistance drops away, you'll find the suffering that you're causing yourself drops away, you're causing yourself that by unintentionally resisting or unintentionally reacting. As that drops away, you will actually feel that pain without suffering that pain. And that's when the effects of life, the traumas, the memories, the indoctrinations that have restricted you and programmed you and made you into something that's not true to you, they're held as tensions and information in the body and as you feel these things that don't belong there, they start to dissipate through the feeling of the pain or the distress that starts to come directly out of that tissue, therefore out of your body. So this is a receptive, body-based meditation.
Speaker 1:The mind and thinking has got nothing to do with it, because thinking is too superficial, it's not. All we're going to do with. Thinking is interfere with what I say would interfere with what the body is trying to do, which is what I discovered when I was a monk and my body did this. It was trying to get rid of the shit that I'd done to myself. It was trying to release and it was succeeding, luckily for me. And since then I've realized this is the meditation the body does. Naturally, if there's pain or distress there, you feel it as a sensation in your body and the very feeling of it, enables it to release from the body as the body goes through a recovery of the initial hurt.
Speaker 1:So this is just a little bit about one, about the various phases of pain. There's a lot a bit more to it but also about how we can heal, whatever the pain happens to be, and why we're not healing. It is because we're frightened and we don't understand that what we're doing, when we're trying to fix ourselves or heal ourselves, is actually harmful. It's preventing the natural healing process of the body from fully doing its thing, and the body's been around for millions of years. So nature, the body is nature, and nature knows how to heal itself. The intellectuals of human species that we've become, we haven't got a clue. We really haven't got a clue, and the good thing about it is we don't need to have a clue because the body knows what to do. So, anyway, you might want to pop in with something else there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting. It reminded me of something that I'd forgotten when I was very young I'm probably thinking eight, nine years old, something along those lines. I don't know where it came from, but I had this thought in my head, if you want to call it a thought that I, if you like, trained myself to say it's only pain. Right now I'm not talking about you know I trod on something sharp and it hurt, and it was a media but let's say, let's say I was playing cricket and I got hit in the stomach by a cricket ball.
Speaker 2:right now, being australian, you probably, you probably have experienced that yourself. Yes, it's not the most pleasant experience that you'll ever experience. But let's say I got hit by a cricket ball and I would just say to myself it's just pain, it's just pain, it's not bad, it's just pain.
Speaker 2:And I remember I would have been 10 years old, I was on a soccer camp up in liverpool with the best, with my best friend at the time as having the absolute time of my life, and but it was in the summer, so the ground was really hard and as we were playing, I think by the end of the first or second day, I had these pretty bad blisters on my feet. Now, yeah, but most people think, oh, it's just a blister. But when you're experiencing a blister, it's, it's pretty awful, right, and your body will try and do anything. You know, your body will try and change your gait pattern, whatever else, to try and avoid the blister, right, and I I think I was having such a good time and I didn't want to allow something like that to spoil the time I was having. You know, one of the coaches was my hero, for those that are old enough, and and I didn't want to allow something like that to spoil the time I was having. You know, one of the coaches was my hero, for those that are old enough and know football. Steve Highway was one of the coaches and you know, for me I was, you know, as a 10 year old, I was in heaven and I went the whole five days with these blisters in my feet and they were getting worse every day and I and I kind of I didn't even, I didn't even consider it to be anything you know of a achievement, if you like. And it wasn't until my parents, after we got back, said your friend David said that you had really bad blisters and you just kept carrying on and he couldn't understand how you did that, like how did you do that? And to me it kind of it felt like a strange question. But looking back now I can understand why you would question that. Right, but it was in my head, it was just saying, well, it's just pain, it's no big deal, and and it's really interesting that I haven't even thought about that, for you know, 40 odd years that came up now that I somehow in my head just trained myself to say it's just pain, just and.
Speaker 2:And as a sports person, that actually served me really well in some ways. Oh yeah, because you know I could, I could get hurt playing sport and I never really it just didn't affect me. So you know, I'm not, I'm not the biggest lad in the world, but I was a striker in football or soccer and I would always come up against really big guys and you know, back then you could, you know, decapitate someone and you wouldn't even get a yellow card if you're playing football. In those days, you know, it was almost like afl is now right and um. So I would get kicked and I'd come off the pitch. I'll be covered in in bruises but I would just say, well, it's just pain, it's no, it's no big deal. Now, that can also cause a problem if you do, if you do that too much, right, if you ignore, if you ignore the pain completely, yeah, yeah, but, um, again, when you were talking, what? There's a few things that came to me.
Speaker 1:I don't know that came to me. I don't know. Are you familiar with the book the gift of?
Speaker 2:pain? I'm not, no, oh, it's an amazing book. I can't remember the author's name, but he it was about, uh, an english doctor, and he worked predominantly in india, if I remember right, and he would work on um leprosy colonies. Now, people with leprosy, they lose feeling right, pain, yeah so this, this is a very good yeah so you know he was saying things like. You know a lot of the the people with leprosy would end up. You know their fingers would get shorter yeah and why is that?
Speaker 2:so they'd stand by a fire, not feel the heat of the fire, and their fingers would just start to burn away, right?
Speaker 2:or or they'd be chopping vegetables and they'd chop a finger off and they wouldn't even notice it yeah you know, and the one story that really stands out was that this doctor hadn't worked at this specific colony for quite a long time and he revisited and all the patients there saw him and recognized him. They were running towards him to say hello and there was one guy and he looked at him and he thought that doesn't look right and his running gait was all over the place and when he kind of got close enough he realized this guy dislocated his foot and the guy was running on his tibia right because he couldn't feel the pain. And you know the title of the book is so apt it's the Gift of Pain. Because the way that I see pain is that it's a way that your, if you like, like your subconscious mind is communicating with your conscious mind, because you know if you put your hand on a, on a hot plate or a hot radiator, or if you tread on something sharp, you need to know that otherwise it's going to do you harm. Yeah, but like I kind of guess this is similar to what you were saying that's the first phase of pain. It's it's telling you to stop doing whatever you're doing because otherwise it's going to cause damage.
Speaker 2:But also the way that I see it as well is that there's more chronic pain is a different story, because, you know, we've all heard of people when they say, oh yeah, I've had back pain or knee pain for 10 years, right, well, the question is, why have you still got pain? Because there's no cell in your body that it still exists. I mean, we think it's about two years that every cell in our body turns over. So if you injured your, let's say, your knee 10 years ago and your knee is still in pain, but you've got, you've probably had five new knees since then, so why is the pain still there? Well, it's not a physical problem, right? But certainly, I would suggest, you know the tissues would have healed by then, right? So why, why have you still got pain? And that, then that is quite an interesting question.
Speaker 2:And you know, you know, and you know, I know, you know who paul check is, and you know, in the check system, we look at the body from a holistic point of view. It's not just the physical. We look at the mental, emotional and the spiritual aspects and what they can potentially be telling us. So you know that the, the chakra system is, is almost. For us, it's a roadmap of what could be causing the pain.
Speaker 2:Yes, you might have ruptured your ACL 10 years ago, but you may have had surgery or you may have just left the ACL where it is. But the facts of the matter is, if it's 10 years, you've had five new knees. So why are you still in pain? Okay, and it's a little bit like also the way that I look at it. You know you have, you have amputees, right? Yeah, and they get. You know they might have been amputated, let's say, from the elbow, but they've got pain in that hand, but the hand hand isn't there anymore, right? So pain is a very interesting subject, certainly, for me it is. So do you have any feedback on what I've just? You know, what's your view on what I've just said?
Speaker 1:For sure yeah.
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Speaker 1:You've opened up a very big area, yeah, okay, so you might have to halt me as you wish, okay. So how to most simply approach this? I think what we've got to be careful of and this may be quite challenging, because I challenge ideas, ideas or thoughts are things that we learned, we invented, um, and we weren't born with them. So when I was a baby, I was born, I could feel, I could sense, and that feeling and that sensing was how I knew myself and the world around me, and it was very adequate. And then, at some point, I was taught to form words and the language, complex language, of thinking. Now, this was my first point of disassociation from myself as a sensory being. Yeah, and so stay with me on this. I've got to make this really clear. Yeah, yeah, myself, as I already knew myself to be into thoughts about myself. Now these thoughts about myself are once removed from what I'm thinking about or trying to think about, so I can think about something. Let's say I think about an aspect of myself. Now, the problem with that is depending on not just learning to think but being taught what to think about myself, being indoctrinated with society's views of what I should or shouldn't be being influenced by the biases of my parents through speech, not just through actions, but through speech. So really heavily teaching me everything we learn mentally is not something that any one of us actually know, because for us to know, I mean I'm not talking mechanically, I'm talking about when we try to learn things about ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so I can talk about another person in pain. We were just talking about certain things there. And you know, like why has a person got pain in their knee after five years, and so on? What we know as that person is relevant. What the therapist knows, I don't think is that relevant, because that is not going to help the person heal that pain, regardless of whether that pain is now not actually a physical problem but just a psychological association with that area of their body. And this is where we get into chronic pain or we get into the complexities of identity, that when we go through experiences, we remember certain things about that experience.
Speaker 1:And what is memory? Memory is our capacity to think. Yeah, and what is memory? Memory is our capacity to think. Yeah, I know we can talk about memory as sensation in the body, but at first I'm talking about our capacity to think. So if we are still like you used the term unconscious or conscious.
Speaker 1:So whether we're unconsciously or consciously remembering an event where we hurt our knee and you know, now our knee is physically, we're saying it's physically healed, but we still feel pain and so on there and fear of hurting it, and we're apprehensive. That is our learned association with that knee. Yeah, so we've learned to associate it with it in that way, and so the healing process is not over. Yeah, now that association we could call it imaginary because that knee is not damaged, but I might say that I would actually say that it's not what is being felt is really being felt. Yeah, yeah, the fear is really there and the association and relationship with that part of your body is still a part of that part of your body, not separate from it.
Speaker 1:And that's why massage can often be very effective, because you know you can massage. I think you do massage. So you massage into an old area, an old injury, and you discover the person starts to feel the disturbance they have with that area, whether it's painful or whether it's just upsetting or whether it's just agitating. They don't like you doing it. So what are you releasing there? You're releasing the memory of how they were shocked at the time or how they learned to associate with that injury or that harm or that illness or whatever condition it was in for a period of time, how they learned to, in that moment, disassociate and not fully get back into connection with that part of their body, which means they are still holding an attitude about that part of the body, as you were using the term unconsciously, yeah, yeah, or subconsciously, sorry, not. Unconsciously, yeah, subconsciously, yeah, subconsciously, yeah, subconsciously, yeah.
Speaker 1:So this is very important because I would say we can. It looks like, from the point of view of thinking, this looks like there are different parts to us. We have mental, a spiritual, a physical and so on. So it looks like that. But the only way we can consider that that we are made up of many parts, in other words, to split the living organism of me into body, unconscious, conscious, soul, mind, spirit, whatever you know, there's a whole list. You can only do that once you learn to think as a natural creature. You don't do that, yeah, so as a natural creature, you only know your living experience, which incorporates all of those things perhaps that I've just described.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but we haven't dissected ourselves through the process of thinking about ourselves. Am I making sense so far? So I'm going through this process of chronic pain. I'm going through this process of this should be resolved. But I would then question well, what is this so-called unconscious question? Well, what is this so-called unconscious and how can I make this so-called unconscious tangible? Otherwise, it's just an idea. It's just an idea and we can go along with that idea. I mean the whole world of psychology. What are they studying? They say they're studying a mind. How do you study a mind if you don't even know what it is or if it's really there? Yeah, so we satisfy ourselves with these ideas about ourselves because at a very early age we learnt to think ideas about ourselves. And if you think about it, all those ideas we learnt to think about ourselves were not about our true selves at all. They're just ideas, they're just indoctrinations, they were just a way we became vulnerable to manipulation once we were disconnected from our physical, live, living sense of ourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because now I'm not grounded, I don't really know what it is to be me, because I've got no sense of me. And if I've got no sense of me and you tell me something about me that doesn't fit with that sense of me I'm, you tell me something about me that doesn't fit with that sense of me. I can't tell. If you lie to me and I've got a sense of what is true, I can pick up on you lying, yeah, because it doesn't fit with what I feel, as this is not true. But if I'm disassociated from my body, sense of life and people, then I've got no way unless I've got. If I don't know what you're talking about, if I don't know about the topic you're talking on, I either believe you or don't believe you. But I don't know for myself, from myself, whether you're lying to me or not or whether what you're saying is true or not.
Speaker 1:So in this sense, this is a very big problem I see in the human species is that we've disassociated from our natural state when we learn to think and we build on what we've been taught to think, because we're not just using thinking for what I think it's really for, which is just for mechanical processes of building a house and baking a loaf of bread, and it works fine for that. But once we try to use thinking to understand ourselves or anything about ourselves, we're missing one crucial thing, and that is the only way you can know yourself and the only way I can know anything about myself is in my felt sense of me.
Speaker 1:I can know I'm cold because I feel it, but I know I'm sad because I feel it, but the word sad doesn't contain me in sadness. I cannot capture the living experience of me in a word. So therefore I cannot know me that way. I can talk about me, I can think about me or try to, but how do I even know that when I'm thinking about myself through a chosen set of ideas? Through a chosen set of ideas, how do I know that's real? I've got no way of knowing. The only thing I can know is for and from and within myself is what I was originally born doing in my natural state. And what was I originally born doing? I was doing the same thing as any other animal. I was sensing I was alive. What was I originally born doing?
Speaker 1:Doing the same thing as any other animal, I was sensing I was alive, I was sensing myself from the life presence, the live presence, the live feelable presence, sensory presence of me, and any thoughts about that. If I try and think about myself, I would actually go so far as to say is it's impossible Because the nature of thinking is um, it's bias. The nature of thinking is that, it, it, it doesn't, it interprets, it's an interpretation. So, and I know, and the distance between the word sad and the feeling of sadness, these two things which we call they don't even connect. They are like talking about two different universes. You know what it feels like to feel sad, but you know, when you say the word sad, it's empty, it's cold, it's dead. You could be saying the word dog. You could say, oh, I feel really dog right now. I feel really sad right now. What's the difference? It is so disconnected from the real and living experience.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because, as you were speaking, I was kind of thinking of an analogy. So you were kind of saying, as soon as we start thinking, we've got all these, if you like, inherited beliefs, indoctrination, whatever you want to call it and that's not who we really are. And the analogy I was thinking obviously I'm using my MacBook to speak to you through, but the MacBook can only think through the operating system. Yes, so it's got the iOS, but that's not who the MacBook is. Right, that's just the software that's running through the MacBook. And it's almost like you know, if you use the analogy, we are the MacBooks but we're running the iOS operating system through it. But what you're saying is we need to get back to who we really are and see beyond the operating system that we got installed, normally within the first seven years of life.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that operating system is added to for the rest of our life. Like when I said I went to do the meditation course as a monk and they said you're a soul, not a body, and I go I don't even know what that is. I said, oh well, it's a point of energy. You are the point of energy inside your brain. It's like, okay, nice idea, never come across it before. And so then we create a technique to, because the nature of thinking is, if you continue to repeat thoughts about yourself, of any um, how should I say of any topic, you will end up inducing that experience. If you keep thinking I'm a stupid idiot, if you keep thinking poorly about yourself, eventually you will start functioning like a stupid idiot and you'll feel I'm an idiot. You know so. In other words, you willing, you can induce any state, whether it's stupidity, which is not truly the way you are, or whether it's enlightenment, which is not truly the way anybody is, because that's just another thought-induced state. And not only that, but you can induce experiences that are actually disconnected from what you really are and what you really are. What I'm saying there is I create an experience of a soul which is a separate function separate to the body. Let's say that's what I'm talking about when I was a monk. But the body is really there. I'm here, and the way I say this is because how can you tell the difference between something being real and not real? If it's not real, you will only experience it by thinking about it or by memory of it. If it is real, the existence of it will be felt whether you think about it or not. So this is where I came to using those meditation techniques.
Speaker 1:Once I became very quiet, I found that quiet was without me meaning to, was simply a returning of all sense of myself. I'll make it more clear. I managed to completely disassociate into an imaginary sense of myself as a point of energy and could not feel my body at all. This was my meditation, yeah, but what kept that going was the technique, which is now what, after a while, becomes automatic. You don't have to actually use the words. Yeah, it becomes an automatic procedure that you've conditioned yourself into, just like a person feeling insecure. You know they don't think about why they're stupid anymore, they just are in that state. Now, yeah, it's an attitude, so, which is like a wordless attitude, a wordless thinking. So there I am. I'm thinking about my, you know I'm maintaining this disassociated experience of no body, only a soul.
Speaker 1:But once I got, as I got, really quiet over sitting for many, many hours, after a few years I got skilled enough to do this. What became very clear was, as soon as that thought process dropped away, fully dropped away, it was like what happened automatically was, it was like I I sunk back into a very soft and complete sense of myself, which was an entire body sensation. So when the thought dropped away, the disassociated imagining of the thought, the experience that I was creating and convincing myself was real, the disassociation couldn't be maintained without a thought. So what isn't real can't be maintained, what you imagine can't be maintained unless you keep imagining it. Once you really do stop imagining it and I mean also at a deeper attitudinal level once you really do stop imagining it, once you really have recovered from the effects of that repetitive imagining, then the whole, the way in which that effect has damaged your sense of yourself in the body, is it's caused a contortion of sorts. If you're always disassociated from your body in different ways and you're thinking about yourself in a certain way, this will be affecting what you are, which is it affects you harmfully in the body, and so I'll go into that, if you need me to, later in a moment.
Speaker 1:But the point I don't want to lose is that as you come back into, as you drop the disassociation, you don't come back at all. You realize that you were never away from yourself. You just imagined you were, and automatically, the only thing that remains when there's no thought, description, no language, none of this learned shit. That happened when we're three or four or five, three or two or three years old, but just all that you, you discover is, oh, it's just the, the soft living pulse of life, of the live sensations of the body and the sense organs, yeah, which is sense organs, part of the body. So you, you actually discover that without introducing any ideas about yourself, which is not a small thing, yeah. But what happens is what you're left with is a one, a singularity, and what may be contained in that singularity may be all these different levels that the spiritualists have or that the thinking person has brought into existence through their dissective thinking and then brought into their experience through their repetitive imaginative thinking.
Speaker 1:But as a body, without that thought process and without those beliefs, I have no way to experience any of that. All I can experience is the totality of myself, which may very well incorporate meridians and chakras and so on. I know it incorporates, we know it incorporates hearts and lungs. But can you feel your heart and your lung? Can you feel your? You know you don't. When you feel your body, you just feel that massive life and flesh. What you feel when you feel your heart, your lung, your soul, is you feel the effects of your knowledge about that. I know it's a big statement but it's like whatever you learn to think about yourself, those experiences are your experience. The experiences they conjure are your experience of the knowledge, not your experience of anything other than knowledge. And knowledge is what we call the mind. The activity of thinking is what we call the mind. Yeah, so there we have the activity thinking. Whatever knowledge.
Speaker 1:So you said about the computer, that was awesome. Whatever software you put in there, what thoughts go in, they become your disconnected experience of yourself as anything other than what you are. And I'm not going to say what that is a materialist or say the body is this. The spiritualist will say no, no, we're that. But they're both just interpretations, they're just perceptions of this one living organism and I can't honestly say in words what it is. But I know in my own lived experience exactly what I am and how I am. Yeah, at any moment of my existence I know it's. All I gotta do is stop thinking and I'm automatically.
Speaker 1:What remains when I'm not imagining anything, when I'm not trying to overthink myself, what remains is the absolute, raw essence of what it is to be me. Whether I like it or not becomes irrelevant, um, because the body doesn't give a shit about what it likes. It's pain is pain and it's there for a reason, you know. And so I guess this was a long-winded not long-winded, but long explanation, because it's a very big thing. You've mentioned there I have pain in my knee, okay, and we say, oh, this is unconscious mind.
Speaker 1:Now then I would say, well, what is the unconscious mind? What I would say it's the body and what we hold as distortions or sensations. You see, the trouble with this unconscious-conscious psychological stuff is that people don't understand that when we talk about an unconscious mind, we think, almost imagine we know the conscious mind as a process of mental activity. So I think most people tend to imagine that the unconscious mind must be a process of unknown mental activity. So I think most people tend to imagine that the unconscious mind must be a process of unknown mental activity, but what I would say it is the absence of mental activity, and only the unconscious is not a mental activity really. It is the information of tension held as various tensions and little packages of information held as tensions.
Speaker 1:And I'm not talking theoretically now, by the way. What I mean is there's all different sensations all through our body and we feel those, and how do they feel? They are the way it feels to be me, and the way it feels to be me is cognitively unconscious and indescribable. But I, at a feeling level, I know it. So in that sense, I'm. There is no such thing as being, um, uh, being subconscious. There's no such thing. It's subconscious, there's no such thing. It's just not what people think it is.
Speaker 1:Well, that's what I'm suggesting and I've just, you know, in my own discoveries. Is that? Well, where does all this conscious thinking come from? Where it comes from is the physical sensations all through my body. So if you get a sensation, if you meet I'm a man, you're a man, and we meet a woman we find sexually attractive, we get a sensation in our groin, then what thoughts would? Obviously, what thoughts would produce from that? Or we see a bigger man who's being really aggressive and we feel the sensation of fear in our chest, let's say in our chest area. Then what thoughts are going to come from that? So, in other words, whatever sensation is going on in the body is the driving force and itself becomes cognitive thinking or the topic of our thinking or the way in which we think. I'm chucking something in pretty big there.
Speaker 1:But in other words, I'm saying the sensation in the body is what precedes thinking. It's, it's a. So thinking is entirely an activity of the body. It's got nothing to do with this mythical mind thing. It's just an activity of the body and that sensation. We have learnt words as a living and brilliant organism. We have learnt words. We have invented words to describe sensations. Yeah, and so I I mean I'm unpacking a lot here.
Speaker 1:So let's say we've got that thing in your knee and I'm saying well, I know what my so-called unconscious is, because I injured that knee 10 years ago and it still gives me trouble.
Speaker 1:Well, if you sit with that quietly or if you get a talented masseur to really work into that and you really connect into the feeling of that, that will dissipate. It will definitely dissipate. Resist, fight and argue with the feeling of their knee and not hang on to the belief system that they've created because their knee has troubled them for 10 years. Why has their knee troubled them for 10 years? Because every one of those years they've been thinking about it in the same way. They have the same association with it, and the only way or the way to resolve that false association is to use it again, gently, with sensitivity to your fears and so on, but also to sit still with it and feel the distress that you feel and the fears that you feel when they start to activate in that part of your body. If that makes sense and then when that happens, that change will happen. I'm 64 years old and I don't have these types of things in my body, even though I've had plenty of injuries, you know, because I'm into weightlifting, so you know.
Speaker 1:I don't have any. How many times have've, you know? And I was a shearer when I was younger, so I've absolutely destroyed my back. Yet my back exercises are, in fact, my strongest, deadlifts are my strongest exercise. So why is it at 64 that I can deadlift quite comfortably more than two times my body weight? Because a lot more.
Speaker 1:But I don't want to go into the wet silly stuff, but be comfortably not to hurt myself, because I've resolved fully the times that I've injured that part of my body, right down to resolving my false association from the shock and the fright of that time period. Yeah, and that's been done, simply through feeling it and through just keep going, man, you know, just keep doing what you're doing, but do it with sensitivity. Yeah, don't stop. So I think that probably answers your question about the knee, but in a thorough way. I'm trying to be thorough about it because this is chronic pain. This is stuff that's got people really confused. Yeah, because there's a lot more in it. But if we start going to the spiritual or we start moving into these ideas and the spiritualist does, we're still not, we're still disassociated from the actual problem and we're still disassociated, therefore, from the solution problem and we're still just associated, therefore, from the solution, because the solution is in the problem, not somewhere different to it. Yeah, yeah, so this is why I like to bring it back to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, are you familiar with the term illness currency? I'm not, but oh sounds interesting hit me.
Speaker 2:yeah, you may. You may have, you may be aware it, but maybe just not associate with the name. So you know, some people will be in pain but they will perhaps subconsciously perceive a benefit from that pain. Yeah Right, so it might be. You know, they have this perception that when they're in pain they get more love and attention. Or if they're in pain they get more love and attention. Or if they're in pain they don't have to go to work but they still get paid. That kind of thing. There is a benefit to the pain. I'm guessing you're aware of that. But how does that fit in terms of your thoughts?
Speaker 2:I first met Amelia at a health club where I was hosting an event offering back screenings to the members. The first thing I noticed about Amelia at a health club where I was hosting an event offering back screenings to the members. The first thing I noticed about Amelia was a dullness in her eyes, which I later realized was due to extreme pain, and I noticed that she was unable to turn her head and had to turn her whole body if she wanted to look in a different direction. Amelia informed me that she had a history of repeated shoulder and neck pain for the last two years and was diagnosed with spinal stenosis at c45, c56 and c67, and a stenosis is a blockage which, in amelia's case, was in the spinal canal of her neck, irritating her spinal cord. She had extreme tenderness over her neck and trapezius muscles on both sides and she suffered from severe neck pain continuously.
Speaker 2:Amelia informed me that she'd been advised that spinal surgery was the only option, but the surgery came with great risks, including potential paralysis and no guarantee of success, which made Amelia fearful of the surgery, of the surgery. In addition to this, amelia suffered from continuous exhaustion, painful intestinal gas and bloating, even though she felt she was following a healthy diet. After a thorough evaluation, I designed Amelia a corrective exercise, nutrition and lifestyle plan, plus I referred her to a new chiropractor for specific adjustments to her neck. After following the plan religiously, amelia is much stronger and much more flexible than she's ever been before and no longer suffers from repeated neck pain and has full range of motion in her neck. Amelia also reported that her energy was maximized and that she no longer suffers from the gripping stomach pains that had dominated her life for a very long time. If you're suffering like Amelia was and you'd like to find out more about getting to the root cause of your pain. Go to wwwbodycheckcouk that's B-O-D-Y-C-H-E-Kcouk to request your this is.
Speaker 1:I think this is the most serious, um and underestimated signaling from any human being is when they're invested, when they appear to be invested in their pain, it's because and they continue to act in ways that confirm that their pain is still bad and isn't getting better, and they continue to act in ways to benefit from the pain, but the benefit isn't really cutting it, because the benefit they're looking for, maybe without realizing it, but I would say therefore, a deeper aspect of themselves, in and as the pain, misery and sadness itself, is there's a cry for help from a disassociated place inside of themselves and they're just trying to draw attention to that part. So let's say, a person's been badly abused as a child and they're disassociated from that so they don't even remember it. And this is a very common problem, which I've actually written a white paper on. So it's something I really understand and how I validate understanding it is when I work with people with these problems. They resolve them. So if you understand something, you will know how to help a person heal it. If you don't know how to help a person heal something, you probably need to learn a bit more about it. That's all. So I'm not saying that to pat myself on the back. I'm just trying to say you know, I've been working with this for a long time and it's a serious problem, yeah, and I've had to find my own answers to it, because the answers to it still are not out there even today in the so-called psychological profession.
Speaker 1:Because they're looking in the wrong place, they're looking to the mind, they're looking to the psychology of the problem, and the problem isn't there. The problem's in the body. The problem lives as attention, as a distress, as a memory that's suppressed and held in the body, somewhere in the relevant to whatever's been done to that person or where they've had it done to them, and all they know is they feel terrible. So let's say a person has been treated violently just a general term very violently, and that violence has been suppressed. So, in other words, that whole memory of being treated violently has been disassociated from their normal day-to-day person. So how do you think that violent, hidden part of them can express itself? It can only express itself as itself. And if itself is nothing but the memory of repetitive violence, then that self, that fragmented part of them, has nothing else to express but violence. So the violence will show up. But so when the violence comes out of them. What is that? Are they just trying to be mean? Are they just bastards of people, or are they actually? Is it a deeper part of them that's crying for help? And the only way it can cry is to show itself exactly as it is, and that may be to have an explosion of anger over nothing or be you know, smash things or whatever.
Speaker 1:So this is a driving force inside of the person that people say it's an attention-seeking or there's a benefit in them. External expressions of it, merely the unknown damage inside of that person, momentarily finding a way to surface, trying to get the attention. So it gets a bit of attention, but it doesn't get the attention it needs. Because people react to those expressions, not just violence, but just someone whinging all the time or someone having an aversion to a sexual interaction with their partner because they have sexual pain. And this becomes something that the person involved with them or the people involved with them have a reaction to, because they simply don't understand that this is not something the individual expressing themselves this way has any control over. And the reason is because it's even hidden. Its essence and its source is even hidden to them. They only know it, as we all know what we call subconscious, which is they know how it feels to be them in those moments when that feeling comes into existence inside of them or when it's activated by something, or they might know it as just a very background feeling, the way they feel. They felt like shit all their life and they just learn to live above it or beyond it. And so these feelings and these expressions are cries for help. But what is the help they really need? The help they really need is for those unconscious things to be known, understood, not just by the person that they're expressing it to but, more importantly, known to themselves again. And this is where there's different sorts of therapies out there that people can use to help people get in touch with so-called suppressed memory. But I prefer to let people and I've worked with all of those. I've developed many of those, you know but I found the only really effective way is to get out of the psychological approach and begin with what that person knows.
Speaker 1:Where is that expression of that person coming from? It's coming from the shitty way they feel inside, the feeling inside of them how it feels to be them, and to get them in touch with that feeling of how it feels to be them is difficult because that feeling will be disturbing and painful. But that's where they need to go into, purely the feeling of that, to help them get into, stay with the feeling that is driving their rage, that is driving their complaint, that is driving their reaction in day-to-day life. To stay with the feeling of that, because in the feeling of that is the memory, is the cognitive memory, and in that that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is staying with the feeling of that pain enables the body to process and dissipate that pain. But the trouble is the individual is judging, judgmental of, obviously, because within that pain is inherently a reaction to what was happening to them. So that's all coming out at the same time. So it gets very confusing. You've got pain coming out and you've got massive resistance to that pain coming out with it, because that resistance is a part of that event. So it's really hard. So they need tremendous support of someone who understands the nature of pain and how the healing of pain can I'll be so bold as to say can only occur in the body.
Speaker 1:The psychological healing is not a fact, it's just a modification, it's just changing your way of looking at your pain. But to heal your pain you have to go through. You have to firstly feel it, and in feeling it, this is where it's very difficult for people and this is where the natural meditation of the body, which is what I've discovered to be the most powerful, effective meditation there is for healing not because I invented it, because I didn't, but because I discovered that this is what the body does when it's in pain. So why not just do what the body does, do what nature does? So why not just do what the body does, do what nature does, that is, to feel the pain where it is in your body and whatever comes out with that pain.
Speaker 1:Rather than you will feel fear, because that's part of what's coming out, you will feel anger, you will feel resentment, but to keep bringing it back to the pain and the sensation in the body means you keep stopping rather than going into your projection, and connecting the pain in you with something outside of you as being a reason for it and I was projecting your pain onto your life makes your life look like a hell. Because if you don't connect your pain with your life, remember your pain has been there and if any person is in this sort of pain, they'll know it's been there all their life. That's something that's been there all the time. But what's happening in your life today has not always been there. So what's happening today is not the thing that's causing you to feel this way. You feel this way for reasons that you don't know. That's why you accidentally blame everything else. Once you discover why you're really feeling that way, you won't have the need to find the reason in your life today. So so much of our life today is ruined. Our life experiences today is ruined because we connect our pain with our life today when it's not to do with our life today.
Speaker 1:In these sort of situations, it's a deeply ingrained memory held in the body as sensations in the body, and our association with those sensations is also distorted. So, for example, I've been through sexual abuse. Then the sensation of sex in anyone's body is in a healthy, natural state, is very pleasurable, probably the most pleasurable and engaging and connecting feeling we ever have, maybe, yeah. So whereas a person who's been abused sexually is traumatized, sexually is traumatized, and what I mean by traumatized is their association with that very natural sensation, which is a core, primary part of being a human being that has been naturally associated with abuse and how it felt when they were being abused. So their association with this natural, healthy sensation of sexuality in them has been completely distorted, leaving them unable to live with themselves as they really are. And until they heal that association with that sensation, which they can through this process that I'm talking about, until they heal that, they won't really feel comfortable whenever that sensation is stimulated in the act of sex or whatever, whenever that sensation is stimulated in the act of sex or whatever. But once they heal it, they will discover that they don't have to fix their sexuality because our fundamental condition is there. We're born with these natural sensations. Okay, sexuality develops as we go through puberty yeah. So as the body changes, so our ability to feel things hormonally and so forth, yeah, changes, but the fundamental sensation of sexuality I'm using that as an example because so many people have this disturbance in their life.
Speaker 1:As an example, because so many people have this disturbance in their life. This is a fundamental part of being a human being and this is what we do to one another. When we hurt each other repetitively is we distort the individual's relationship with their primary natural state and they experience that distortion and they can't get back to what it really feels in their primary natural state until they heal that distortion, heal that pain and that trauma. So to me this is a description of what it's not just pain we're talking about here. This is trauma, when a person's relationship with themselves and with all all that is natural to them has been so mixed up in abusive behavior with other people that they can no longer know themselves as they truly are. They only know themselves in the damaged state. And the thing just the last part of that is, once anybody heals any of these damaged states, you don't then have to redevelop the natural state. It's already there.
Speaker 1:That's the amazing thing about the body the body. We're born perfect. Actually, we're born complete, we live complete and we die, and that's the completion of our life. But that completion is covered over and distorted, or our experience of that complete state is covered over and distorted by all of these things. We learn about ourselves from the way we're treated or the way we're indoctrinated to denaturalize us, from just being the expression of us as an incredibly unique creature that's come into existence through our mother's womb, in the natural world, as a part of the natural world and we've lost sight of that.
Speaker 1:I really have a different view of life to the spiritualist, because I don't see that there was anything wrong with us when we were born. I don't see that we came here to improve, we came here to express. But we got hurt and the thing that makes that very clear to me is that when there's no hurt there, when the hurt is at least healed to the point where you can live with it without reassociating with it throughout your life, you know daily where you know there's a pain there, but you're still living in free of that pain because you're no longer associating it with every part of your life. So you can actually enjoy the fullness of being you, even though you're still healing a bit of pain and your relationship with pain is correct and the body will heal that pain. And then tomorrow something else will happen. The body will heal that pain, but what is it doing? That healing is is not improving us. That's just a correction.
Speaker 1:I'm just coming back to my already complete state as a living organism. Yeah, even at 64 I'm complete. I might be, and maybe I can't run 20k's. I probably could actually, but I don't bother to try. Yeah, but I, I know that in my soul, even if I lose a leg, what remains of me is still the complete and whole me. Okay, um, and and my sense of me is intact, uh, as long as I I can let my body heal the pain along the way. But in these traumatized situations where people are coming out of this question you had of, you know people expressing their pain to get attention or because they're invested in it. It appears that way, yeah, but I think it's not quite. It's not a deep enough understanding of the nature of pain and what immense suffering is hidden deeply inside of a person who's behaving that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, awesome, deeply inside of a person who's behaving that way, yeah, awesome. So just to wrap up just in a maybe a short summary if someone's listening to this and they've, they have crying, they've had pain for some time what, what would be your kind of closing words for those people?
Speaker 1:I don't think the closing words would be enough which is the pain is not your enemy, but you're going to feel like it is Okay. There's a process that you're going to have to go through and in order to approach your pain correctly so that it begins to heal, rather than approaching it incorrectly, so you turn it into a suffering and you compound your experience of suffering that pain, you have to stop compounding that suffering and that is to embrace the feeling of the pain or the distress that is already there. But you have to embrace that in your body, inside, where you feel you won't heal pain through the mental approach to yourself, because that is actually a disassociation from it and a reaction to it. Trying to heal it, trying to get rid of it, it's not something to get rid of. It's a part of you that's really hurt and to attack that part of you to try and get rid of it, to try and fix it, is an attack on it. Really it's not what you need. You think you want that and superficially you do, because your relationship with pain is damaged. So there's a lot of unlearning to be done, um unlearning of you need to understand reactions. You need to learn how to feel again. You need to be um in a way. You need to learn this in a way that gradually brings you back into a state where you are actually able to embrace your pain as it is and let it heal. So, because it's such a tricky thing to do, there's two things on offer.
Speaker 1:I've created an Undo Natural Meditation app U-N-D-O Natural Meditation app. It's got 14 chapters and I think it's not until you get to chapter 10, that is a chapter on pain and it's called the Significance of Pain. But that's not until chapter 10. The first chapter is on reactions and projections, which is about your thinking processes. The second is on feeling. Then it's on the natural intelligence of the body, then it's on beliefs. So we go through a process of negating beliefs, of negating our misunderstanding that intelligent, real intelligence is something outside of the body. It's not, and you'll learn it's not about. It's not. It's not a telling you type course in this app. It's an investigative approach to take you through a step-by-step program of unlearning the incorrect thinking, not by calling it incorrect and saying don't do this, do that, but actually helping you understand it. So you have these aha moments where you actually have realization after realization and realization of your natural way of being and what's become unnatural in your way of operating, until you eventually get to you know chapter 10 of the 14 chapters, and by then you will have already learned a lot about pain. But that's where you go into very deeply into beginning this healing process of your pain. So there's that and the other is and anybody can download that app from app stores and I think we're going to have it on our website, undoappcom, quite soon. The other thing is to, if you're having pain is.
Speaker 1:I run natural meditation retreats and I'll be another one coming up in about a couple of months' time where you will learn, no matter what your meditation life has been, whether you've been doing it for 25 years or 50 years, I haven't come. I had a podcast with a very nice man the other day, adrian, who runs a very good podcast called the Principles, and we did a podcast on different things. So we've done a couple and he's been meditating for 50 years, and why he wanted to do a podcast with me is because when he came across my approach, it was the deepest he'd ever managed to go in his meditation, the most connected he'd ever felt with himself as himself, and this is common with this very unique approach to meditation that I've learned from the guidance of my own body and I've worked out how to share with other people. So the meditation retreats they run for a minimum of 10 days, I think, and anything up to a month, three weeks or so. These are more powerful than doing the app, because you're actually over days of meditating, you are going deep into yourself and with my guidance and my presence which helps, it really does, it makes a difference.
Speaker 1:You're not dependent on me. You won't remain dependent on me. But the sensitivity from someone like myself to know when you're in trouble and to guide you through that so you don't get stuck there, is very important, which you won't get on. You won't get that on other retreats, um, because any they just throw a technique at you and you just go for it and basically suffer and I'm not saying that against someone saying this is serious. You want to heal, you want to get real depth in your meditation. You do need a little bit of direct guidance. The app will also give you that. Actually, I've discovered from all the people who've done the app, or from many of the people who've done the app.
Speaker 1:But the reason I'm suggesting the meditation retreats is I've run over 200-plus retreats in the last 35, 40 years of these links, so I've got a lot of experience with them and I've had a lot of people come through, a lot of people, and whether you're wanting to just enhance on the human being you are or whether you have some serious trauma that you need to heal, uh, these retreats give you both. Yeah, so it's like the early stages healing is a lot like you're saying when you went on the vipassana retreat, how much pain there was. With the right guidance, you could have really benefited tremendously from that and processed and healed and gone into great depths in yourself using, you know, taking, knowing how to approach your pain, but you wouldn't have been given the right instruction to be able to do that. You know and I know because I've been a monk, I know what, I know what they get up to, you know. So, um, that opportunity is there. And the other thing is, if you're really um keen that I also run one-on-one sessions and even though you're not in my, the country that I'm in, um, I'm very capable of working very sensitively and connecting very sensitively um with people online. Yeah, uh, to help them, uh, to help bring about the healing process in their body. So you would call this typical counselling sessions, but it's not like your typical counselling session.
Speaker 1:And we have online retreats as well. If you look on our website, the indication of when they're going to be there will be there. You can look up quietretreatsco it's another website we have that's just on retreats tells you all aboutretreatsco. To tell you it's another website we have that's just on retreats tells you all about the retreats and when they're going to be run. Next, with the app, it's $18 a month, or Australian, not American, or $130 Aussie per year and I think there's seven days free trial in the beginning. So there's these. These things are available, um. So if you want any of those services or you want to take it further, um, I'd like to love to hear from you wherever you are, whoever you are, okay.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome, that's great, awesome. And what's next for you, matthew, today or in general?
Speaker 1:However, you want to answer that question what's next for me? Okay, this is going to sound a little strange. I sort of don't think a lot about what's next for me. I leave that up to the girls and even though I might plan what's next for me, the truth is you, you know, you never know. So my, my real answer is whatever comes in front of me, I'll be responding to that with whatever is inside of me. Uh, as you know, and um, otherwise, what's up next for me today is I'm going down the gym to have a workout Me too. So we've got to look after ourselves every way we can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I've just really enjoyed, by the way, our connection. It's our first time talking together and it was such an easy connection. I find you very receptive and open to new ideas, because a lot of this is new ideas or new ways of looking at life, and I do hope you know we get to do more of these. I'd really like to do more with you if you and we can pick topics and you know and really hone in on things. But I think today I was really glad that we stuck with pain and various aspects of pain because, as you can see from my responses, it is a favourite topic of mine. It really is. It's most important. So, yeah, thanks for the way you led the podcast. It was very, very helpful, really good, yeah my pleasure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, matthew, thank you so much for your time today. I've you know, I've I've really enjoyed it and I'm sure, I'm sure the listeners are going to get a lot from it as well terrific.
Speaker 1:Thanks very much. See you next time, yeah, indeed.
Speaker 2:so that's all all from Matthew and me for this week, but don't forget to join me same time, same place next week on the Radical Health Rebel podcast. Thanks for tuning in, remember to give the show a rating and a review, and I'll see you next time.
