The Power of Self-Compassion

Forgiving and nurturing yourself can set the stage for better health, relationships, and general well-being. Self-compassion yields a number of benefits, including lower levels of anxiety and depression. Self-compassionate people recognize when they are suffering and are kind to themselves at these times, which reduces their anxiety and related depression.

 

While some people come by self-compassion naturally, others have to learn it. Luckily, it is a learnable skill.

Harvard psychologist Christopher Germer, in his book The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, suggests that there are five ways to bring self-compassion into your life: via physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual methods. He and other experts have proposed a variety of ways to foster self-compassion. Here are a few:

• Comfort your body. Eat something healthy. Lie down and rest your body. Massage your own neck, feet, or hands. Take a walk. Anything you can do to improve how you feel physically gives you a dose of self-compassion.
• Write a letter to yourself. Describe a situation that caused you to feel pain (a breakup with a lover, a job loss, a poorly received presentation). Write a letter to yourself describing the situation without blaming anyone. Acknowledge your feelings.
• Give yourself encouragement. If something bad or painful happens to you, think of what you would say to a good friend if the same thing happened to him or her. Direct these compassionate responses toward yourself.
• Practice mindfulness. This is the nonjudgmental observation of your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, without trying to suppress or deny them. When you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, accept the bad with the good with a compassionate attitude.

 

              Train Your Brain To Be Happier

The hardest part of all of this everything we're talking about is one simple thing making the time to do it that's it making the time for your precious self to eliminate the people in your life and the things that you do just for a short period of time when you wake up in the morning or before you go to bed at night and you say okay what is the greatest ideal of myself that I want to be today but listen I'm not going to get up until I am this person and you begin to wrestle with your limitations and vercome them you know there's so much talk in the United States about self-love you know people think self-love is getting a manicure or buying a sports car that it's not self-love that's pleasure self-love is when you're sitting with yourself and you are working on overcoming your hardwired thoughts or beliefs or your emotional propensity that are connected to your past and you are really working to overcome them and right on the other side of your pain is freedom right on the other side of your fear is courage right on the other side of your sadness is joy it's the same energy it's just trapped in the body and when you stretch yourself past that point and you break free from the chains of those emotional addictions a side effect of that is called joy and the body is liberated from that level of mind and when that happens there's available energy to create with and so when you break through that you begin to love yourself you begin to respect yourself and you begin to love and respect others because you see yourself and them and now that you're free from it you can understand them with compassion without knee jerking in the same way so the difficulty here is really making the time to do it and if you began to think about a new way of being and you've moved into a state where you said I'm not going to get up until I am this person and not only did you memorize it neurologically in your brain but you allowed the box that you were thinking to become the experience to the point that your body is the unconscious began to live in that future reality in the present moment and when you got up when mind and body were working together in that state of being and you said I'm gonna maintain the state of being my entire day and I don't care bring on the challenges because I want to test my greatness and you did that the entire day the end of your day when you finished your day more than likely you'd have more energy than when you started literal translation of the word meditation in Tibetan means to become familiar with the symbol means to become familiar with so if you're becoming conscious of or familiar with your unconscious self to the point you're so conscious of your unconscious thoughts so familiar with your unconscious habits and so aware of your emotions that you would never let them go by and notice by you that there's no chance for you to return back to the old self to know thyself and then if you became become familiar with a new self because you neurologically fired and wired it in your brain and you emotionally conditioned your body and you were able to do it enough times sooner or later it would get easier and become more familiar to you and you would be able to move into that state of being by the way a new state of being is a new personality and a new personality is a new personal reality one of the things about substances is that it urgently helps to change chemistry in the brain and body so there becomes a chemical dependence on it at that point but the person who wants to change has to want to change that's the first element in other words so no one can make you change but you have to find it in you're to really see if this is what you want to do and I've studied people over the last you know 12 years why is it that one person an old-timer can look at his x-rays and see in a spot on his lungs and the doctor will say to him hey George you know that's a spot on your lungs it's nothing now but if he keeps smoking it will be and then guy just takes his cigarettes throws him in the trash and he's done the next how do you explain that he made the decision and the decision was an experience and it began to rewrite his chemistry in his biology hey how can a person who moves into a state of religious ecstasy a state of absolute faith drink strychnine not get poison bite it's a decision Wow energetic decision how powerful the mind really is well this you people then who actually want to make the decision to change have to make the decision with firm intention once you understand the how to that you can't use your conscious mind to do this you have to move beyond the analytical mind that when you understand brain wave patterns and when you slip into a different state of mind that it's it's easier to do it because most people then you know 95 percent of who we are by the time we're 35 years old is a set of memorized habits and behaviors that become part of our identity or personality so 5 percent of the conscious mind is trying to change 95 percent of what we've memorized hard-wired become addicted to emotionally so the person may want to think positively but they've been feeling negatively and oiling those programs for the last 25 years they might want a new life with new conditions and as they use their mind conscious mind to focus on that their subconscious mind they've been they've been programmed to feel guilty that's mind and body in opposition we have to begin to recondition the body to a new mind so changes in heart she's that you got to get the manual to understand how to begin to unlearn and relearn to break the habit of the old self and reinvent the new self you know Newtonian physics is about cause and effect you know you and I wait for for most people they wait for a reason to feel joyful they went for a reason to feel gratitude and when the event happens then they give thanks that's cause and effect uh-huh the quantum model of reality releases something different the quantum Maalik model of reality says you have to change your mind and Bridey thoughts and feelings ahead of the actual event so your brain and body are physically changed to look like it's already happened so if you begin to give thanks ahead of the experience in your body by the way is the unconscious mind it does not know the difference between an event in your life that produces an emotion or an emotion that you fabricate by thought alone to the body it's the exact same okay so if you could begin to move into a state in which you were giving thanks before it took place and you could convince your body emotionally that that vent already happened because you were in a state of gratitude then you would begin to literally biologically change your body to no longer be a record of the past but now in fact a map to it to the future because if your brain and body are beginning to respond neurologically and chemically now you're moving into a new state of being and if you can get up in that state of being then what you did inside of you should cause an effect outside of you so the quantum model says then that we have to give thanks ahead of the event we have to move into the state of joy and change our energy before it happens so much so that we're not using our senses determine or reality any longer so if we're living by the emotion of pessimism right or depression or sadness or the emotion which is connected to the past is actually filtering your perception in order for you to begin to see possibility you got to look at the thoughts that are creating that pessimism that are happening behind the scenes of your awareness you got to look at your behaviors that demonstrate pessimism or unhappiness and then you got to look at the other emotions that are you know generated from pessimism and when you can observe those programs that means you're no longer the program you're the consciousness observing the program and if you can become so familiar with your the way you think act and feel so much so that they would never go by unnoticed by you biologically and neurologically and chemically you would begin to break the circuits in your brain that are connected to the old you because nerve cells that no longer fire together no longer wire together and if you no longer signal the same gene emotionally because you're no longer allowing those emotions to be created in the body and you begin to say now let me think about what joy looks like let me begin to demonstrate optimism and you begin to read about say Ernest Shackleton who crossed the Antarctic and right all those men and spent 600 days away because of his optimism he overcame began to think well if that guy can do it I can do it and then you began to plan your behaviors and you began to modify them to produce different experiences that created different emotions you would literally begin to reinvent neurologically and biologically a new self but no most people don't like to look in the dark place they would rather turn on the TV or get on the cell phone and complain but awareness is 80%  of this right yeah and by my point is you can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering or you can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration well first usually people wait till they reach the point where they've broken down I'm saying why wait right why not just do it most people as I said earlier are trying to create some type of change in their personal reality but they're still the same personality we have to become somebody else so if you were to sit down and you began to think about a new way of being a new thought that would connect to a new emotion that could drive you to plan a new behavior and you reviewed that enough times there's a good possibility that you would change your brain neurologically and you would emotionally signal your body chemically to signal new genes to look like your brain and body already had the experience the biological and their own scientific model says it's possible and if you could get up as a different person than you sat down now here's the key and then to maintain that modified state of being your entire day independent of your environment something unusual should happen in your life that's the law so it's like this most people do a meditation they have a great meditation and then they spend the rest of the day in a state of memory that's like eating an organic healthy breakfast and then spending the rest of your day eating junk food right the purpose of meditation is to prime the brain and body into a new state of being to elevate your sense of self so that the environment is no longer you're not effective it actually you've changed something inside of you both neurologically and chemically in mind and body that now you're beginning to produce an effect in your environment so I always recommend experiment in your reality we are scientists in our life now when you say I move through my day with grace and ease and flow finds me and I live in no time and accomplish everything there is a biological effect that's taking place in your body and as you begin to feel like what that would feel like when mind and body are working together now you get up in a state of being because a state of being is when thoughts and feelings are aligned now you have to practice that enough times so that it begins to become familiar to you but if you did this and you said okay you know universal mind quantum field giver of life I took time out of my day to emulate you as a creator so listen if I'm just a child of God and I'm practicing this and experimenting I gotta know that you're real so listen if you've been paying attention to my efforts show me a sign but don't show me a typical sign show me your sign there that I could never predict that surprises me that leaves no doubt that what I did inside of me produce some result outside of me so that I'm inspired to do it again.

I hope you all  better understand to make your brain happier 

 

 

                                      Back Pain

 Will treatment for the mind, body or both help?

    By Danielle L. Sarno, MD

 

If you’ve ever struggled with low back pain, you know that it can be surprisingly debilitating, even if the discomfort is short-term. You may find it difficult to grocery shop, do housework, play sports, or even tie your shoelaces. When back pain is chronic, lasting 12 weeks or longer, it can impair quality of life and physical function, and contribute to or worsen stress, anxiety, and depression.

While people dealing with chronic back pain are often directed to physical therapy, research shows that psychological approaches that teach strategies to manage your experience of pain can help. So, would combining these approaches do more to ease the pain? A recent systematic review of multiple studies suggests that it might.

How big is this problem, and what did this study find?

Worldwide, low back pain is a leading cause of disability and affects more than 560 million people. In the US, four in 10 people surveyed in 2019 had experienced low back pain within the past three months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

• physical function, such as standing, climbing stairs, and managing personal care
• fear avoidance, because fear of pain can lead people to avoid movement, which contributes to the cycle of muscle weakening and further pain
• pain intensity, measured by pain scores from validated rating scales.

The review revealed that physical therapy plus psychological approaches, such as pain education and cognitive behavioral therapy, more effectively improved chronic low back pain than physical therapy alone. More specifically:

• For improving physical function and fear avoidance, pain education programs in conjunction with physical therapy offered the most sustained effects.
• For improving pain intensity, behavioral therapy combined with physical therapy offered the longest-lasting benefits.

The study shows the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach to chronic low back pain. Integrating behavioral therapy and physical therapy helped people achieve better function, reduce the cycle of avoidant behavior, and reduce the intensity of their pain. In their daily lives, this may lead to more productive workdays and better sleep, as well as enabling people to participate in more social activities, which boosts overall well-being.

What else should you know about this study?

The authors define chronic, nonspecific low back pain as pain between the bottom of the rib cage and buttocks crease, without an identified structural cause like spinal stenosis, cancer, or fracture.

However, "nonspecific" is a controversial term. Many experts on back pain believe that further evaluation might determine specific, multiple factors that contribute to pain.

How do psychological therapies help with pain?

Psychological therapies can help people reframe negative thoughts and change pain perception, attitudes, and behaviors. Examples of approaches that aim to reduce pain-related distress are cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), biofeedback, and pain reprocessing therapy (PRT). A recent study evaluating PRT showed that psychological treatment focused on changing beliefs about the causes and consequences of chronic low back pain may provide substantial, long-lasting pain relief.

Neuroscience has demonstrated that the brain and body are always connected, and pain is a combination of medical, cognitive, emotional, and environmental issues. Strategies to manage pain effectively must address your body and brain by integrating physical and psychological therapies, such as with functional restoration programs and working with a pain psychologist. Gaining a better understanding of pain, and treating all factors contributing to your chronic pain, can be empowering and healing.