In previous blogs, I have discussed the concept of a TMS Chronic pain control mindset. The mindset that I adopt when I feel the onset of a flare up, or to keep one from showing up in the first place, is one of extreme confidence in the innate power of my mind over my body. I also draw upon a deep sense of gratitude. I am lucky to know what I know about my pain. Very few people have received the same gift. Just writing about my gratitude sends a warm sensation up and down my previously problematic spinal column. Like every day for me, today is a good day with the back, and there is no chance that won’t be the case tomorrow or anytime soon. I am not reciting reminders, I am actually describing how I feel right now. The opposite was true for many years, but today I am grateful for my cure, my understanding, and for my superpower over my chronic pain. This is still true even on days when I wake up feeling like emotional dirt or when life gives me a bad bounce. But how do you show up every single day with unwavering confidence and gratitude? I do it by developing a super-human belief in my chronic pain healing ability. I step into “The Zone” with mind-body connection just like professional athletes do with their sports performance.
I probably use more Sports Psychology stuff that I read to cure chronic pain than I do TMS specific psychology. The TMS specific therapies I most often see are not empowering or consistent with my cure. They seem very 12 step program like, where you have to surrender and make yourself feel safe, figure out what is wrong with you, and then follow a bunch of steps to reconcile your issues while not falling off the wagon. Sports psychology is the opposite. It is all about facing your fear, managing, and harnessing fear to your advantage, feeling empowered and invincible and overcoming limiting self-belief. That is the stuff that resonates with me and my cure.
Watch an interview with this year’s Masters Champion and the World top ranked golfer Scottie Scheffler. He is ultra confident, calm, very grateful, present, and without a shred of limiting belief in himself. And like with most of these guys he didn’t just learn that overnight, he worked on it and cultivated it very intentionally from a very young age, just like he did his golf game. What is equally interesting is that listening to the 200th ranked player in the world is not all that different. These top-level athletes are just wired differently. Or more accurately, they wire themselves differently.
You can read every TMS book ever written, you can meditate for an hour a day, you can recite TMS rules, you can journal until your fingers bleed, you can smudge, you can work on stress management and stopping emotional repression, and you can pray to any god you choose, but at the end of the day, if you really want to take your healing to the next level, you have to step up to the plate, grab your bat and say “F**K YOU JOBU, I DO IT MYSELF!”.
I recognize being in The Zone from brief periods on the golf course where the normally inconceivably difficult game seems easy. When playing high school sports, some days the baseball looked like a grapefruit tossed in slow motion. Other days, when less “in the Zone” that same ball looked like a ping pong ball shot out of a cannon. If you play in a band there are probably days that the entire band is “tight”, in sink and just flowing naturally with little effort. Some meditation and mindfulness books that I read talk about learning to live at a higher vibrational level. In a nutshell you get back what you put out.
“Your life is a reflection of your vibration. When your vibes are high, you are unstoppable. You are a manifesting machine. You say something and it shows up on your doorstep in a bow tie. ……When you’re in a low-vibrational state, the opposite is true. One thing leads to the next and your vibe keeps getting worse. The thoughts in your head are spiraling downward, as are the situations in your life. This is the power of vibration.” –
Sahara A Rose – Discovering Your Dharma A Vedic Guide to Finding Your Purpose
That over enthusiastic evangelical that looks at you with eyes as wide as saucers, over-gripping your right hand and right shoulders simultaneously while referring to you as his “brother”; That guy knows the zone I am talking about too.
Being in the zone does not mean feeling completely safe and free of anxiety. Being in the zone for TMS chronic pain management does not mean that you are unconscious or being led by an outside force. It means you are not being distracted by outside forces and that you have a high expectation of an outcome that your higher vibration can influence in the present moment. You may be using experience to guide you, but you are certainly not thinking about the past when you are in The Zone. You are in the present and not in your head. This is the mindset I seek in my day-to-day life and with respect to TMS Chronic Pain.
Pro athletes often talk about nerves and nervousness as crucial for them to play their best and get into The Zone. Same with famous musicians. Professional athletes lean into their nerves and draw from them instead of trying to eliminate or hide from them. Many report that when they stopped feeling nerves is then they stopped performing at the highest level. If you are constantly trying to make yourself feel safe through self-soothing therapies but are still battling recurring chronic pain and anxiety, this may be an avenue to explore.
Instead of eliminating your stress, you can learn to use the stress to trigger you into a Zone Mindset just like how pro-athletes harness anxiety and stress to their advantage.
Bad breaks are generally known as part of the game in golf. A ball can hit a sprinkler head and bound into a sand trap. A sudden gust of wind can push a ball out of bounds. You can even hit a 300-yard tee shot right down the center of the Fairway and it can land in the middle of a divot hole that some hacker before you left when they chunked their approach into the lake. A few golfers out there are hotheads, but by far, what you see and even hear the pro’s talk about is that they don’t recognize bad breaks as bad breaks. They are the best players in the world, and they realize that every player out there is going to get bad breaks during a 72 hole tournament. They not only believe they are the best players out of the fairway they also believe they are the best player out of the sand or divot hole. What we see as a bad break they see as a challenge and a chance to show how good at this game they really are! That is exactly the approach I use for mind-body related challenges.
I am not a great athlete and not a great golfer. Golf is a hobby of mine and any time I spend in The Zone while playing is very limited!
I am great at mind body medicine, and I always have been. I spend a lot of time in The Zone when it comes to being able to use my mind to control my body. In fact, I have never come across anyone that has a better overall understanding of how mind body connection works and how to apply it than me. If I were to enter a mind body medicine world tournament tomorrow, my expectation would be a victory. If it sounds like I am being outrageously cocky, it is because I am that cocky.
If you read my last two statements where I explain golf vs mind-body medicine it should be obvious why, at golf, I am very much an amateur, but at mind body medicine, I am a pro. Do you have to be as cocky as I am to heal? Probably not, but it wouldn’t hurt. Pun intended. You can see the same while listening to top golfers talk about their golf ability before talking about there ability to manage waking up with a stiff neck. The contrast is night and day. They mostly have no idea that ALL pain is generated in the brain and that our mind can influence it. Much like I have no idea about how my shoulder always comes over the top on my down swing or how to stop it. Unfortunately for both of us, someone explaining it probably won’t change a thing.
Golfers, like a lot of professional athletes, have confidence in their golf ability that is almost off the charts. I think this possibly plays into why so many appear to have extremely fragile bodies at younger and younger ages in spite of ever higher levels of physical fitness. With better and better players having better and better sport psychologists, they develop such extreme confidence in their playing ability that anytime they play bad, their subconscious looks for a way to distract them from the unthinkability that they are just bad at sports. Many in there 20’s, that exercise and train every morning, and play golf all day, have to withdraw from a golf tournament after playing with their toddler takes them out the night before a big round. Why mind body concepts are unknown is a complete mystery to me. The top athletes hire the top sports phycologists and top back surgeons, but basic mind body pain concepts are completely lost and costing these athletes millions.
Maybe the inverse is why I suck at golf. I have such high confidence in my body that any bad shot I hit must be from lack of any inherit golf skill or natural ability. See how that might play out subconsciously if you don’t have the correct mindset?!
Oh, and hey Scottie Scheffler, congrats on the big Masters win! Want to learn how to play without all that placebo tape on your back and neck? You have a kid on the way. Hit me up before this neck pain gets out of hand and before the surgery train makes the first of many stops at your mansion door!
I am not saying that being in The Zone or in a higher vibration place is possible all the time, but I do believe that just like with sports, being in the Zone is something that can be learned and cultivated. That is what I hope to help people with in this blog.