Is it possible to be Pain Free?

[kenpopaul]

Hi All,

I was laying in bed last night, couldn't sleep. I occasionally suffer from restless leg syndrome (Ekbom's Syndrome) and started thinking about training etc and thought how one of my goals for years and years has been "To be completely pain free".

I started thinking back and can't really remember when I was ever pain free, maybe back as a child or something but my whole adult life I've suffered from various aches and pains. For example since around 14 or 15 I've had a bad back, then a couple of years ago I hurt it even worse. Now it's a rotar cuff injury, I can't run that much due to knee and lower back pain etc. I'm not meaning to whine It's just an observation.

So my question to you all is 'is it possible to live a life free from pain' - I'm not talking occasional cramp or aching after a workout (which is quite normal), I'm talking sharp pain, pain that's there whether you train or not.

Is there anyone else here who has to put up with it? I hate taking pain killers so basically live in mild pain, which I've always considered normal but now wonder if it is.

Any thoughts?

Don't get me wrong, I do have times when I feel fine, but it's less than the pain times. Luckily I can tolerate it and almost forget it's there but it always is.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts guy's.

Kenpopaul

[sillypup]

never had such pain. only pain I have was ones that comes with after surgery pain or injury pain or nerve pinch pain. none that just comes for no reason. so yes, you can live without pain.
pain is a biofeedback mechanism from body that something is wrong. maybe your nervous system is screwed up to give you those pain feedback. sometimes people condition them accidentally from physical stress and even mental stress.

some people get migraines on seasonal occasions and some get them from in laws visiting. it's psychosomatic for some. depends on what's the cause.

and yes you can live pain free. use hypnosis. a hypnotherapist have pain from arthritis and he use hypnosis to minimize or deal with pain. he even use hypnosis for surgery to minimize anesthesia drug because he don't trust drugs.

here's another true story. a client of mine have chronic pain from breaking her two feet due to olympic athletic training in her younger days. they kept putting her on cortisone shots at poisonous levels. this is before they regulated it. so the drugs stayed in her body and made her bones brittle. she broke it a couple times within 10 yrs after her younger days training. for 2 yrs she could not walk on it without pain. even though she already healed. she came to me. i did body work. don't seem to see anything wrong physically, she healed up well. I did some hypnosis talking to her unconscious giving suggestions for healing and did some energy work as it could possibly be energy blockage causing pain. told her that if her body heal up and don't need the pain no more then it can let go. only give pain signal if it's needed to let her know if something was wrong or not functioning right with her foot and leg. next day. pain went away. now she's all happy happy joy joy. sometimes the body to give pain is an old program to let you know something is wrong from old injuries. it just haven't let go of that program still running it. of course for each person it's different. it may just of been they energy work that help her. sometimes people get pain from lack of energy flow or incorrect energy flow. I balanced out her energy and directed it to flow in right directions. now she's a walking billboard yet i don't have a place to practice as corrupt laws in this city don't like natural healers and make it hard to open business if your not credentialed with a doctor degree of some sorts. As you know I do bodywork so the city categorize us into prostitution even if we are honest. and the law makers i know for sure use such service, that's why they don't separate the two field. it's voodoo or forbidden to do bodywork is the message I get when i talk to those idiot doctors/workers that regulate it. bottom line, it's all about money and control. state law is fine, they pass a law that allow natural healers to work without lawsuit for malpractice. it's just the city law decided to make their own to undo what the state law pass to let natural healing practitioner treat clients with client permission. this is how they do it. they use the zoning law to regulate business by putting exception requirement for any work involving touch so one can't get a massage business license. what use is getting a license to practice on people if one can't get a license to open shop? and this is one of the reasons why america is going bankrupt. not business friendly. it still comes down to power and control of working class to go up into higher class. government fear is what it comes down to. they want to keep status quo rather than make society better.

pain isn't normal if it's chronic. find the cause deal with it. most likely it's some sort of feedback for past trauma that you haven't let go. can be psycho, emotional or physical. maybe your lacking proper nutrition, minerals or chronic posture problem? guess you have to be a detective to find the cause. many tai chi masters/practitioners had chronic pain due to poor health but it went away after a yr or two of rigorous tai chi practice. help with posture and energy flow. etc...

the pain that I had for years on my knee area went on and off for years depending on angle pressure from jumping or walking or sudden movement or running. it would have sharp pain at just a particular angle shock. it got to a point where it was affecting my daily life. chronic pain is annoying. so i had it check out. it was a benign tumor blood clot growing on my tendon. had it remove and pain all gone when heal up. occasionally i feel this old pain sensation feeling if i put pressure on it and it's cold weather. yet , it's not pain but a weird feeling of numb pain.

[Andy62]

I am pain free which I attribute in no small way to this type of exercise. Most people think that am younger than I am,but when they find out my age [70] one of the first questions that many of them ask is whether I have pain. They are usually surprised when I tell them that I don't have any pain. In my youth from contact sports and other adventurous activities I had a wide variety of injuries-broken bones [ some of which had to be temporaily surgically pinned], torn cartilages, dislocated joints, whip lash etc. I really think that DVR/VRT and Isometrics, at times combined with some light calisthenics, have really been helpul in keeping in this conditon. Many of my friends who have used other methods of exercise have not been so lucky.

[John Peterson]

Hey kenpopaul,

Years and years ago I read an extensive magazine article by Rock Brynner (Yul Brynner's son). In the article he stated that his dad was in a constant war against debilitating pain in his lower back that caused him to limp. This condition was caused when Yul Brynner was a very young man and was a circus acrobat that was seriously injured in a fall. He rehabilitated himself primarily with dynamic tension style freehand exercises which he was fanatical about doing and strengthened his entire musculature in a way that allowed him to regain strength without further injury to his lower back even though he was still in great pain.

When he made "The King and I" which he performed on stage for several years people were enamored with his beautifully sculpted dancer's physique which was very lithe and cat-like and the direct result of Dynamic Tension style exercise. Woody Strode mentioned getting know Brynner while filming the Ten Commandments and that people were always mentioning the two had nearly identical bodies only that Brynner's was on a much smaller scale (Well dah, since they trained the same way that would make good sense). Later however, Brynner was re-injured even worse while making "The Brothers Karamazov" when performing his own stunts on horse back in 1957. According to his son the only thing that made it possible for his dad to function was a strong devotion to exercise. He also had mentioned that his dad was visibly limping in one scene in the movie "King's of The Sun" where he was walking all alone.

Now why am I mentioning this about Yul Brynner? Just one reason. Yul Brynner knew and understood that if he gave in to pain and stopped strengthening himself in the right, non weight bearing way that he trained that it would not be long before weak, slack muscles would exacerbate his condition and cause his pain to be amplified many times over. And that at that point disability will soon be to follow.

This too, is why I am so adamant about my training. From the hips down I have had searing pain since I was a little boy recovering from polio. My exercises have allowed me to be super fit and super strong without increasing my pain and literally helping me to deal with it. It was not until I injured my shoulder which is completely healed and pain free that I was introduced to systemic enzyme therapy with Wobenzyme N in 1989 (which was great for my chronic pain) and which I continued to take until just four months ago when we came up with our own far more potent formulation of systemic enzymes which we will start selling within the next week or two from Nutriprima under the name " John Peterson's Ultimate Pain & Inflammation"---Systemic Enzyme POWER Formula.

Bottom line: Pain ain't all that bad. Sometimes it motivates us to remain on the right path. It just depends upon one's expectations in life. And it's also one of the reasons Aeschylus's quote has meant so much to me since I first read and memorized it more than 40 years ago. He states; "He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. And in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." I remember that each and every day.

So, is living pain free possible? For some. But for the rest of us there is physical and emotional pain that we have to learn to live with and master or be mastered by. I've made my own choice. So must everyone else.

---John Peterson

[sillypup]

Also remember that pain is a word that is given by society to be able to communicate to each other.
call it something else. pain to you may not be pain to others. it's all semantics. I tend to think of pain as a feedback mechanism to let me know what's up. pain is an ongoing verb. it's not static. pain comes and go. Just like colds , fevers, chills, etc... they are labels that make a process static to be a noun. A cold is just you going through certain symptoms. just because you have a cold don't mean you have it the rest of your life. it means at the moment you are going through a phase where your body is fighting off viruses. sometimes you have to redefine the labels to cope. if your going through pain often. it just means your body is telling you something or trying to send you a message frequently. it's not like a scar where it's just there and you have to live with it. anything that is a process like pain can be influence.

[Greg Newton]

This too, is why I am so adamant about my training. From the hips down I have had searing pain since I was a little boy recovering from polio. My exercises have allowed me to be super fit and super strong without increasing my pain and literally helping me to deal with it. It was not until I injured my shoulder which is completely healed and pain free that I was introduced to systemic enzyme therapy with Wobenzyme N in 1989 (which was great for my chronic pain) and which I continued to take until just four months ago when we came up with our own far more potent formulation of systemic enzymes which we will start selling within the next week or two from Nutriprima under the name " John Peterson's Ultimate Pain & Inflammation"---Systemic Enzyme POWER Formula.

And that my friends, if you have ever pigeonholed John as the guy who always had it easy in everything he did gives you the reason John has become such a student of physical culture. It is also why I believe John has become so good at doing high reps in various calistenics. He has related this to myself and others in private conversation, but I believe this the first time he has openly talked about this. The man knows his stuff, he has to.

Now as to Paul's question, I've dealt with chronic pain. The good thing is, most of it is gone thanks to training like John for several years. Last year it seemed like every few weeks I was noticing another layer of pain no longer with me in my knees, back, hips and shoulders. I was so used to adapting my body movements that didn't know how much I was hurting. I just took it for granted. It is so wonderful to be able to roll off the couch or jump out of bed and be able to move pain free!

The only advice I'd give, is to be cognizant that every exercise is not for everyone at the current level of fitness they are at. Some exercises that John swears by, such as the bridge, I've had to let go by the wayside. Others such as Atlas Situps that I couldn't do in the beginning, I can do now.

[gruntbrain]

At the risk of being blissfully ignorant, avoid TV & newspaper to minimize pyschological pain