Healing Your Back
*** If you order this program as a CD the packaging will be different than it appears on this website.
Relaxation and Imagery for Self-Care And Peak Performance
This program gives you the tools you need to relieve stress and pain, discover and disconnect your triggers, start and end each day in the right frame of mind and body, and change behaviors that lead to re-injury.
Healing Your Back is a powerful, effective, enjoyable way to take charge of your healing, reduce tension and pain in your back, and speed your return to wellness. It is three programs in one.
This first part helps you focus your mind, relax, and ease the tension, pain, and inflammation in your back or neck. Deep relaxation, guided imagery, and positive affirmation enable you to do this. Next, you will use these same mind tools to explore the roots of your back pain, rebalance your mind and emotions, and rewire your brain to provide you with the healthy attitudes and behaviors to heal your back and prevent future episodes.
The third part of this program enables you to program your mind each morning so that you carry the sense of calm balance throughout your day, thereby avoiding triggering further tension or inflammation. It also provides you with a soothing experience of deep relaxation and visualization just before bed, so your body can more quickly heal you while you sleep.
Many who have used this program found it valuable to read Healing Back Pain, by John Sarno M.D.
Contents – Track Information:
Track 1: Healing Your Back through Relaxation, Stress Management, and Guided Imagery
First, through guided relaxation, you will learn the basic skills of deep relaxation. In the state of deep relaxation, you'll tense and then relax your hand. Using autosuggestion, you will then transfer the skill of relaxation to the muscles of your back. In addition, through imagery, you will send healing light to inflamed areas of your back that need to be healed. Finally, you will use 44 different affirmations of the health and self-care to change how you think, feel, and act in relationship to your back.
Listening to this brief experience each morning will help ensure that you stay focused on the importance of treating your back the way it should be treated in order to heal and stay healthy.
Track 2: Evening Relaxation, a Quieting
Throughout the day you move and do things, and this just about always involves using the muscles of your back. As a result, tension tends to build up during the day. Relieving this tension creates a healing environment in the area of your back that has been inflamed.
Track 3: Exploring the Roots of Your Back Imbalance
Your thoughts, emotions, and attitude toward yourself and life play an important part, both in how your back problem developed and how quickly it resolves. As you listen to this part, you will be guided back through time to discover the mental, emotional, behavioral, and attitudinal issues that may have caused or exacerbated your back problem.
Track 4: Exploring the Roots of Your Back Imbalance
Your thoughts, emotions, and attitude toward yourself and life play an important part, both in how your back problem developed and in how quickly it resolves. As you listen to this part, you will be guided back through time to discover the mental, emotional, behavioral, and attitudinal issues that may have caused or exacerbated your back problem.
Purpose:
- To alleviate mild, moderate, and severe back pain, especially those pains associated with muscle spasm and inflammation
- To help you start and end the day with a healthy, low-stress attitude, through brief wake up and bedtime exercises
- To reduce or eliminate stress and psychophysiological factors in your back pain through deep relaxation and stress reduction training (the relaxation response)
- To increase your self-empowerment and self-confidence
- To help restructure your self-image and prevent it from becoming identified with your back pain
- To teach an “easy does it” attitude and counteract the personality patterns that lead to repetitive episodes of pain
- To help you explore the emotional and behavioral antecedents to your back pain and to rescript more adaptive mental, physical, and emotional behaviors and responses
- To teach the general principles of self-care for the back
How Healing Your Back Works:
The human mind, when it is focused during a period of deep relaxation, has a powerful, direct effect upon the body, and it can either speed up or slow down the healing process. It's hard to do anything without using your back or neck, and when there is pain, tension, and inflammation there, it has a huge impact on your life. It can stop you from working (or make it very uncomfortable) and playing, and even from making love.
The result of this is often that you feel frustrated, afraid, helpless, and can even lead to a reactive depression. These emotions simply serve to increase the tension, and therefore the inflammation, thus making that part of your body you want to heal become even sicker!
Through his studies and his clinical practice, Dr. Miller discovered that there is a way the mind can be guided to overcome these emotions through the use of a deeply relaxed state of mind that he can easily induce in his patients. The result of this was much more rapid healing of the back pain and fewer recurrences. Using techniques drawn from meditation, prayer, and self-hypnosis, deep relaxation inhibits the tension and anxiety and empties the mind of distractions.
Just as visualizing yourself sucking on a lemon will cause you to involuntarily salivate, there are thoughts and images that can enable you to bring about the desired involuntary changes in your body. By mentally imagining certain specific things in this state of deep relaxation you can induce the flow of chemicals and nervous impulses that balance and heal your back. Furthermore, by continuously associating relaxation and balance with your awareness of your back, you rewire your brain to think differently about your back, to be gentle with it, and to use it properly.
Reading Healing Back Pain, by John Sarno M.D. while you use this program may be valuable. Dr. Sarno’s thesis is that back disorders are not the result of structural abnormalities but are due to the mind's effort to repress emotions. Although he did not have access to our current research showing how the chemicals of stress and tension cause inflammation and tissue breakdown, he realized that the inner battle to remain in denial and suppress your emotions creates an actual physical disorder – one that may affect muscles, nerves, tendons, or ligaments. An injury may trigger the disorder, but it is not the cause of the huge (and crippling) amount and intensity of the resulting pain.
According to Sarno, your mind keeps you in denial of the emotion it does not want to face by tricking you into focusing on the pain it creates in your body. When the awareness of this process sinks in (mere intellectual understanding of this process is not enough), the trick cannot work anymore, and the unconscious mind’s need for pain vanishes.
Track 4 of Healing Your Back uses a kind of age regression analysis to guide you back through time. It will help you understand the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are at the source of your problem. It then helps you reprogram your mind so that you replace maladaptive patterns of thinking and feeling and behaving with relaxed, balanced ones.
A rather dramatic and very interesting account of how a man who injured his back, failed back surgery and was placed on permanent disability sank into a depression, then discovered these techniques and not only recovered but went on to become a yoga teacher. Warrior Pose: How Yoga (Literally) Saved My Life
Recommended Applications
- Relief of back pain due to stress, strain, or injury
- Learning valuable skills of deep relaxation, mental focus, and guided imagery
- Developing stress management skills and prevent illness
- Changing your self-image issue to one in which you have self-confidence and any emotional balance in dealing with life's challenges
- To discover and treat the roots of your back problems
- To support and enhance any simultaneous medical or surgical treatment you choose to use
Contraindications and Precautions:
Although there are no absolute contraindications for the use of this product, people who are severely psychotic or who do not want to at least try to follow the guidance offered will probably benefit little from listening. Listening is also not a substitute for needed medical care or psychiatric care for serious mental or emotional disturbance. In any undiagnosed potentially serious condition such as a head injury, again, there will not likely be any harm, but it would be wise to delay their use until an adequate diagnosis has been made.
Although no such problems have been reported, people with seizures of any kind, or neurological or with severe neurorespiratory disease, should check with their primary care practitioner for suggestions regarding the use of this program. Likewise, if you are undergoing psychotherapy, share your use of these with your therapist, as he/she may want to integrate this use with your treatment.
And, of course, if you are driving or using equipment that requires your full attention, do not close your eyes and do not listen to any program that you find causes you to become drowsy, distracted, or incapable of functioning safely. Programs designated as “Drivetime” should be used with these precautions in mind.
Detailed Description of Exercises:
Track 1: Healing Your Back through Relaxation, Stress Management, and Guided Imagery
As you listen to this track, you will hear Dr. Miller's voice guiding you in several of the skills of deep relaxation, including guided imagery, deep self-awareness, and muscle tension awareness.
As you listen, you will begin to experience your body in a whole new way. You'll learn how to use relaxation to sustain relaxation and send it throughout your body. Next, you will imagine that you can look at that area of your body, as if you had x-ray vision, or could travel internally down to that place within you in a tiny submarine. The image you see of the injured area may not be what you would find in an anatomy textbook, but it is an image of your mind he can use to make changes.
Next, you will imagine that you are breathing a stream of white light and the healing energy into your back or neck and surrounding it with healing energy. By making a fist with your hand, then releasing it, you will teach the deeper part of your mind what tension is and what relaxation is. Then you will transfer this to the part of your back or neck that needs to behave in a similar way.
Finally, you will repeat certain affirmations in your mind, affirmations that are designed to change the way you think and feel about your back and provide you with important ways to interact with the world. You will find all these are fully consistent with the behaviors any qualified health professional would recommend for dealing with disorders of the neck or back.
Track 2: Greeting the Day in a Healthy Way
While you are still relaxed, physically, mentally, and emotionally from your night's rest, you will take a few minutes to become more aware of your body. Your goal will be to awaken in a positive way and let your body and mind know that you can accomplish everything that you really need to accomplish today in a balanced and healthy manner.
After a brief relaxation, you will focus on the things that you are grateful for. Your goal will be to establish a deep sense of gratitude and fullness within. This will be the starting point for looking at the goals and plans you have for the future. Here you will adjust your thinking and feeling so that you focus on those things that are truly meaningful and valuable to you. Using future pacing (future projection), you will visualize the outcomes you really want.
Motivated by this compelling vision, you will visualize yourself behaving during the day in a way that is consistent with attaining your vision, while at the same time being consistent with the rapid healing of your back. You will visualize yourself handling challenges that might arise in a calm, confident, healthy way. Especially you will visualize taking care of your back.
Long after your current episode of inflammation and tension has faded into the past, you may wish to continue this process each morning, since it will continue to keep your back healthy and balanced and strong. After a while, you may find that you have virtually memorized this whole process, and it can simply do it in your mind each morning, without having to listen to the recording. Remember, each time you do, you are programming your deeper mind to look at the world in this way, to keep you healthy, and to help you be successful in what you really want to be successful at.
Track 3: Evening Relaxation, a Quieting
This track, just like track 2, can be listened to at any time of the day or night when its guidance and suggestions seem appropriate, but track 3 is especially valuable for use at the end of the day, just after work or just before bedtime.
Dealing with the challenges, pressures, and stresses of the day produces tension in the body, especially in the back. Most of the time people don't pay attention to this, but you will find that being mindful of what you are feeling in your body, and then using these tools can prevent the stresses of the day from triggering your back pain or making it worse.
Once again, after entering a deep state of relaxation you will use the tightening and the relaxation of your hand to become aware of and release any tension, swelling, or inflammation from your back or neck. Then you will be guided to travel to your special place, a place of peace and calm, where you will breathe healing energy through your body.
Next, you will access gratitude by letting yourself be grateful for and enjoy the positive things that have occurred during the day. Then, if you wish, you will allow yourself to look back over the day and discover any situations where you may have lost your balance or engaged in behaviors, thoughts, or feelings that could be harmful to your back or to your health in general.
Finally, you will recommit yourself to being kinder to your body, more effortlessly efficient and effective, relaxed, positive and joyful. Then, after a few positive affirmations, you will allow yourself to drift into a pleasant sleep or wake up to an enjoyable evening’s activities.
Track 4: Exploring the Roots of Your Back Imbalance
If you have experienced pain in your back or neck on previous occasions, this track will help you guide yourself back through time to discover the patterns that are similar among these different episodes. In the privacy of your own imagination, you will be guided on an exploration of some of the important issues in your personal life. The imbalance and pain in your back will guide you to the events you need to look at in a different way.
In the deeply relaxed state, you will find that you can examine situations that your mind may have avoided previously. You will see the different mental, emotional, social and ego purposes that the episodes may have served.
Looking back from the present, it will be clear what would be a better way to deal with situations such as these. In order to give your deeper mind an opportunity to learn a new pattern, you will allow yourself to relive these events, each time, however, picturing yourself behaving differently. Depending on the kinds of situations, you may find that you need to learn to be more assertive. On the other hand, more acceptance might be the appropriate changing of your behavior. In a similar manner, being more expressive, being less “uptight” or rigid might be the advice you would give yourself. Living in these situations, changing your behavior, and changing the outcome, is how you teach your deeper mind these new, more healthy patterns.
Finally, you will project this new behavior into the future, and literally rewire your brain to behave in this new way, the way you really want it to.
Supplementary and related programs:
An excellent alternative imagery program to help with your healing. The very soft and soothing guidance takes you deeper into the healing state. It helps you relax into the recovery program and marshal your spiritual resources and guide them towards your self-healing. This program features a symphony created specifically for this recording by the legendary Raphael.
Often the changes in your life, as a result of your back issue, produce lots of stress. This program will add to what you have learned using Heal Your Back. A carefully graded series of four deep relaxation and guided imagery experiences show you how to deal with the imbalances in mind, emotions, and body that produce and maintain stress. For those having problems with the relaxation in Heal Your Back, this is a great way to perfect your relaxation response. Featuring the music of Stephen Halpern, PhD., this Dr. Miller Classic is a perennial bestseller.
Sometimes discomfort in your body, or even pain, along with anxiety and worry, can interfere with your sleep. Easing Into Sleep uses deep relaxation and meditative techniques to help you learn to release tension and be available to sleep.
Deep Healing - The Essence Of Mind-Body Medicine
Dr. Miller’s classic text will help you deepen your understanding and ability to use your mind to support and heal your body, and how to help others do the same. You will learn the scientific basis of his theories, and how they give rise to his effective techniques of healing, personal growth, stress management, and inspired living.
This better understanding of how mind and body work together will be of great value in modifying your life and your behaviors, promoting balance and helping you maximize your wellness.
Explore the many dimensions of healing the body using the selective awareness of your mind, the power of deep relaxation/meditation, and their power when used together with creative imagination and guided imagery. Each of the different CDs or MP3s in this program shows you how to use the basic tools of systemic healing in a variety of different areas of your life.
As you become more aware of the kinds of changes you need to make in your lifestyle to achieve the highest level of wellness and optimum performance, you will realize how you want to design your future. This program, as its name suggests, will help you reprogram the behaviors of your mind and your body – so you can become the person you really want to be. Once you really know who you are in the present moment, you can make wise plans for what you want to be in the future.
Accepting Change And Moving On
This program helps you through unexpected changes that you may encounter as you deal with changes you may need to make, permanently or temporarily, in your lifestyle as a result of your back issue: Relationships change, priorities change, perhaps bodily functions will change. These changes will require an inner adjustment and this program through guided imagery and self-hypnotic mind-tools will help you through to new patterns of living.