This week I appeared on an ITV news feature on painkillers with my client Claire Madin. Most people will seek me out because of my Pilates and Yoga teacher qualifications. However when they come to me I always treat the person and not the disease. Pilates and Yoga is, and has been medically proven to help all sorts of medical and mental conditions, however I know that movement pattern alone can not heal and other lifestyle factors have to be addressed including our belief system.  For me a wise therapist treats the person and not the disease. I have a holistic approach and took Claire through a six month lifestyle change using the Chek system, this included looking at Hipprocrates three doctors plus the six foundation principles, we then topped this up with careful pilates apparatus sequencing.

“I have had lower back pain since I was 18, I have always been into sport and training and lead an active lifestyle. Over the years i have relied on normal painkillers to get me through everyday activities with frequent periods of inactivity due to pain.
When I was 32 I had two severely bulged discs in my lower back. I was prescribed diazepam at first and then a combination of strong painkillers and anti-inflammatories by my GP and advised to ‘use them to be able to go about your normal life’.
I was on the painkillers for around 18 months, but because I couldn’t drive using some of them I frequently had to go to work in agony without them. The anti inflammatory also caused me intense stomach pain and acid reflux.
When I tried to come off the painkillers for any length of time i found i had severe headaches and found it impossible to sleep without them at night.
I have private healthcare through my employment and was lucky enough to be referred to a consultant who scanned my spine and diagnosed my disc problems. At this time I was told that the disc degeneration I had was normal for 50% of people in my age group and that I was just ‘unlucky’ that it was causing me such severe pain. It was concluded that there was effectively nothing that could be done to help me because it was just my genetics causing me the problem, but the consultant suggested I try one to one reformer Pilates to help improve my condition. 
This is when I found Nisha and started a programme of Pilates at North West Pilates. Nisha guided me through a lifestyle change using a movement programme and also advice about diet and lifestyle changes which would help to get me out of pain.
Within 3 months I was off the painkillers and after 6 months I joined a group lesson at North West Pilates. I have now been attending there for 18 months and have just signed up for another 12 months without hesitation. The Pilates is brilliant for maintaining your spine health and I now use it as a maintenance programme to keep me out of pain”.

Addictions – we are all guilty!

Most of us have some sort of addiction, believe it not. We get into behavioural patterns that keep us from avoiding the self. The hardest thing to do is ‘to go inwards’, ‘if you don’t go within, you go without’. Any sort of addiction including painkillers, working, porn, mobile phones, smoking, drinking, shopping, exercise, sugar, gambling and sex plus many more are actually golden opportunities to beat life’s challenges and understand the true self.

If you’ve ever heard of ‘vipassana’ this is total silence usually fo ten days without any distractions what so ever. You are forced to go in and face the self, without realising and cannot be distracted by anything else but your mind. Vipassana is a gentle-yet-thorough technique of meditation. According to dhamma.org, it is an observation-based, self-exploratory jounrey that focuses on deep interconnection between the mind and body, which is realised through disciplined attention to the physical sensations.

C – Cycle of Addiction. D – Decline Process. E – Enabling. F – Family Connection.

Are you healing or avoiding?

Healing is a natural process of exploring your authentic needs and identifying where you’re ignorance is not producing bliss in your life. How many diet books and diets do people have to read before they realise that diets do not work. This would be an example of where ignorance stops healing. As we grow and connect with the universe we actually come to release that the ‘ego is the greatest gift to the universe’.

Once you learn how to use the ego and enjoy it and how to care for a body that expresses the ego, you will become the most amazing wonder, surprise and mystery there is. If you don’t remove your ignorance you will carry on taking one pill after the other.

The inherent structure of the human ego is that:

  1. It operates on the ‘exclusion’, so black is only black because you agree that black is not white. Somebody made you mad as they did not make you happy.
  2. It’s really an ‘idea- plex’, without ideas we have no intellectual ego, no mind beyond your autonomic instincts. Without these programmed ego ideas into our mind, we could not possibly make judgments that result in the exclusion expressed above.
  3. The human ego creates the separation between the self and other, it does this largely by labelling and believing its own labels. The ego is a self diagnosis producer that projects first onto itself then onto others.

The ego believes it does or does not have something, this could be someone else’s approval or appreciation. That belief reflects onto emotions and thoughts which become that persons physical expression.

When we believe we are not getting enough of something, we are deficient of this and it is usually love, hence addiction. Various ailments arise from our belief system. The belief and pain we create (I have witnessed it so many times in children and adults) can create serious ailments including  skin conditions, digestive disorders, depression, back pain, emotional turmoil and many more.

When we stay in our belief system, seeing a doctor may get the symptoms to disappear but only to reappear further down the line.

Healing is not about replacing one addiction with another, loading you up with pills, suppliments or implementing a rigid belief system. It’s actually empowering you to address root causes of emotional, mental and spiritual beliefs. Healing is a life long process and is based on two important factors:

  1. Having a goal, purpose, legacy and intention
  2. Taking action

Bibligrophy

Paul Chek blogs