You’ve done your best to sort out the physical side of your low back pain, yet the pain persists. Now what? As with all pain, low back pain can have an emotional cause. A persistent stressful thought or attitude can keep the pain active.
The word “emotion” explains what is actually happening. E-motion is energy in motion. Your painful emotions create energy movement resulting in physical changes in your body that can create physical pain. These changes can range from barely discernable to obvious and extreme, from tension as muscles tighten up, to going “weak in the knees” as muscles just collapse, from posture a little off centre to totally displaced, from a slight discomfort to severe pain.
Pain is a warning. Something is not right. Low back pain can be the result of cumulative influences that have put strain or demand on the low back muscles. What you do to correct that and be pain free depends on what caused the pain in the first place. Previously we considered some physical causes of low back pain and what to do to resolve that. So now lets look at low back pain and the emotional cause.
We talk of a broken heart, having a gut full, of being torn apart, feeling unsupported or let down. Our language is full of sayings of emotions being powerfully experienced in specific parts of the body causing physical distress and pain. We commonly acknowledge that emotional pain goes with physical pain, and that psychosomatic refers to the psyche, the mind, and soma, the body, so we know through our own experiences that the two are linked.
Yet in the medical world solutions are primarily aimed at treating all pain as if from a physical cause, using medication or surgery.
Scientific Breakthrough
Candace Pert, world famous scientist and author of Molecules of Emotion, has done the groundbreaking research to show how our emotions and body interact. She shattered some cherished medical beliefs about emotions being experienced only in the brain, and went on to discover the scientific breakthrough that shows molecules set into motion by emotion have specific receptor sites throughout the body, not just in the brain. These emotion molecules dock in at cellular receptor sites and change the activity in the body organs, in the muscles and other structures, giving scientific credence to the truth that emotion can be experienced, as the saying goes, as “a pain in the neck,” among other places.
Her conclusion was that the body and mind are one, what happens in the brain is happening in the body too, something natural therapies practitioners have known and addressed in their practices for centuries.
Ancient Knowledge
Centuries before our Western scientists worked out that emotions can create physical pain the Chinese had already worked out a co-relation of which emotion effects which organ function and the influence on the meridian energy system. Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture work with a system of energy pathways, meridians, that support all body functions, and with Five Element energy flow patterns of these meridians to understand where energy gets blocked when there is dis-ease or pain. They teach that pain is blocked energy and that releasing the energy block and reinstating flow will reduce the pain.
More recently, in the 60s George Goodheart, a curious and motivated chiropractor, looking for more ways to relieve pain, matched body muscles to meridian energy flow to organs, adding a further dimension to the Chinese traditional insights of organs and emotions. And so Applied Kinesiology was born and has spawned many expressions of kinesiology to give relief to human pain on all levels, physical, mental, emotional, and biochemical.
John Thie, a student and colleague of George Goodheart, created Touch For Health kinesiology to give every day people a way to work with and maintain their health and physical structure. He recognized we all need tools at our fingertips to deal with the day-to-day stresses of life. TFH has been taught round the world, and brought empower and relief to thousands of people.
Kinesiology works to reduce pain and aid healing because it taps into the body’s own resources, the meridian energy flow, the communication between body and brain through the nervous system and, as Candace Pert clearly identified and tracked, through the body’s biochemical messengers.
The word “tap” is very appropriate for Meridian energy balancing.
The dictionary states: tap – any device for controlling the flow of liquid from a pipe or the like by opening or closing an orifice. Acupuncture points are the entry to the energy flow lines, and acupuncture, acupressure, kinesiology neurolymphatic points, neurovascular points among other correction points can control the flow of energy through meridians, opening or closing special connections, increasing or reducing the energy flow, there by reducing pain effectively.
Fight or Flight Muscle Pattern
We are all familiar with fight or flight reaction to a life threat. Emotionally that is anger or fear. With anger the muscles of the upper body power up with extra energy and blood to physically fight, to defend or attack an enemy or opponent. With fear triggered the blood is primarily shunted to lower body so your legs can take off in flight, run from the enemy. Prolonged state of anger or fear will lead to muscle pain and internal organ disruption. But these are not the only emotions that are triggered up when pain is on line.
Each different emotion will produce its own pattern of energy use and muscle reactivity, redirecting energy from less needed muscles and focusing a concentration of energy in the muscles required for action.
Specific Emotions
Pain will trigger emotion in each of us. Unfamiliar pain may trigger fear or concern. A recurrence of an old pain may trigger dread of going through it all again. Long standing chronic pain can trigger frustration or anger that no solution has been found. Or it could trigger feeling sorry for self, that pain is an unfair burden. Or there may be guilt or regret over a lack of implementing lifestyle changes required to help sort out the pain. Certainly, pain can block joy.
The pain may be in the same area in different people yet be caused or exacerbated by different emotions. Each emotion will have its own pattern of under working muscles and over working muscles that shows in our posture and gait. This is the body language that we read to get a sense of how a person is feeling. The energy change occurs first, then the muscles show the distribution of energy with some muscles tensing up and others releasing.
Low Back Muscles
Muscles associated with low back pain, when related to Chinese Five Element meridians and emotions, tell their own story. The multilayered muscles each side of the spine are activated by Bladder Meridian and are affected by fear and anxiety. That’s your major back support and is often too tight and inflexible or not evenly balanced.
The psoas muscle, attached at the inner low spine and to the inner leg, is supported by kidney energy flow, and is also related to fear and anxiety. Another low back muscle, quadratus lumborum, allows you to bend sideways and is an indicator of large intestine energy flow, and goes with grief, guilt, regret.
These three muscles are all linked to elimination of body waste and toxic material. If we do not clear out the bladder and bowel regularly the concentrated toxic contents will create havoc producing health symptoms and pain in the low back. The corresponding emotions, fear, anxiety, dread, and grief, guilt, regret, can disturb the efficient elimination of the body, and conversely, poor elimination can predispose emotional sensitivity to fears and regrets.
And same as for when you do not eliminate toxic body matter, fear, anxiety, dread, grief, guilt, regret, elimination related emotions, can play havoc in your emotional wellbeing, affecting personal and work life. The emotion, the organ disruption, the stagnant meridian and the painful muscle are interconnected expressions of the same experience.
Other low back muscles relate to reproductive system, to blood sugar balance and their emotions and can also contribute to low back pain.
If the organ function is stagnant, the energy is stagnant and the emotions can be stagnant too. Stagnant means not enough movement, motionless, stale, sluggish, torpid, foul. When you face up to the emotion and move through it the meridian energy too moves freely again, supplying the elimination organs and clearing out physical waste, taking pressure of the organs and relieving the stress and pain in the low back.
There is no point in ignoring the wholistic nature of human beings. The best results are achieved when we address all three aspects, the physical, the mental/emotional, and the nutritional/biochemical. Addressing low back pain and the emotional cause is part of recovery.
“I’ve come to believe that virtually all illness, if not psychosomatic in foundation, has a definite psychosomatic component,” writes Candace Pert. And so does pain.
How do we address the emotional side of pain? This will be covered in a separate article.
Cheers
Anna