Are You Suffering From Sciatica Pain?

Understanding the body on a deep level is required to cure yourself of any disorder, including sciatica pain. Your body is built on two core principles of science, the first being chemical: you are constructed of chemical compounds and operated by chemical interactions. The second is electrical. You are an electrical being. Your brain is pulsing with electrical signals, and the cells in your heart beat in synchronization due to an electrical current produced by cells called pacemaker cells. But there is a third, unscientific part of you, and that is your spirit - your essence, your soul, if you will.

At your core you are pure and perfect. But dealing with being human, including the pain, suffering, and guilt which permeates our lives, the lives of our loved ones, and the lives of countless people that we hear about can be a burden to our soul. Negative emotions can run rampant over our desired happiness, and situations in our lives can become overwhelmingly difficult to handle. So difficult, in fact, that we may unintentionally harm ourselves by repressing socially unacceptable emotions, such as anger, resentment, and guilt, and turning them into physical pain instead.

The emotional component of pain is so misunderstood that an entire medical industry, Pain Management, is having a heyday prescribing drugs, surgery, and physical therapy simply because of our inability to cope with the stressors of life. The best way to truly become healthy and pain free is to understand how your emotions, especially those that you may have repressed, may be causing your pain.

Your body has an amazing ability to heal from injury. Even horrendous injuries can heal without lingering pain. Our nerves are there as early warning devices to warn us of possible harm, but they are not meant to keep screaming long after the injury is healed. Consider a sprained ankle. It really hurts, maybe for a few days, or if the sprain is really bad, a couple weeks. But remember when you sprained your ankle years ago‚ it doesn’t still hurt, does it? Or your skinned knee when you were 5. How about that? Does it still hurt? No, it would make no sense for it to still hurt. You have healed. Sciatica pain is like this. There is no reason for your sciatic nerve to keep screaming, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” And it makes no difference if your doctor has found a problem with your low back, such as a herniated disc. Doctors are very good at finding little things on x-rays and blaming your pain on them. It is important for you to know a number of research studies of the x-rays of people’s backs have shown that herniated discs are not indicative of pain. In these studies they x-rayed people with and without back pain and found just as many instances of herniated discs on pain free people as they did those who reported pain.

It is important to know that the discs in our neck and low back start to get compressed early in life simply due to gravity. Compressed discs are not in themselves a cause pain. They have just become a convenient scapegoat for the pain. Your pain, if it has become chronic, is more likely caused by repressed emotions of anger or resentment. Dr. John E. Sarno, a back pain specialist, found that 88% of his patients were able to cure themselves of their chronic back pain, including sciatica, simply by understanding that their unconscious was causing the pain, not their bodies. In many cases their pain was gone overnight. Dr. Sarno believes that our unconscious mind, which also operates our bodies on autopilot (think breathing, blinking, and your heart-rate) takes the emotional pain and creates a physically painful condition by contracting blood vessels, which reduces blood flow to the area, to which our nerves react by shouting out a warning of pain. What this pain is really saying is, “Hey, we need a little more blood flow down here. We need more oxygen.” But all you feel is pain.

Humans are complicated creatures, but we make our lives much more difficult by blaming our pain and suffering on everything beside ourselves. I cured myself of 16 years of chronic neck pain once I understood the concepts of mindbody healing and applied them to my own pain. I sometimes have pain in my neck, and when I do, I check my unconscious. What am I stressed about? What is making me angry? I have learned to “let go” and this has done wonders for my pain management. I don’t take pharmaceutical medication for pain, nor do I treat it as if it is a physical problem by getting massage or sitting in hot tubs. I know that if pain comes, it is emotional and I deal with it. Try it yourself, and see how it works for you.