A therapist friend heard me talk about how I had strange pains that would come and go in various parts of my body, at various times, for no apparent reason. She suggested I read a book called The Way Out by Alan Gordon. 

I got the book. And–it’s helping a lot! The premise of the book is that there is something called neuroplastic pain, which is when the brain misinterprets a sensation as pain.

Alan Gordon walks you through just how to reprogram your brain to interpret the signals correctly. I recommend the book.

You might also want to watch this excellent YouTube video in which Mayim Bialik interviews Alan Gordon. I watched this first and then bought the book for further reference.

A note for those who have the trait of High Sensitivity: I think we may be more prone to neuroplastic pain. I say this because I find the flareups with my neuroplastic pain often come after I’ve been overstimulated.

Overstimulation is emotionally painful for HSPs, so it makes sense that we may also feel it as physical pain. 

There are several ways to “train your brain away from pain,” and I’ve written about it from several different angles.  Check out my blog posts here.

Train Your Brain Away from Pain

This Thanksgiving (2023), I am focusing on gratitude and simplicity.

Subtraction and simplicity have been my watchwords this year.

I have been focusing all year on subtraction and simplifying (I have a ways to go!).

As I tried in this Black Friday week to fend off FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out–on great deals), and practice POMO (allowing myself the Peace Of Missing Out), the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” written by Elder Alfred Joseph Brackett in 1848, has come to mind.

Here are the lyrics:

Simple Gifts

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

And here’s my Thanksgiving greeting ecard to you, because I’m so thankful to those who follow me and read my blog posts and emails.

There is a story in the third chapter of the biblical book of Genesis that explains, in my opinion, the source of every single problem any of us has in life.

We, like Adam and Eve, fell for a lie.

In Adam and Eve’s case, it was one lie: that God can’t be trusted.

In our case, it’s a bunch of lies, a spider web of lies, but at the bottom of them all is pretty much the same lie. It’s some variation of “God can’t be trusted.”

Maybe it’s that you don’t even believe there is a God. You can’t trust a God that you don’t believe exists.

Maybe it’s that you believe there is a God, but you’re not sure what kind of a God it is.

Likely the “God” in your mind is somehow tainted by your experience of your own parents, who were certainly like “God” to your baby self.

(Let’s face it. No parent is perfect. So to believe, on a heart level, that the heavenly Father is perfectly loving, can be a stretch—at least to the heart, if not the mind.)

Think about it. If you could truly and completely trust that there is a Being who is all-powerful and all-loving, totally wise, who is always for you and is able and willing to turn any experience into a blessing in the end—wouldn’t you want to trust that kind of God?

Who wouldn’t?

The rub is, we have believed all kinds of lies that counter that kind of belief. Read More→

In the U.S. and elsewhere, the end of October/beginning of November, depending on where you live, signals a turning back of the clocks from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time for many areas of the world.

These artificial time changes can wreak havoc on the body, though turning the clocks back an hour isn’t as challenging as “springing ahead” an hour for Daylight Savings Time.

As an aside, I believe so many people get sick when autumn turns to winter partly because of the time change, partly because of eating too many sweets around Halloween and the holidays, partly because we’re outside less, therefore have less exposure to the sun and more exposure to viruses via closer quarters in drier air.

When the body says rest . . .

The longer evenings are meant to signal our bodies to rest more, but do we? Most of us turn on our LED lights, continue looking at screens with blue light that blocks melatonin levels, and don’t get the rest our bodies were designed to get in the darker months.

With all these factors converging to lower our immune system, it behooves us to take extra care of ourselves at this time.

If you have a more sensitive nervous system, all these things may have an even greater impact.

Here are some tips to navigate the time change:

1. The night of the time change, go to bed at your usual time (before you reset the clock), and let your body decide whether it needs that extra hour. If you awake after your usual amount of sleep, you’ll know that’s right for you. PLUS you’ll gain an extra hour and feel fresher than if you stayed up later. 
2. Cut the processed sugar!  A research study done by Loma Linda University in which participants were fed different forms of sugar found that the effectiveness of white blood cells (our immune cells which fight infection) decreased up to 50% after 1-2 hours of eating sugar, and lasted up to five hours!
3. Cut out the blue light at night. I use special glasses (and if you wear prescription glasses, you can get the kind that fit over them). There are many brands, but I like the ones with the red lenses that block out blue and green light.
4. Get more rest. Listen to your body. Be willing to make the adjustment to more sleep over the winter months. It’s part of your divine design to live within the natural rhythms of life.
5. Boost your immune system. Fruits and vegetables, broths, herbal tea, my two “healthy brews.” Warm liquids can soothe and open up nasal passages and provide healing nutrients.
6. Guard your circadian rhythms. Find out your best bedtime and stick to it. I am amazed at the difference it makes if I get to bed before 11pm, vs. after. 

A device that helps the circadian rhythms of all your organs is the HOLOS Balance. Check it out here (and get 15% off if you order). This device has helped me to sleep better, have more energy and perform better, heal quickly from my surgery, recover faster from PTSD (the Balance Plus has a PTSD setting), create calm and peace, and much more! I absolutely love this device.

Alane Freund, an international consultant on High Sensitivity, has a YouTube video on adjusting to the time change you might also want to check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x869nFZigU

(I don’t resonate with her spirituality, but I do agree that this is a good time to lean on your spirituality, and she does have good things to say about sensitivity.)

I would add: If you are Highly Sensitive, be very aware of how much stimulation you are getting, especially at night. Because we process everything so deeply, everything we take in will need more time to process.

I’ve had to limit myself to listening to podcasts or watching videos in the evening, because I need that time to process what has already occurred that day. If I add more to process, it interferes with my rest.

Do you beat yourself up when you make a mistake?

I used to. As a recovering perfectionist, I used to get down on myself whenever I didn’t do anything optimally.

I didn’t really think I could get it “perfect,” but I did strive for optimal. Was I using my time in the best way possible? Was this approach in my business the best way?

If it took “too long,” or some better way appeared, I would feel bad.

Optimization was a prison. Making mistakes was not allowed.

I found out where that came from. Two foundational memories.

One was such an early memory, it’s amazing I remembered at all. I attribute the memory to a “cellular memory” stored in my body and spirit, that my spirit revealed to my soul (consciousness).

My first six weeks of life were here.

When I was a week old, I got very sick and had to have abdominal surgery to cut away intestinal blockages. I was in the hospital for the first six or seven weeks of my life. On top of that, I burst my stitches at one point, and also got pneumonia. I was one sick baby.

In 1957, they did not let the mothers see the babies in the NICU. (Actually, the whole concept of a separate hospital unit for sick infants was itself in its infancy.)

So there were attachment issues for me as well. (Who did I actually bond with?)

It’s amazing that I can remember anything from so young an age. But I definitely have this hazy memory of a head nurse scolding my nurse, saying, “You can’t make a mistake in here. You could have killed that baby,” referring no doubt to me.

No erasers allowed!

Another formative memory was first grade, when the teacher didn’t allow us to keep erasers on our pencils. She said it “encouraged us to make mistakes.” (In first grade!)

One night, I did my arithmetic homework, and realized I’d made a mistake. I erased my answer as carefully as I could, and wrote in the correct answer.

Nevertheless, the next day, the teacher still marked it wrong, because I hadn’t gotten it right the first time.

I’ve since healed both those memories, and now see mistakes as being a necessary part of learning and growth. Besides The Healing Codes, I want to share another thing that helped me with this.

It was being open to seeing mistakes as not being mistakes at all.

It started when my husband (who always did the grocery shopping) would sometimes not get what I’d put on the list, but something else.

At first I’d feel frustrated. But then I begrudgingly had to admit (to myself at least), that what he’d gotten instead was better.

I started being open to seeing what good could come out of other “mistakes.” Astonishingly, I saw that very often, God turned what seemed to be a mistake, or some frustrating experience, into something good.

One shining example of this was when I had ordered something online, and I couldn’t download it. I contacted the company owner, and somehow we ended up being great friends for years. She even supported me when I published Abundant Gifts. She loved it so much, she gave me $1000 to promote it! She also tutored me in online copywriting.

God knew I love my books!

Another example: For years I chastised myself for not moving more of my books from my office to the basement, where we had all kinds of space for storing books. Well, after a basement flood and subsequent mold issue, we had to get rid of all the basement contents. I felt God had kept me from moving those books into the basement because those were books he didn’t want me to lose. (Being a writer, my books are among my most precious possessions.)

Because of these two things—healing the memories, and being open and even expecting “mistakes” to turn out well in the end—I no longer beat myself up when I do make a mistake. I look for ways to correct it, and if I can’t, then I wait to see what good can come out of it. Actually, I pray that God will bring good out of it. Then I look for how that prayer will be answered.

Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up for making a mistake. That, I believe, only puts up an energetic block to whatever good God might bring out of it.

Perfectionism and optimization, be gone!