THE DESPERATE NEED TO RELEASE TRAUMA

(16 Notes on 22 Nov 2008—dedicated to B. H. who made these thoughts crystallize)

1.     In one’s life before PD one exhausts oneself trying to be “good,” thoughtful, useful.  Ultimately, this “trumps” or wins over the ability to feel (anything)—especially, and most importantly, happiness.

2.     In PD thinking itself exacerbates the thinker.  The PDer does not seek a release from stressful thinking but rather release from thinking itself—through feeling the suppressed trauma in the body.

3.     If you spend time with those in advanced states of PD, you will see people who are like lost, lonely, largely expressionless, exhausted, numb children (infants). 
Advanced PDers are “adrift” like so many of the mentally ill homeless—as if cut off from human nurture, or incapable of receiving it. This is the tragedy—along with the role that PD drugs play in this process.

4.     Growing up with the dictum “Don’t you dare express your feelings!” (which has a complicated origin), the PDer has lived 90% of the time in the head.  This is in order not to not feel the (unhealed) traumas stored in the body—often going back to birth and even former lifetimes.  These traumas, though, now scream for release—making the PDer’s body a minefield of both rigidity (the trauma on hold) and pain (the trauma breaking through).

5.     Yes, the PDer is hugely needy—what may have been a drive for sex may be (should be / could be) replaced by a drive for releasing trauma. 

6.     This releasing trauma activity results in the real feeling of having been nurtured / heard / understood—even if a little bit—and offers connection to another person, to nature, to another dimension, to God.

7.     How is this releasing trauma activity achieved?  First and foremost, by the “foot holding” activity that Janice Walton-Hadlock so capably, wisely, and generously explains (for free) in her two books at www.pdrecovery.org.  She calls this yin tui na which she translates from the Chinese as “Forceless Spontaneous Release” (FSR).  This is a must for ALL PDers to experience one, two, or three times a week!

8.     Any other hurting body area can be gently held between both hands of a caregiver—like Reiki or many other systems of energetic healing.  Hands can be put on both ears to access the substantia nigra (which is inflamed in a PDer), or above and below the stomach (which is “hard” in PDers).  Allow the hands to remain in these areas (and others) for an hour: a lot happens, including trauma release, a sensation of being nurtured, warmth, well-being, and a deep healing sleep. 

9.     PD, as Janice W-H claims, can be healed—with energy, not with drugs.  This is especially true if the PDer HAS TAKEN NO PD DRUGS.  If the PDer HAS taken the drugs, so what—the benefits still need to be felt and explored.

10.                          I take carbidopa-levodopa, by the way, a low dose.  I am in more and more pain—daily.

11.                         A related point is that I fear abandonment—and will also cleverly deny it by being / living / acting alone. (This speaks to the core of how screwed up I am by PD.)

12.                         A seemingly less-related thought (but which is, in fact, connected) is that I enjoy meeting people at their places of greatest pain—the “letting go” point—because I can relate.

13.                         At issue is that thinking can block feeling.  Feeling, to me, is more important than thinking.  I’m sick of / from thinking.

14.                          I am doing my best.  Do your best, too, dear reader!

15.                          Love, finally, is all there is.  It can’t be denied.  (Thank you, John Lennon, for being the first to point this out to me.)

16.                          And, thank you, B.H., again, for re-introducing to me The Work by Byron Katie (www.thework.com) which leads to freedom (it’s nice to do it with your foot being held!).

(And for Those Without)

By Bardo Mountjoy

29 September 2008

1.     Love yourself fully and deeply.  Be the love you need. Only you can feel your own connection to Love.

2.     Find your Beloved.  Love your Beloved with all your heart.

3.     Love your friends with generosity and joy.

4.     Make new friends all the time.

5.     Spend at least two hours outside a day (preferably with as much skin exposure as possible and in as natural a setting as possible).

6.     Drink lots of good water—lots.

7.     Learn to love breathing. Breathe fully to relax and let yourself go. Develop a daily conscious breathing practice of connected, even breaths—pull on the inhale and let go on the exhale. Preferably spend an hour in the morning and the evening doing this.  (Notice how shallow your breathing is “normally” when you are absorbed in a task such as reading, speaking, or concentrating.)

8.     Develop a morning and evening personal, private “spiritual” practice.  Cultivate energy in your body, experience the subtler “levels” of your being; realize you are a spiritual being having a “seemingly physical” experience here now on earth.

9.     Retire from your full-time job if you can to give yourself the time / space / energy to heal.

10.                         Give and receive as much “energy work” as you can—such as massage, Reiki, Integrative Manual Therapy, Rolfing, Trigger Point Therapy, acupuncture, Tui Na, Deep Tissue Massage, and many others.

11.                         Open up your heart in every way you can conceive.

12.                         Laugh. Laugh.  Laugh.

13.                         Give yourself as much Joy as you can.  Only you can feel your own joy.

14.                          Ask for help.

15.                          Take a warm bath morning and evening—and breathe.

16.                          Give yourself plenty of sleep.  Deep sleep heals.

17.                          Search for therapies that put you into deep sleep—the “still point” of deep healing.

18.                          Pray as often and deeply as you can.

19.                          Learn to sun gaze–look safely at the rising and setting sun.

20.                          Do ritual to honor your life, this planet, all beings, divine oneness; to honor the ceaseless opportunities to love, to feel joy, to find “the starry connection to the heavenly dynamo” (as poet Allen Ginsburg put it).

21.                          Allow animals such as pets to teach you the art of relaxing, letting go, and being fearless.

22.                          Give yourself the gift of nature every day—walk in it, explore it, breathe it in, study it, commune with it, be at one.

23.                          Keep your body alkaline.

24.                          Eschew caffeine.

25.                          If you’ve never taken PD drugs, go to www.pdrecovery.org and learn about healing PD energetically with “yin tui na” (Forceless Spontaneous Release).

26.                          If you take PD drugs, stick to the minimum.

Welcome to Parkinson’s Destiny wherein I hope to share my experiences, hopes, and fears living with this difficult dis-ease frequency from deep within the brain. 

Call me Bardo Mountjoy—not my real name—so that I can rail at neurologists, the mainstream beliefs about Parkinson’s Disease (PD or pd), and even Fate (not a good idea) with an Internet disguise.

I was diagnosed in January 2005 at the tender of (for PD) of 54.  I am now almost 58 as I start this enterprise.  There is so much to “discuss”—especially my notions of PD’s origins, causes, and spiritual underpinnings.

When I can I will keep my points brief, using lists as much as practical.   

I support the theories, findings, and energetic healing method (called Forceless Spontaneous Release or FSR—this is also called yin tui na)  of Janice Walton-Hadlock and her PD Recovery team at Five Branches Traditional Asian Medicine Clinic in Santa Cruz, California (read the two free downloadable books at www.pdrecovery.org).

However, I have taken too many PD drugs (although I put up a campaign of resistance!) to go to Janice’s program in Santa Cruz.  In February of 2008, I made email overtures to the program—having read the two books—but they have amended their policy and no longer accept PDers who have taken any anti-PD meds (so called Dopamine-Enhancing Drugs—DEDs) for more than three weeks. 

This posting will list some of my thoughts about what mainstream neurological medicine claims to be mystified about: causes of PD.

For me, the foot injury that Janice W-H asserts is the root cause of a person’s PD (Yes, this sounds  strange—but READ THE BOOKS!!) probably happened to me at birth by sloppy handling by the obstetrician—thus I want to consider birth trauma as a cause of pd.  (More on this in coming posts.)

Here, then, is a partial list of some sources (I think) of my PD—these are ideas I will take up in future postings:

1.     unhealed foot injury

2.     toxic womb (alcohol and cigarettes)

3.     birth trauma

4.     lack of maternal nurturing—especially breast feeding, skin-to-skin contact, rhythmic activities such as rocking and singing, isolation

5.     emotional abuse in infancy (first three years of life)—which put the right and left amygdalas (important brain centers) on overload and prevented the proper growth of connective nerves in the corpus callosum

6.     “karma” from former lives

7.     unresolved traumatic deaths in former lives

8.     great fear and hurt in my mother (absorbed by me)

9.     being an “emotional empath”—absorbing others’ pain without good boundaries

10.                        ancestral problems passed down on both father and mother lines

11.                         wearing out my sympathetic nervous system (adrenaline based)—stuck in fight-or-flight

12.                         weakness in the limbic system

13.                         reversed stomach meridian (see Janice W-H’s work)

14.                         impaired gall bladder meridian putting the parasympathetic nervous system out of action (switching off the substantia nigra brain nucleus that makes dopamine—again see Janice W-H’s work)

15.                         habits of self-stimulation and self-isolation that lead to joylessness

16.                         other physical trauma to my body—head, jaw, neck, organ injuries

17.                         a dangerous lower back condition called a spondylosthesis (a gap between Lumbar 2 and 3 vertebrae) which occurred at birth—again from that sloppy obstetrician!

18.                         A lifetime of medical issues—“nervous breakdowns,” cluster headaches, a “bad back,” one kidney stone, polyp surgery to remove a large benign polyp from my sigmoid colon

19.                         dental mercury (a lot—now removed—but did its removal put mercury in my brain?)

20.                         other heavy metal toxicity

21.                         other exposure to environmental toxins

22.                         feeling and acting inhibited all my life—living in my head, being a “good boy,” finding it hard to be rhythmic

23.                         having a closed off heart (see the work of Janice W-H)

24.                         other causes I am discovering day by day…

I think that’s enough for now, dear reader, thanks

Bardo Mountjoy