The Curiosity Cure - MindBody Wellness Deb Malkin

I'm back from my trip to The Galapagos Islands and had a experience of knee pain that I couldn't wait to share with you!

I guess that's an upside to being a pain coach, everything is content?
Well I'm sharing with you Part 1 - Navigating Disappointment.

Have a listen!
There will be more coming next week.

Phil de la Haye is an Internal Family Systems practitioner and coach with a particular interest in the mindbody connection and chronic physical symptoms. He has a degree in Psychology and a background in education.

Phil has his own history of chronic pain recovery and he’s passionate about supporting others through their own process of healing.

He and I have a fantastic conversation that can only happen when two people who speak the same language and share some overlaps in our experiences of chronic pain and our healing as well as how we help our clients feel better.

We talk about the impacts of stress on various communities like queer + trans people and the overwhelming overlaps of pain conditions and medically unexplained symptoms that we are seeing.

If you've heard of IFS but have never thought about applying it to MindBody Healing work. Phil shares how IFS can help and his three things that everyone with pain should know.

I LOVE A METAPHOR!

They're some of the best ways for us to convey meaning and embody understanding without a lot of confusion.
Enter my own Drama Club vs. Debate Club as a way to help our mindbody navigate the metabolically taxing and cognitive overload of uncertainty.

We all have survival strategies, habituated ways of relating to our internal and external sensory world. Our brain has a meaning making mandate which it pursues through the nervous system and cognition to understand the world around it, after all it's encased in a skull, and senses are storytellers of sensemaking.

So I've developed a simple and hopefully fun construct of drama club vs. debate club to help you step outside of the endless suffering of overthinking and sensory + emotional avoidance, as well as how to use logic and cognition to help you decrease the stress response that comes with uncertainty, confusion and fear.

If we learn to know and love our meta cognitive strategies we can create a welcome foundation for change.
Enjoy!

This week's episode is another practice. This time it's a follow along repeating sentence relaxation + repetition practice called Autogenic Training. I'm reading to you a script I discovered in a great overview document from the VA. I also share the research about this practice showing that it's a very effective self led activity to help with pain + fear reduction. Which of course are the two main issues with neuroplastic pain.

This week's episode is an interview that I did with Natasha and Maria from the podcast Making Work Fun. I was so excited to talk to them because so often my clients have chronic pain in conjunction with stressful jobs, or find the idea of trying to work while also experiencing chronic pain impossible. Let's face it, work often has a lot of pressure, demands both internal and external, as well as complex social landscapes that can be challenging to navigate. How we deal with our physical body at work can be a trigger for ongoing pain. Learning how to attune and tend to ourselves in these environments can help and change is possible.

On this podcast we unpack how approaching pain in a light and joyful way can be incredibly helpful and healing. And how pain management actually has parallels to other challenges in our lives, including work drama.

If work and pain and concurrent experiences for you, I hope that you have a listen.
And also follow their work. Links below!

Did you know that you can train your brain waves?
Did you know that different types of brain waves are useful for different types of focus activities and learning.

Since the research behind chronic pain explains it as a type of learning done by the brain, we can use a brain wave entrainment practice to teach the brain a new way of experiencing attention and focus.

The work of neuroscientist Dr. Les Fehmi and his wife, therapist Susan Shor Fehmi, explores practices to help us reach a state of synchronous alpha brain waves and how it helps us manage stress and dissolve pain.

I share with you an Open Focus practice and some information from their books and research.
I've ramped up my practice of Open Focus and it's been helping me relax my mind and body and feel more grounded, centered and emotionally even keeled. I believe open focus training is an essential and simple practice to add to our mindbody tool kit to help us rewire our brains out of pain.