“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”- Upton Sinclair This quote is often bandied about when people who believe Dr John Sarno's story - that most back pain is caused by repressed emotions - want to make the point that he saw something that threatened his salary, bucked the...
Journaling and meditation are two proactive and simple tools that you can use to move forward in your process of healing. One prescription that Dr Sarno made for dealing with chronic pain was journaling daily. Nicole Sachs, a former patient and protege of Dr Sarno, focuses some of her work on helping others to journal....
We've been doing this work for over 25 years and have made all kinds of films from rock and roll narratives to crime films to political and personal documentaries. On the surface, most of the films don't seem connected, but certain themes run through them all, and they build on one another. These can be thought of as themes and...
Rage and fear are intimately connected - which can be see in the way we often respond with rage when we feel threatened and feel fear when we are confronted with rage. Sometimes these perceived threats are physical and sometimes they are emotional. When rage is directed at us, we often default to an automatic response of fight of flight-...
In early December I posted a radiant image of my mother on the first night of Chanukah. She got a lot of positive feedback on that image; maybe too much. A week later on her birthday so many people wrote to her about the picture that it kind of overwhelmed her. Turning 84 was hard enough on her...
A few years ago I went to the dentist and wrote about meditation practice. The other morning I went again and found myself thinking about meditation in a slightly different manner. About a week ago I saw a post about Sam Harris' meditation app and downloaded it. Well over a decade ago my partners and I shot a series of...
Most stereotypes have some truth to them -but it’s how those shreds of truth are twisted that leads to the kind of dehumanization that is seen in this ad. My father, who was Jewish, didn't love money so much as he hated to spend it. We got our winter coats in May (when they were practically giving them away) and...
All the Rage - Trailer from rumur on Vimeo. Our film about Dr. Sarno is called “All The Rage” because, according the doctor, the repression of rage is a primary driver of many pain issues. From Dr. Sarno’s perspective, the pain acts as a distraction or defense against feeling or experiencing “unacceptable emotions.” Many people reject the idea that our...
While we were in the late stages of making "All The Rage," my partner Suki was very focused on the edit, and I began to shoot more on a separate project - work related to protest. The short pieces I was making were part of the process of constructing the film we'd finish next, "Working In Protest". As this film...
PROLOGUE This is a post about ritual, health, belief, and systems in general. Often, those outside a system have the kind of perspective that allows them to spot the flaws or anomalies within a system, while those who exist within it are often "willfully blind" to these problems. The case of Enron is a good example. To anyone who looked under...
[caption id="attachment_21631" align="aligncenter" width="960"] Dr Sarno on one of his last days at work.[/caption] Every time we make a film we have to believe that it will reach people and have an impact. Each of our last 3 films has taken a decade or more to make. Some of that time was simply hitting a stall, having to work on something...
Last night, just before I shut off my computer, a music writer who I have corresponded with for over 25 years sent me a picture of this press letter I had sent him in 1994. It's not the most "professional" of letters, and while I'm 25 years older, I'm not sure I've become much more professional. During the night, I...