“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-...
Last night I spent a little time going over a grant application for film funding. Years ago, I gave up on applying for grants because we never got them- literally- in our first ten years of applying, we got none. The one positive thing about the process is that it does force one to do the work of articulating what...
The Commons Trailer from rumur on Vimeo. When I start a new project, I rarely have a full understanding of how it connects to our other work. However, I have spent the last few years taking stock of what we’ve done, and where we are heading, and there are a lot of patterns that have emerged that make the decision-making process...
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...
2017 was a very long year that went by at light speed. While 2016 challenged the basic idea of objective truth, 2017 took a hatchet to it in a way that highlighted how we all inhabit different worlds and different stories. For those who see Trump as a lying incompetent narcissist, it is almost unfathomable that others don’t see it...
Cathryn J Ramin's heavily researched look at the back pain industry, "Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting On the Road to Recovery", is painfully satisfying to read - especially for people who have struggled with back pain and the surgeons, pushers, and needle jockeys that profit from it. Ramin's book is framed by her personal journey to...