Masonry

[caption id="attachment_17522" align="aligncenter" width="908"] The author on a friend's shoulders during Thanksgiving in 1977[/caption] Family holidays are one of the most stressful times of the year, so it’s a good time to think about the connection between this kind of stress and back pain, before you find yourself on the bedroom floor of your childhood home, screaming in agony because your...

24 November, 2014 /

In the 90's, Ebay became the best way to find rare videos, mostly on VHS. In 1999, John Stossel profiled Dr. Sarno and his theories in a piece for the ABC show 20/20. Not long after it aired, that piece traded for hundreds of dollars on the Internet because it was the only media that existed on Dr....

22 November, 2014 /

This summer I read Eckhart Tolle's book, "A New Earth". The writing helped me get a better understanding of ego and empathy. Now I understand the idea; the thinker that is observing our thoughts is our consciousness, and that the thinker of the thoughts is the ego. Tolle uses the term pain body to reference the way in which identifying...

21 November, 2014 /

How long did you have pain and what did your doctors/others tell you about your future? I had pain for nearly a year before I met with Dr. Sarno. I was desperate, had stopped running and pain was controlling my life. The osteopath I saw for my pain told me I should never run again, and that if I did it...

19 November, 2014 /

"Be good to yourself". That's what Dr. Arlene Feinblatt said to me when I was stuck on my office floor, unable to even turn over. Five days earlier, as I tried to type a frustrating email, my leg seized up with incredible force, throwing me to the floor screaming in agony. It had cramped up worse than I had ever...

19 November, 2014 /

The day before we launched our recent kickstarter campaign for All The Rage, I wrote a blog post about Glenn Beck and his recent announcement concerning his struggle with chronic pain and auto-immune disease. A couple of days later I was shocked to see an incredibly mean spirited response to his announcement on a liberal video site called The Young...

18 November, 2014 /

Yesterday we posted a clip of Amy Skinner talking about her experience with CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome). Today I got a google alert about a woman who had doctors cut off her foot because she couldn't stand the pain. While we are working on a film about mind body medicine, we are in no way arguing that...

18 November, 2014 /

A couple of years ago, shortly after I had my last insane bout of back pain, my partners and I got our first grant. When I went in the office to meet the coordinator, Amy Skinner, I began to tell her about a Ted talk I'd recently seen that was related to the film we were working on about Dr....

17 November, 2014 /

I woke up today thinking about my father. Like so many other people, he spent way too much of his life suffering because he was unable to break his deeply ingrained habit of unconsciously repressing his emotions. As a psychologist, and someone who had discovered Dr. Sarno's book "The Mind Body Prescription" in the early 80's, he understood the...

16 November, 2014 /