Natural Treatment for Sciatica – Mind Body Healing and Emotional Freedom

Mind-Body Healing:

For best results, you want to be focused on what you WANT – in this case, being healthy, feeling great, and doing all the great things in life you want to do. The more you can keep your mind focused on being healthy and feeling good, the greater the benefits. At first, it may be difficult to shift your focus away from your symptoms, but with some practice, it will get easier to focus on being healthy. Use positive affirmations, imagine yourself doing favorite activities and feeling great while doing them, and be grateful for the amazing healing ability of your body.

Again, imagine yourself as being healthy and feeling great right now, instead of it being some future event. Most people who make the effort to do this are Pleasantly surprised at the difference it makes.

One other type of “exercise” that I think bears mentioning is the use of visualization and positive affirmations to enhance healing. While this is not physical exercise, mind-body healing techniques do involve regimented mind exercises, and can be very beneficial.

When one has a health problem such as a painful disc condition, there is often a tendency for fear, anxiety, and depression to set in, and for one’s thoughts to be focused on the health problem and its symptoms. Negative emotions and focusing on symptoms can actually increase one’s perceptions of the symptoms, making things worse. In addition, negative emotions can trigger the release of stress hormones, which increase inflammation, also tending to make things worse.

On the other hand, by consciously focusing one’s thoughts on healing and feeling good, it is often possible to reduce the perception of symptoms and possibly even promote healing. The more consistent you are at imagining yourself as being healed – as if it has already happened, not as some future event – the greater the potential for healing to actually occur. This takes a bit of mental discipline, but the rewards can be well worth it. After all, if your activities have been limited by sciatica and other disc-related symptoms, you probably have some extra time to devote to imagining yourself as healed.

One distinction I think is important is to be sure you give yourself positive messages of being healthy, not negative messages of not being in pain. For example, if you are using verbal affirmations, you want to use phrases like “I am happy and grateful that I am totally healthy and feel wonderful!”, as opposed to things like “I am so happy that I am no longer in pain.”

The reason for this is that if you are thinking about not being in pain, the brain still has to focus on pain – tending to reinforce it. If I tell you, “Don’t think about a pink elephant.”, chances are you made a picture in your mind of a pink elephant.

Emotional Freedom Technique:

In addition to simply directing your thoughts toward being healed, there is a technique that is sometimes helpful in alleviating pain and/or alleviating other stressors that may be causing increased pain due to muscle tension. This method is called Emotional Freedom Technique. It uses acupressure stimulation combined with verbal affirmations (you simply repeat a phrase related to your pain or stressor while you tap on various points on your body).

Explanations of, and care suggestions for sciatica and sciatica-like symptoms due to other underlying causes can be found on our blog @ http://treatmentforsciatica.blogspot.com