08 Jul A 10-Week DIY Pain-Free & Happy Program

Doctor’s Note: This post is a long one. Only those of you who have suffered enough should continue.  We want to see you pain free and happy. But you have to want it as badly for yourself as we do.  Barefoot Rehab is here for you! 

Here’s a convo I had over text with one of the clients from Pain-Free and Happy. You can HAVE THIS!

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How was Barefoot Rehab and the 10 Week Pain-Free & Happy Course born?

One of the blessings of serious depression that barely gets you out of bed is discretion.

Why bother getting out of bed to do something that someone else can do?

It becomes a little game to play.

If I don’t get out of bed to do XYZ, someone else will suffer.

This has been one of the foundational conversations going through my head as Barefoot Rehab has grown over the past 10 years.

It’s why we:

• do NOT do typical chiropractic adjustments (we’ll leave that to the 5,000 other chiropractors in the state)
• are the ONLY clinic in New Jersey certified to find and fix the most common cause of chronic pain, ADHESION.
• have a few patients/week cry in the office. “Crying” is the result of our doctors and staff deeply hearing and listening to our patients’ stories of suffering (so many people aren’t fully seen and heard by the people who claim to want to “heal” them).
• hug you and leave you with a loving prescription of chocolate almonds.

• we call our patients to say hi and check in on you even when you haven’t been in the clinic in months to years
• our staff takes their own physical, emotional, and spiritual healing seriously, so they can be present for the “wounds” you bring to our space. Like this 20 minute Behind the Scenes Video of one of our Staff Meetings.

In the vain of working or serving when we might not need to, I want to share with you all of the nuggets of wisdom we’ve been working through in our 10 Week Pain-Free and Happy Course and the resources we’ve been studying over the years to put the program together.

Follow what’s below and you can put together your own 10 week course to find Chronic Pain Relief & Happiness similar to how Tim Ferriss did his own alternative MBA program.

If you REALLY want to be pain-free and happy and you’re the go-getter type that doesn’t need hand-holding, digest the material and we GUARANTEE, your life will be transformed.

Like it was for Meg.

After all, we currently offer a 100% Money-Back Guarantee if people follow everything we ask them to do and have no relief by the end of our 10 week course.

Doing everything we ask of people is how we’re able to take a woman who has had:

• 20 years of pain caused by low back disc degeneration
• adhesion throughout her entire body
• repressed guilt and shame from childhood
• 3-4 hours of sleep a night
• systemic inflammation from diet

… and get her to beg us to film her story so she can share it with you all. In fact, Allison was so happy with her health and life transformation that she’s now an ambassador for Barefoot Rehab, working for us for free to spread our message.

If you want a TRIBE of people living out this material and hand-holding each other in the process, then email our patient advocate Richie to see if you’re a candidate for the course.

How to Put Together the Pain Free and Happy Puzzle

If fixing chronic pain or disease were easy, there’d be way less people suffering.

First world societies have a very REDUCTIONIST way of thinking.

We try to make a very complex problem simple.

When it’s NOT always that simple.

Truly holistic care addresses the 4 major puzzle pieces of chronic pain.

1. Mind – mindset, beliefs, conditioned brain patterns, meditation
2. Emotional – stuck emotional patterns, chronic fight-or-flight stress activation
3. Muscle – adhesion, weakness, and the sub-category of joint degeneration
4. Metabolic – systemic inflammation caused by diet or pollutants in the environment, contact with Nature

I can’t recall ever meeting a patient whose pain was caused solely by ONE puzzle piece.

Kristi suffered 23 years of chronic ankylosing spondylitis, was told that she had “bamboo spine and her spine could crack at any time”.

Previous doctors had only addressed one puzzle piece – Pain-Free & Happy was the first time she addressed all of the puzzle pieces and her pain relief showed — 100%!

That’s why every puzzle piece must be addressed to see the full picture of the puzzle box cover.

MIND: When Conventional Medicine Fails, Meditate!

A year ago, our doctors at Barefoot Rehab were telling all of our patients with severe joint damage:

You’re screwed.

However, we were wrong.

What happened?

Joe Dispenza (and the 499 testimonials on his Youtube Channel at the time of this writing) happened.

Fortunately for all of us, Dispenza broke 6 vertebra in his spine in 1986 and was told he’d never walk again without Harrington rod surgery where the bones get bolted together.

How’d he heal? By connecting with his mind for 3 hours a day. After 6.5 weeks in a hospital bed and visualizing what he wanted to have happen, Dispenza made progress and noticed he was starting to have more energy.

4 weeks later, he healed his broken back.

Hear it out of his own mouth.

I highly recommend his Online Courses.

I started doing Dispenza’s meditations and found I could sit in meditation for 2-3 hours a day instead of the typical 15-30 minutes I’ve been doing on-and-off since 2012.

My many decades of anxiety significantly improved (although it’s not gone … yet). I started having visions outside of plant medicine use and my dreams became vivid to the point where I could lucid dream.

I was hooked.

Then, we started having our patients in the Pain-Free & Happy course do the meditations.

Much to everyone’s surprise, people started betting relief when nothing had worked before then.

Just from meditating? WTF!

So, we all started doubling down on meditation with a primary focus on Dispenza’s Blessing of the Energy Centers.

I don’t necessary recommend starting off with the 60 minute meditations as it can be too much to handle at first.

10-20 minute hypnotic inductions or using the Calm or Headspace apps are a good start for 2-4 weeks.

Here’s a 17 minute meditative hypnotic induction (you’ll bring awareness to different body parts) to teach your brain how to go from high-stress Beta to a more relaxed Alpha.

NOTE: You can’t heal when you’re always in Fight-or-Flight Beta brain waves.

Then, we recorded the 7 part meditation from Dispenza’s Breaking the Habit of Yourself.

In this one, you’ll need to pinpoint emotional ball-and-chains that have held you back all of your life.

Finally, we created a Walking Meditation where you’ll practice carrying the new energy you cultivate while meditating into action.

You can just put your phone in your pocket and listen on headphones.

Dispenza’s meditations are arguably the most important piece of the Pain-Free and Happy course.

When all mechanical interventions that humans can think of fail, the science behind mystical healing is the catcher in the rye.

BOOK RESOURCE: Becoming Supernatural: How Common People are Doing the Uncommon – Joe Dispenza
BOOK RESOURCE: Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself – Joe Dispenza

Not everyone’s willing to do these meditations. Then, I might ask them:

How much do you need to suffer before you bring out the big guns?

You Must Believe At Least 0.001%

A short story.

I’ve been considering putting together this course for years.

Doubt always crept in, thinking to myself, “You can’t help people unless they come to the office.”

Remember Allison from above?

Occasionally, she’d hear me shaming myself about what’s possible for people’s healing.

One day as I was seriously contemplating finally doing this, she said:

Chris, no one has ever believed I could heal. I never believed I could heal.

Then, I met you. And you believed in me like no one ever has.

Allison’s words hit me hard.

People need someone to believe in them. To see what they can’t see (yet).

Soon after I started the program, another woman mentioned that I “showed her what is possible.”

Turns out, BELIEF is vital to any of this working at all.

YOU MUST BELIEVE you can be out of pain.

75% of people we talk to on Instagram about systemic chronic pains like fibromyalgia or autoimmune-related pains DO NOT believe they can find relief and therefore, never take action.

When you have emotional brain patterns that have been grooved over decades since your childhood, it can be extremely hard to break them.

i.e. We all probably know someone whose parents told them “You are a piece of shit,” and they carried that belief far into adulthood. I know several people off the top of my head.

If you’re not aware of limiting beliefs, we use the “Morning Pages” journalling process from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way to become aware of our subconscious thoughts.

So much of what we’re doing in the course is breaking down limiting beliefs holding people back.

We follow the advice of the famous mystic Oprah:

You become what you believe.

BOOK RESOURCE: Psychocybernetics – Maxwell Maltz (a classic still relevant today)

Once you believe, you’ll start realizing that you’re rarely ever out of Fight or Flight mode (sympathetic nervous system activation):

• rarely breathing from your lower belly
• doing little to nothing that you find joyful on a daily basis
• never stopping the ruminating thoughts in your mind

… which all prevent your body from having the resources needed to heal (you can’t heal when you’re always in Fight or Flight mode)

You must get your body into Rest and Digest mode (parasympathetic nervous system activation).  In this neurological state, your body is relaxed and investing resources in your health for the long run.

I created the video below to bring our patients’ attention to Non-Negotiables for a Powerful Immune system, highlighting stress as a impediment to healing.

BOOK RESOURCE: The Stress of Life – Hans Selye (an oldie but a goodie)

The mind is the first place to start if you truly want healing.

Without the right mindset, any other puzzle piece will lay there by itself without you ever putting the puzzle together.

EMOTIONS: Stuck Emotions Will Manifest Physically

A few years back, I went to the Temple of the Way of Light.

I did 5 ayahuasca ceremonies in 10 days and had the life scared out of me.

VIDEO RESOURCE: The Reality of Truth (60 min long documentary)
VIDEO RESOURCE: The Last Shaman (75 min long documentary) & Netflix

I saw myself as a pile of bloody bones and when I came back, I was having suicidal thoughts I hadn’t had since high school.

The book Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren, one of the top 5 books that changed my life, helped me understand what was going on.

Depression is a state where your spirit is trying to tell you:

Your entire way of living isn’t working. Change it all.

Since then, I’ve learned I need to reconnect with:

• my body, listening deeply to it’s signals
• my people, having more connected relationships with family and allowing myself to be held by a tribe
• the earth, spending time in Nature and meditating in Mother Earth’s presence
• my work, now calling it “my reason for living” or “our mission”
• service, wanting to be known for healing on my deathbed
• my food, purchasing local, organic veggies and humanely raised animals to consume

BOOK RESOURCE: Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope – Johann Hari

The cool thing about completing old emotional patterns is that people find they start working out for the purpose of health and longevity and not stress management.

Emotions need to be addressed because if not, they will completely block your ability to go deep with meditation.  Dispenza’s best meditation for pain relief, the Blessing of the Energy Centers, requires that you release old emotional patterns like guilt, shame, and anger from your “chakras” to activate the nerve plexuses that live there.

This is science, NOT some esoteric woo-woo voodoo magic.

BOOK RESOURCE: Eastern Body, Western Mind – Anodea Judith (an integrated perspective of the chakras with psychotherapy and childhood development)

Learning how to process our emotions is worth doing for anyone who deeply desires healing.

The Rabbit Hole of Feelings Runs Deep into the Darkness

All this thinking in the Western world is literally making us sick.

We’ve never had higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and other mental health issues than we do today.

Our society teaches us how to leverage our intellectual abilities without much education around our emotional super powers. Our go-to intervention of anti-depressants NUMB us, while real healing does the opposite.

Here’s the thing:

When you learn to FEEL MORE and receive the messages of each emotion, your life will improve because of it.

• Women, you’re allowed to do more than cry (Sadness asks you, “What do you need to release?”)
• Men, you have more than anger (Anger asks you, “Where have your boundaries been over stepped?”) that needs to come out.

The next step is learning how to wield the sword of FEELING.

It’s a hard path, but an extremely worthwhile one.

As you go deeper down the healing path, you’ll start to go further into the darkness.

What Carl Jung calls “the shadow”.

If you can open your heart enough, you’ll learn that the things that trigger you in daily life, whether it’s a partner who chews with his mouth open or a work colleague who has a habit of never asking you “How are you doing?”, completely focusing on himself, is just a reflection of where you’ve been wounded in the past.

BOOK RESOURCE: The Dark Side of the Light Chasers – Debra Ford
BOOK RESOURCE: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious – Carl Jung

When you stop pointing the finger at those around you and instead, use what triggers you as a mirror for your self, profound insights will come.

One individual in our Beta test group had been complaining about his partner for years when he realized that he was hurt by his parents who were apathetic when he was a child, causing him to live close to the poverty line.

Looking at himself, he started the hard work of untangling the old stories he told himself that no longer serve him, his wife, and two young boys.

Psychospiritual teacher Gregg Bradden has one of the only videos of the 7 Essene Mirrors I’ve found on youtube. Once you’re aware of them, you won’t be able to blame anything outside of you ever again.

The Mental and Emotional puzzle pieces are two of the most unique aspects to what Barefoot Rehab does differently than most other chronic pain interventions.

MUSCLE: The Most Common Cause of Chronic Pain No Doctors are Talking About

We’ve been having people from across the world contact us about chronic pain relief for the past few years through our blog, instagram, and Barefoot Rehab youtube channel.

Because our colleagues, Integrative Diagnosis providers, are only located throughout the US and Australia, we hate to say:

You have to fly to see one of us.

It’s the rare individual with lots of free time and money who does fly in to see us. Or drive half way across the US from Texas to New Jersey like Melissa did.

Or why Melissa drove 6 hours a day for a few months to get out of pain!

Even though adhesion is the most common cause of chronic pain that almost no doctors are talking about and removing it is the reason why our practice has grown 300% in the past two years, we don’t address adhesion in the course.

Instead, we address 1 GIGANTIC Pain Principle piece that both patients and other pain doctors get chronic pain wrong.

People disrespect and ignore their pain.

Patients push through their symptoms, not realizing the pain is the brain ringing the fire alarm that some tissue (a muscle, ligament, tendon, cartilage, nerve, or bone) is damaged.

They’ll:

• use ice, heat, cortisone, oral anti-inflammatories to make the pain temporarily go away, putting more stress on the damaged tissue that inevitably makes it worse BECAUSE …
• … working at one’s job, exercising, and holding one’s child must go on.

When we give people strategies based on mindfulness and shamanism to learn how to have a dialogue with one’s pain and how to move to MINIMIZE stress on that tissue, the pain gradually begins to heal.

Physical therapists and chiropractors that have patients push through pain may temporarily get their patients stronger. But this strength doesn’t last because the tissue (almost always a damaged joint) is still screaming.

Then, when strengthening begins, that damaged tissue’s current capacity (or bucket size), is respected so strength increases progressively.

The wisdom behind your pain signals and strength can be boiled down to two concepts:

1. Listen to your pain
2. Use and strengthen your body based on that listening.

Some of the exercises we use with our patients are on our Exercise Playlist on our Youtube Channel.

METABOLIC: Avoid “Poisons” Like the Plague and Consume as many Medicines as possible

The foundational framework we use for diet is based on Chris Kresser’s The Paleo Cure.

Since the days when I owed a CrossFit gym, I watched people lose surprising amounts of weight, get off diabetes and thyroid medications, and have more energy and sleep from a simple dietary change over 30-60 days.

What’s the “Paleo” framework for eating?

• Lots of colorful veggies
• Grass-fed animal proteins and wild-caught fish
• Minimal fruits, nuts, and seeeds
• NO GRAINS, DAIRY, SUGAR, OR ALCOHOL (and that’s a hard “no” while cleaning out)

This style of eating subscribes to the ancient advice of Hippocrates:

Let food be thy medicine.

Disclaimer: We are not functional medicine doctors and don’t claim to be experts in the metabolic piece. We are merely helping 2 out of 3 people who don’t realize how much diet is affecting their health.

Beyond diet, we spend a lot of time helping people realize how vital 8 hours of sleep is EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.

The research behind anything less than 8 hours is a bottomless hole. It’s nearly impossible to be healthy, find pain relief, and be happy when you’re breaking this rule of Mother Nature.

BOOK RESOURCE: Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker

A few major pieces to implement for sound sleep:

• Schedule an alarm 30 minutes before your BEDTIME and keep it sacred.
• Keep your bed-room pitch black. Get black-out curtains.
• Use blue-ray blocking glasses when on the phone or watching TV at night.

Think about it this way: if your body doesn’t have the building blocks to heal (diet) and time to heal to put those blocks in place (sleep), how can healing ever happen?

What’s the Puzzle Cover Look Like?

Can you see it?

The puzzle box cover?

What your life would look like when you have no pain, no disease, and are happy?

FEELING GOOD is your birthright.

We believe that and we’ll take that belief to our graves.

Our mission at Barefoot Rehab is to help people heal more profoundly and deeply than they ever thought possible.

Like Sheb, who started fixing her chronic pain by getting her adhesion removed, and finished it off in our Pain-Free and Happy program!

We will continue to explore all of the conventional, esoteric, spiritual, and shamanic forms of healing that exist on this dirt rock flying through space.

If there’s anything else that has worked for you, feel free to comment below so we can learn ourselves.

After all, some of us are doctors, but before that, we’re all human just like you. We’re on the healing path with you.

The more some of us, the more the rest of our collective human tribe and earth can heal too.

We wish you enormous success on your pain relief and healing path.

If you need hand-holding, let us know. We’re here for you.

Let us know how it goes?

What has been the MOST IMPORTANT PUZZLE PIECE in your healing so far? Or if you haven’t found any relief, what do you think is the biggest problem causing your pain?