EP 36 | HOW TO HEAL CHRONIC PAIN WITH PLANT MEDICINE

Chronic pain. If you have suffered with this or any other chronic or relapsing illness, these words send shivers through your body because, let’s be honest. This shit SUCKS. Chronic pain is debilitating. It steals your joy, your attention, and your life. It takes your identity and makes your world close in, leaving you feeling hopeless and alone. It can make you question everything you thought you believed, and shake you to your core.

For me, chronic pain has been a companion of my adulthood since as far back as I can remember. I have suffered with migraines with aura, excruciating back pain, IBS, bloating, constipation, all manner of digestive issues, reproductive problems, pain, numbness, tingling, sciatica, extreme anxiety, heart palpitations, chronic fatigue, recurring UTIs, insomnia, panic attacks, and more.

At several points I began thinking I was developing the symptoms of MS, fibromyalgia, or another unknown autoimmune disorder or neurological disease. I tried every medical solution, including doctors and specialists, physical therapy, chiropractors, inversion tables, massage, yoga, meditation, dry needling, pharmaceuticals, supplements, kratom, kambo, and more.

In this episode, I will take you through my own intimate story of how I healed chronic pain with mindbody and nervous system knowledge, plant medicine, and integration and got my life back.

In this episode, John interviews Sinclair about:

• What is chronic pain? 3 months or longer of persistent pain, often accompanied by other chronic illness
• Symptoms coming on at the beginning of her spiritual awakening journey
• A car accident that changed everything
• Moving home with her mom at 37, feeling devastated and like a failure
• Quitting alcohol at Burning Man in 2017
• Developing severe pain in her mid-back overnight a month after getting sober
• How online dating led her on a path to meet plant medicines in South America
• Being called by ayahuasca hiking down the Inca Trail from Machu Picchu
• On her 40th birthday, she made a promise to herself to heal the deep trauma that caused her to drink so that she could stay sober and have a better feeling life
• The pain subsided somewhat while she traveled throughout South America, Mexico, and Central America
• Sinclair completed a 3 week, 200 hour yoga teacher training in Guatemala where she had to sit on the floor for many hours a day and the pain returned to a very difficult level
• Connecting to ancestral hypochondria, becoming hypervigilant, and accepting the level of pain that was there
• Working in an ayahuasca retreat center, learning how to cope with chronic pain while holding space for others
• The pain becoming chronic and debilitating during Covid lockdown
• Recovering from being in service and not taking care of herself 
• Focusing only on pain and work, developing digestive issues
• Taking supplements, seeing doctors, specialists, receiving diagnoses, getting dry needled
• Chronic pain steals your joy and becomes your identity
• Hitting bottom – despair and surrendering that this was not a medical problem
• Chronic Googling of your symptoms is a sickness in itself
• Dabbling in kratom
• Surrendering due to exhaustion, and putting a stop to any and all medical or physical treatments
• Getting a message from mushrooms that she was creating the symptoms and she could heal them
• Finding Dr. John Sarno, the godfather of Tension Myositis Syndrome and theories of how chronic pain actually works
• Opening to the mindbody cure for chronic pain
• Deep research and learning about the neuroscience of pain and healing, trying new healing practices like somatic tracking, brain retraining, visualization, journaling, art therapy, inner child work, and guided meditation
• Understanding what was actually going on in her nervous system and how to rewire her brain
• Finding supportive tools and teachers to help her on the path
• Returning to deep medicine work in Ecuador after two years away from healing in a retreat setting
• Facing the fear and doing it anyway
• Ayahuasca showing her how self-criticism is the main cause of her pain
• Over-giving and the inability to receive out of a fear of unworthiness and not being deserving
• Self-judgement, perfectionism, and comparison as a way not to be present
• The importance of plant medicines to the healing journey
• Do the work that you are teaching, follow your own system, use the work that you created 
• Believing that healing is possible
• Developing a morning practice that was supportive to her healing goals
• Unconditional permission to feel
• Movement, bringing back exercise and yoga, dance
• Being gentle with herself, breaking out of diet culture behaviors, anything self-critical had to go
• Performing spiritual alchemy on herself
• Moving your attention to the life you want to live, honoring the pain, and becoming indifferent to the pain
• Working with a coach, it’s always an inside job
• At 95% pain free, she had a disagreement with a friend that triggered a relapse
• The importance of relapse in the healing process
• The similarities between addiction and chronic illness
• Symptom imperatives and TMS
• You can heal yourself from anything – debilitating addiction, pain, trauma, chronic illness. It is possible to heal and overcome.
• These are now part of her story and her path of service
• Being pain free and no longer suffering with chronic pain

The Biology of Belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton