Adhesions and Daily Life #1

Transcript of Video:

Thank you to all of you on my mailing list for sharing with me about what you want to see in these upcoming blog/video posts, and how you wanted to hear about it, whether you liked the videos or the written.

As a result of all of your feedback, which has been so so helpful, we have plenty to talk about, basically for the next year!

Based on your feedback, I am going to be splitting the posts. So, if you don’t want to watch the videos of these posts, you can read the transcripts instead!

Down at the bottom of the post, I’ll be including any links that I mention so that you can go straight to them and get any information that you might want or need.

Once again, thank you to you all. It has been so great to have your feedback and to know exactly how to serve you best in 2017!

Over the next few of these blog/video posts, we’re going to be talking about how daily life affects adhesions, pain and discomfort in the belly.

I just want to be clear that I’m not going to be so specific that you won’t get all of the other things that you are interested in.

This topic came up as number one – almost 30 percent of you wanted to hear most about this. But the next most popular after that were:

1. learning more about how to avoid surgery in the first place (and what to do post- surgery) and
2. learning more about bowel obstructions.

These subjects are so intertwined that there’s no finite line between them. Even if this particular one – how daily life affects the adhesions, pain and discomfort – wasn’t your first choice, you will still get information that ties directly into other topics you wanted me to talk about.

I promise we’ll get to it all!

There’s a lot of daily life ‘stuff’ that

• helps to relieve symptoms of adhesions
• helps to relieve the adhesions themselves
• helps with the distress and pain you might be feeling . . .

AND, there’s a lot that kind of works against us, drives the pain deeper, or sets us up for more long-term problems.

We’ll be looking at these topics from both of those angles, meaning:

• What in daily life helps us feel better?
• And, what might we be doing in daily life that’s making us feel worse or keeping us stuck?

The importance of proper breathing

If you’ve been watching my videos for a while, or you’ve been on the newsletter list for a number of years, you’ve heard me talk about this breathing issue before. The link below is a blog post about this. It’s so important and it can’t be talked about enough.

When we’re in pain or discomfort, one of the first things to go is our breathing.

One of the very first things we clamp down on is how our breath is coming in and out of our bodies, how our body is accepting the breath and how our body is pushing out the carbon dioxide and pushing out the breath.

How all of that works together is so important because breathing is one of the most important techniques to calm the whole central nervous system. 

Breath itself might not be enough to resolve pain or even sometimes to bring it down a notch. What it does every single time though, is allow the nervous system to function well enough that more healing is possible.

Even if you don’t notice an immediate decrease in pain as a result of breathing in a very specific way, or getting more breath into your body or slowing down your breathing and being mindful – even if that doesn’t turn into immediate pain reduction – it does give your central nervous system what it needs to incorporate the other things that we can do to have an effect on those symptoms.

(If that doesn’t make sense, leave a comment below and we’ll troubleshoot.)

Hopefully, you get a sense that the breathing is central to how our bodies work . . .

It is just as important as blood flow.

It’s just as important as the lymph flow.

It’s just as important as the beating of our heart.

Without the breath, without the beating of our heart, we die. So, we want to keep an eye on how we’re breathing.

In the links below, the older blog posts talks about how to get into your belly breathing or full torso breathing in order to help the nervous system and body find a good way to breathe better.

I hope you take a look at those and get all the information you can out of them. Let me know of any questions in the comments.

Coming Up

The next post is going to be on one of these things (I haven’t quite decided yet) but we’re going to be addressing the following:

1. How hands-on stuff in daily life can make a difference in pain and discomfort.
2. How movement affects these things (both lack of- and maybe too much movement and trying to find that point where movement is an asset).
3. We’ll also be talking about how stress in daily life, even the stress that goes beyond daily stress and goes into traumatic stress – can affect what is going on in your belly.
4. We’ll be talking about diet.
5. We’re also going to be talking about the mental/emotional state and How that can play into how you experience adhesions/pain and discomfort.
6. Your mindset: How keeping an open mind can pay dividends in your daily life and how that daily life affects what is going on in your belly.
7. Also, clothing: Something I haven’t talked about here before, although it does come up with my in-person clients and those in the online programs.  Different forms or clothing, how we use our clothing, can actually really help or hinder us as we’re working with our abdominal distress.

I can’t wait to bring all or that information to you, and I will see you in the coming video/blog post.

Breathing Links: 

• Breathe with Your Diaphragm to Help Abdominal Pain
• Diaphragm Massage
• “The Hug” Technique for Abdominal Pain
• Feeling nauseus, weak, painful? It could be your Ileocecal Valve.