This is a personal story about my own journey of understanding and healing from a recurring diffuse pain in my lower legs. After some deep inner work (the same as I do for my clients), I realised that the actual root cause was a set of four “interconnected” subconscious beliefs and certain emotional residues, all of which originated in two stressful events in my childhood.
Finding core beliefs by going into the body and feeling the sensations
About ten years ago, I developed a diffuse pain in my lower legs, which would arise on occasion. After a few years with this recurring symptom, I finally decided to do some deep inner work through EFT Tapping. With this process, I “went into my body” with my focused attention, with the intention to feel the “pain sensations” as fully as possible inside my legs. After some minutes in this state of focus, I was able to receive the message from my body, that the pain was due to my tendency to rush and hurry. This is a tendency that I have had for a long time, perhaps since my early 30s. Eventhough I knew it was not healthy, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from doing it. Such a learned behaviour can be quite difficult to change simply by using our will-power. Rather, we need to use a deeper mental and emotional process.
To give you a typical example: I would be standing in the bathroom in the evening and about to brush my teeth. As soon as I started, I would feel a need to rush with it. In my mind, the rushing was necessary because it was late in the evening and my husband was already in bed, and I didn’t want him to wait for me, although I knew he didn’t mind. Yet, even just the thought of needing to rush triggered the leg pain. As my conditioned thoughts to hurry set in, I would feel the stress-level rising in my body, and within seconds, the pain would emerge. It felt like a tension, constriction, and even increased density in the legs. The more aware I got of the situation, the more apparent it became that the pain in my lower legs was due to my tendency to hurry, and that the pain emerged in response to my thoughts, although subconscious and automatic.
At this point, I knew that if could identify the thought-patterns and underlying beliefs that preceeded the pain, I would be able to process and transform these mental patterns and associated emotions, which in turn would undo this hurrying tendency and remove the need to tensen my legs, which would finally remove the recurrence of pain.
To conclude, the underlying belief (that was causing the pain) could be summarized as:
– “I need to rush/hurry with what I am doing.”
Next, I decided to go even deeper. I was now aware of what the underlying core belief was (“I need to rush/hurry with what I am doing.”). But, from where did it originate? And what were the underlying emotions and possible circumstances associated with it. After some further inner work, I realized that the pain actually stemmed from TWO separate stressful incidents in my childhood, which were interconnected by building on each other:
a) The first incident was a “near car accident”, which happened when I was about 7 years old. My father, twin sister, and I were traveling in the car down a two-way, single lane road in a forested area on Gotland, in the South of Sweden (similar to the image below). It was in the late 1970s and we had an old brown Volvo 240 without any seat belts in the back seat for us children. My twin sister and I were quarreling for some time, and didn’t stop to our father’s growing frustration. Finally, he got so angry with us that he pressed the breaks rather hard, whereupon we flew up, standing straight in the back seat, while the car slided to the right side of the road, nearly going down into the ditch. I was totally unprepared for this sudden hard stop and felt quite chocked. In this very moment, I subconsciously created the following belief:
– “If someone gets angry with me, something dangerous might happen.”
b) The second incident was some years later, being around 11 years old. My whole family and I were on our way to see our cousins for dinner. It was a 25 minutes drive away from our home, partly passing over a bridge to a suburbian large island. I was sitting in the back seat with my sisters, and we were just crossing the long bridge above water. I remember my father was getting increasingly upset with all of us at that moment. He was angry that we were so late (again), and he expressed how much he was against being late. In some indirect way, he put the blame on the other five of us, that is, his four daughters and wife. (It apparently took some time for us females to get dressed, so probably we were to blame to different degrees…) While hearing his angry words, I remember scrutinizing silently my own share in us being late, and wondering if I were to blame for the situation and thus for his anger. Here and then, I subconsciously draw the following conclusion (as a belief):
– “If I am late, someone can get angry with me.”
Somewhere in my deep subconscious mind, I must have put the above two beliefs together:
– “If I am late, someone can get angry with me, and if someone gets angry with me, something dangerous might happen.”
Furthermore, the core belief “I need to rush or hurry with what I am doing” (first identified) is at play here too, being a sort of “secondary” belief sitting on top of the two “primary” beliefs stated above. Furthermore, the two event-induced beliefs created a third summarizing belief. So in sum, what caused the recurring pain in my lower legs was the sum of four interconnected beliefs, as well as some emotional residue stored in my body from the two events. As the emotional residue was processed, the three interconnected (limiting) beliefs could be released.
In conclusion, by processing certain painful events in our lives and identifying and transforming associated subconscious beliefs, we are able to remove the mental and emotional “constructs” that lie at the root of our bodily pain. There are various methods available for such inner work, for example EFT tapping and BodyWisdom. As a valuable complement to these, I have developed a highly effective and profound process, called Into Essence, which works in a stepwise manner on all levels of our experience (i.e. the mental, emotional, physical, energetic and subconscious levels).
Thanks to such inner work on myself, I am today almost painfree in my legs. Yet, if the pain does arise again on occasion, it is because there are still certain underlying beliefs that need to be discovered and shifted, and/or some emotional residue that still needs to be processed and released. Fortunately, with these tools, I can choose to continue my inner work until all of these steps have been completed and the lessons “embedded within the pain” have been received and integrated into my daily life. When/if this occurrs, the recurring pain will no longer be “necessary” and thus (most likely) cease to be.
Some final words of hope and encouragement
By sharing this personal story, it is my hope that you will recognize the possibility that you too can become painfree. Especially if you have tried other types of emotional, mental or physical therapies in the past and haven’t find the relief that you hoped for. If so, I would love to help you. Please welcome to contact me via email or phone to learn more.
