One of Leo's Videos on Anger Caused Years of Pain

[Jordan]

Hello, I wanted to share some insights on emotions that I have had over the past year. The video that I am referring to in the title is:

This video is not fully the reason for years of chronic pain. Possibly it would have happened anyways but I believe it did contribute to it. Luckily I am basically free of chronic pain now so all's well that ends well I guess  I believe Leo didn't know the dangers of this technique and I have gotten 100x more benefit from his videos overall than negative effects including the years of chronic pain.

This video basically explains that anger can be controlled through wholistic understanding. It explains about how you carve out your own partition that needs to be defended. People refuse to go out of their limited point of view to see other perspectives. Leo talks about moralizing and should statements and recommending acceptance instead. Anger can be loved to death by going meta and seeing how anger works and that being angry at little things can be understood and handled by seeing that the person or situation making you angry did it out of ignorance or that in the big picture, things are exactly how they need to be. 

I started using this technique back near when the video came out 9 years ago, seeing things from different perspective and accepting things as they are. It worked great. Lets say I go to the store and I go on the escalator, I want to walk up it but there are a bunch of people standing on it so I get a bit angry that I have to stand and wait. Then I would go meta and see from a more wholistic perspective and see it is not worth getting angry over something like this because in a few seconds I will reach the top of the escalator. The other people probably enjoy standing and riding the escalator so it is fine if they want to do that, I can accept this as it is. Then the anger goes away and I feel content and go on with my day. This all happens within a couple seconds and overall I am mostly feeling at peace. 

Doing this whenever anger or stress comes up, I was able to live many years feeling quite peaceful and felt emotionally quite good most of the time. After several years of this I started getting wrist pain. Nothing seemed to fix it until I figured out massaging my back with a massage ball seemed to relax my back muscles and stop the pain in my wrists. It took over a year of trying different things before I got over that wrist pain. Then came knee pain when jogging, Stretches and exercises didn't help. I avoided running and got by without aggravating it most of the time. A few years after that I started getting back pain. It lasted 6 months and got to a point where I was in pain the majority of the time whether lying down, standing or sitting. I went through every video I could find on getting rid of back pain spending hours per day trying different things but it kept getting worse over 6 months. 

One day I joined this online meditation sit and at the end it was open up to questions. I couldn't sit due to the pain and paced back and forth during the meditation. At the end we had time for questions, mentioned I was struggling with back pain and the guy leading it asked me if I ever get angry. I told him not really. He asked me if I thought I might be suppressing my anger. I basically looked back and told him yes maybe I am. He said that he was basically 90% sure this is a psychosomatic issue and recommended I read a book from an author from a guy called Dr Sarno. I looked up the book and found healing back pain: the mindbody solution I think it was called. I found it on Youtube and listened to it on 3x speed. I spent a few hours bringing up anger and feeling into it. By the next day when normally I couldn't sit for more than 5 minutes due to the pain, I sat with that meditation group for over an hour pain free. 

It appears that using the technique Leo shared in the video did allow me to control my anger as advertised but even though I did not feel anger anymore, it still was part of my subconscious. It created tension in my body causing chronic knee and back pain and wrist pain before that. I think this technique does work very well to control your anger and it is very useful but it is very important to know that this technique does suppress emotions that can have negative effects months or years later. Basically if you are going to use this technique I wouldn't use it to keep from getting angry but to decide how you behave while fully feel into any anger being careful not to suppress it when it comes up. It can take 45 minute or longer to feel through some anger that comes up from a small seemingly insignificant occurrence but after the torture I went though with chronic pain, feeling through that is preferable than suppressing that anger.

I just wanted to share if anyone has chronic pain or knows someone with chronic pain that might have a similar thing going on. Here is the audiobook that I listened to and basically fixed my back in 1 day:

So yea I have been free of chronic pain for around 9 months and really life is amazing having that contrast  I feel like I have unlimited potential compared to before.

 

Edited 4 hours ago by Jordan

[LordFall]

Great insight. I think psychosomatic symptoms are very real and we're in a dark period of knowledge in terms of understanding it.

Also society is very in favour of suppressing your emotions for the sake of social cohesion and harmony. That has a lot of benefits but we need to be honest about the drawbacks. 

I'm suffering from back pain as well and I do tend to suppress my anger a lot so I will give that book a go, thanks for sharing. I have massive amounts of rage that I struggle to transmute into useful energy so I feel like I lose 40% of my energy daily by just suppressing it so it doesn't go out of control. 

[Jordan]

@LordFall I hope the Video helps. I have no clue if this issue is common or not but it sure did take me a long time to figure out. For me I never really felt rage that made me act in a way I would regret. I suppressed it so much I never really felt it that much so I am guessing I have done this for much longer than this video has been out so maybe this just gave me another method of doing this. I never conceived of it as suppression, from my point of view the anger is completely gone when I start thinking wholistically and it seems taken care of and I don't have any thoughts come up that indicate that I am still angry. Making that connection it makes sense but it is hard to connect something you have done for years with an issue that has come up much more recently.

Edited 56 minutes ago by Jordan