- So, do you have fun?
- [Audience] Yeah.
- You're playing. - Yes.
The beauty of this is, it's really a lot like play.
'cause you kind of know,
- [Audience Member] I didn't know you were-
- You kind of know what people would wanna do.
What do you wanna do in your life?
You know, what would be your intention?
What do you wanna do,
what would be fun and joyful and meaningful
and beautiful and important for you,
and also what scares you?
So what we're dealing with
is we're finding things that are scary
and we're making them safe.
Teaching the brain that what's scary is safe.
They were asking about migraine.
- Yeah, our question was how to apply that with migraine,
because there's not one specific trigger,
but there can be many triggers,
- Yeah. - and sometimes,
we don't even know what the trigger was.
And the pain doesn't follow immediately, the trigger,
it can come with a delay, like one day.
- Right. - And so,
we were wondering how to apply that,
- Right, so if you don't know what the trigger is,
you can't use this.
But if you know what a trigger is, then you can use it.
And it doesn't matter if the symptom occurs right away,
you can still start working with the trigger.
So if the trigger is wine, for example.
So what you want to do is imagine
you start with very, very slow.
You can imagine just seeing a glass of wine.
Just look at it and see how you feel, how you react.
And then you wanna make,
see if you can work to make your reaction
to be, oh, it's wine, it's safe,
it's fine, it's good.
It won't hurt me.
Just practise, giving your brain positive affirmations
and messages of safety about wine.
And then imagine taking a sip,
or imagine smelling it maybe, or whatever.
Imagine having a sip of wine,
all this imagination until you can imagine it
with joy and safety.
And if you can keep them practising ,
imagining that with joy and safety,
then next day or next week, whatever,
you want to take a real glass of wine,
put it in front of you,
and just imagine its safety.
Keep practising , training your brain and then smelling.
And you can do this over weeks or months if you want.
But you can do it over a just a few days even.
It can be very quick.
And then when you're ready to drink the wine,
you have just a sip.
And you're doing your affirmations, you're doing safety,
you're enjoying it, you're smiling, you're tasting it,
you're savouring it.
Savouring is a great way to train the brain
to safety by savouring like, you know,
savouring the sunshine, savouring the smell of a flower,
et cetera, savouring the taste of the wine.
And then maybe that day you just have the tiniest sip.
And let's say you start to get some,
you start to get a migraine.
You just have to smell,
say a sip, come on, really? (laughs)
That's silly, right?
And then you do it again, and then you do it again.
And then maybe one time you have a sip
and you get a migraine.
Fine. Do it again.
It doesn't matter.
Do it again. Doesn't matter.
I had a patient who had this very severe, this one,
the guy who couldn't eat anything but chicken and rice.
And one day he said, I'm just gonna go eat
a whole McDonald's meal.
He couldn't eat, he couldn't even have any little thing.
And his friend said,
"Don't do that. Don't do that.
You'll die, you'll have all these."
"I'm doing it, forget it."
And he ate the meal and he was fine.
And he said, I'm gonna do it again.
The second day he ate the meal.
He had horrible symptoms.
Fine. Do it again.
Just the brain.
Your turn.
- [Audience Member] So after yesterday,
I had this thought that I would,
I would try the running.
- Yeah. - But I think,
I still had the fear.
And what was interesting after today's exercise was that,
as, oh, we used it as part of the exercise,
was that I imagined running in a way
that I was really enjoying it.
I imagined being free.
I imagined all that.
- Yeah. - And once I had that,
which was a bit like your savouring that you were
- Yeah. - just mentioning.
And so when I'd ended that session,
it was like, no,
I'm definitely gonna do it.
It's almost like yesterday I had the intention plus fear.
- Yeah. - Today I have,
the intention has been added to,
by a really positive memory instead of,
and that's actually what I think of now more than the fear.
It's starting to replace the fear,
is this positive-like feeling of what running's like.
- Yeah. Yeah. - I just wanted to add that,
that was something extra from today.
- Yeah, because we are emotional beings.
We're not just cognitive beings.
And it's really about connecting the knowledge
that we have to the feelings,
'cause we're the feeling of fear or feeling of safety.
That's a feeling.
It's a felt sense.
The feeling of compassion
or the feeling of danger and worry.
The feeling of safety,
the feeling of joy versus the feeling of fear
and/or frustration or anger.
And when you can connect to those feelings
and you're connecting those feelings
to this activity of running,
or you're connecting those feelings to wine
or even better Belgian beer, best,
now, you're really changing your brain
and your body, so to speak,
'cause you're doing it in a felt sense, a heartfelt sense.
And I think that's really great.
Bringing it up that way is really helpful.
- Well, it was my turn to work.
Well we started and it's very funny
because at the moment I think she was thinking,
I was thinking the same almost.
And she said to me, it's a pity
that you didn't give me the affirmation to say out loud.
And it's really the thing I hate that
I have a deep, deep aversion of that.
- Of affirmations? - Yes.
- Yeah, me too. (laughs)
- And saying it out loud, (everyone laughing)
- Me too. - And asking
to say it out loud.
- Yeah. - I think it's bullshit.
- Yeah, exactly.
(everyone laughing)
- And when we worked together,
she asked me, she said, maybe it's more important
to work about that.
And she said, okay.
But in the beginning I really felt, oh,
oh, oh, - Yeah.
- And then she said, but it's just like playing.
And of course when it's just like playing,
I can play with it just as a child, play with it.
And then I can play with it.
- Yeah. - But just imagine
that it's something real?
- Yeah.
- And it's really going to work?
- Yeah. - And it's really going,
- Yeah. - I have some aversion to say,
change something.
- Yeah. Yeah. - It's, oh.
- Yeah.
Yeah. It's true.
And that's, and where does that aversion?
Where does that aversion come from, anyway?
And what, you know, what's that about, you know.
(audience laughing)
It's interesting, you know. - And the strange thing
is that I have the feeling
that I can say I can switch it almost.
And I'm not sure I want to.
- Yeah, right. Yeah.
You know, everything is negotiable.
Everything is variable.
It depends on what makes sense and what works.
If you're lying to yourself, you know,
if you're telling yourself a falsehood,
we don't wanna do that.
Don't do that.
Don't tell yourself something you think is untrue
or you think is bullshit.
Don't do that.
That would be silly.
But are there other ways of being playful
or being creative to create the sense of,
of safety or create the sense of,
of joy in whatever we're trying to attach it to.
And however you can do that,
and maybe it's not with words at all.
Maybe it's with body movements.
Great. - Sorry.
- Maybe it's, maybe words have nothing to do with this.
Maybe it's with body movements or maybe it's with touch.
A lot of times I have people
put their hand over their heart.
A very simple thing, but a very powerful thing.
There was a woman I saw online,
who was part of a demonstration
and they were like, oh, here's Dr. Schubiner,
heal this person. Right.
You know, like, in five minutes, please. (laughs)
And so I don't know what to do,
but she was having neck pain.
And I said, well, think about the time
when the pain started.
How old were you?
You know, she was 15 years earlier.
And I said, what was going on in your life?
Where were you?
Just close your eyes and imagine that person who's you.
And put your hand over, or no, put your hand over your heart
and see if there's a message.
If there's a message from your neck,
if there's a message from your brain,
what was it telling you at that time?
What was going on?
What was important for you?
And she just started to cry,
thinking about what was happening in her life
and the message that she now could see.
Maybe I needed to be more authentic to my true self,
or something like that, right?
And her pain just vanished right away.
So there's many ways to approach this.
And just one thing that we're doing today
is just the tip of the iceberg.
And this afternoon will have a whole variety of other ways
of approaching this and thinking about it.
And if you have an aversion to something,
that's a great opportunity to find another way.
Perfect. Good. (laughs)
But I always thought affirmations
were really stupid. (chuckles)
But it turns out there's a research study
where somebody did affirmations
and did fMRI of the brain
and they actually changed the brain.
I was like, oh, maybe they're not so stupid. (laughs)
If they change the brain, that might be okay.
Anything else? Yeah.
- In the affirmations, will you always include,
there will be no pain?
- [Howard] No, no, no. I never say that.
- Okay.
- I never say there will be no pain,
'cause I don't care if there's pain or not.
- Mm-hmm. - That doesn't matter.
- Yeah. - If the pain comes, fine.
If it doesn't come, fine.
I'm not trying to make the pain go away.
What we're trying to do
is make the fear of the pain go away.
That's the goal.
We can't control whether the pain comes.
This controls whether the pain comes. (laughs)
We can control our reaction to it,
how we connect to it,
how we treat it,
how we think about it,
how we appraise it,
et cetera.