Shoulder & Rib Muscle Pain Healing

EMO and Me

I had a pain throughout the right side of my torso - from the base of my spine, across my ribs, up into my neck and shoulder and into my upper arm - that had first started to develop in 1997, when I was in my mid-forties.

This was an experience that I came to believe was the manifestation of an emotional conflict I'd been going through at the time that had taken me two years to resolve.

I chose to live with my pain. Really, it was only a background sort of discomfort most of the time and just occasionally 'flared up' when I got stressed. And I'm a man, right? And some of us think being 'tough' is what we're supposed to do.

Anyway, in late 2002, I went through another period of emotional conflict that took some time to resolve and my aches and pains got a whole lot worse. As a consequence, all the muscles in the affected area gradually became tighter and tighter, as if they had to hold everything together long enough for me to 'soldier on' and get through what I needed to get through. Eventually, however, they went into a kind of gridlock that made it excruciatingly difficult for me to do anything that required flexibility in the upper half of my body. In particular, household tasks such as loading the dishwasher and folding the laundry - tasks that required short repetitive movements of my upper body muscles - became almost impossible.

I was in so much pain during this period, in fact, that I became convinced that I'd broken - or, at least, cracked - a couple of ribs. Finally, my wife persuaded me to have the area x-rayed (as you may have suspected by now, 'real men' don't go to the doctor) and it turned out that my ribs were fine.

Well, I knew enough to figure out then that, although some physical damage may well have been in there somewhere, possibly real damage to my muscular system, this was still essentially an emotion-based phenomenon. And, since my body was now constantly reminding me that I had a problem to solve, I thought perhaps it would be a good idea to actually look for a solution.

Before long, I was reading about something called 'energy healing'.

Energy healing was new to me and there were apparently a number of different kinds of it. I looked at Reiki at first, then came to EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) and that seemed to be what I was looking for. I was certainly open to believing that even many years of pain could be alleviated or removed very quickly by simply realigning our energy system. However, those chakras and meridian points and things all seemed a bit too complicated for me, and the EFT tapping sequence was totally beyond my memorising ability. So, in the end, I didn't bother. I soldiered on instead.

One day, early this year, I discovered Silvia Hartmann. I'd bought a book she'd just published called MindMillion. I liked it so much, I now promote it on the front page of my website. Through that, I came to Dr. Hartmann's energy healing work with EFT and discovered EMO, the healing system she'd developed from that. So I bought the first of the books she'd written about it, Oceans of Energy.

I read the book through and was delighted to discover that using this particular healing system was, exactly as she claimed - "so easy that a child can learn the basics in under half an hour". Great! I was in with a chance, then.

Well, whether I truly understood what I was doing or not, I got the idea from my initial reading of Oceans of Energy that all I had to do was use my hands and my 'intention' to remove blocks from my energy body and thus I would realign the natural flow of energy through my physical body and that would make it feel better.

I was standing in my dining room, alone, no one else around to be curious about what I was doing, so I decided to give it a go. I wasn't in any serious pain at the time - I'd been practising the relax and flow technique I'd learned in MindMillion and that had been very helpful - I was feeling more an extremely intense kind of discomfort from everything on the right side of my torso being so clenched and rigid and 'locked in'.

So, I said to myself, "Okay, show me where it hurts" and intuitively I put my left hand on my right shoulder, but close to my neck with my fingertips around behind my neck. Bang! My right shoulder immediately jumped upward and there was a sensation of something like a massive pulse in the shoulder and rib muscles on my right side. (I thought afterward of a scene in a cartoon where one of the characters puts a bomb inside a box and when it explodes all sides of the box blow outward and then return to their original position. It was like that. Except I didn't get the little column of smoke that usually comes out of the box afterwards.)

It was an unexpected and startling reaction.

The next thing I knew, I was standing there with tears streaming down my face and the right side of my torso was just completely loose. Relaxed. Free! I could move my right arm up and down with impunity, I could turn my upper body around to the right and stretch out my arms behind me, I could bend down and touch my knees (still working on getting to those toes!). Just like that.

Bottom line, I started that day unloading my dishwasher in s-l-o-o-o-w motion because it was so painful and difficult for me to keep bending down and straightening up. That same evening, I was wrestling in the bedroom with my nine-year old son. Not exactly leaping off the turnbuckle, it's true, but grappling with gusto nonetheless.

The next day, I was dancing around my kitchen like Michael Flatley in Riverdance and unloading that pesky dishwasher with ease.

That was in February. Today, I'm still in there movin' and groovin' like Cousin Skeeter. I do have some residual aches and little twinges (especially noticeable when I'm feeling a bit tense), because I did myself some physical damage, I know, by not dealing with my emotional conflicts before they manifested in my body. That's an area of my life I'm working on now and the physical parts of the experience will make a full recovery in time, I'm sure.

But, generally speaking, I move around very freely these days, in a way that I hadn't been able to for a long time before I tried EMO - and I feel great. I've even been working in the garden lately.

So, that's my story about EMO and me and I don't know what else to say about it except - thank you, Silvia!


Copyright © 2005, Bob Collier

Bob Collier

http://www.parental-intelligence.com