Pete Egoscue - Pain Free Living: The Egoscue Method for Strength, Harmony, and Happiness

Pain
Free
Living

THE EGOSCUE METHOD FOR STRENGTH,
HARMONY, AND HAPPINESS

Pete Egoscue
with Roger Gittines, authors of Pain Free

An Imprint of Sterling Publishing
387 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10016

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

2011 by Pete Egoscue and Roger Gittines
DVD 2011 by Eight Horsepower Inc.
Illustrations by Peter Egoscue and Roger Gittines

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4027-8643-3
eBook ISBN 978-1-4027-8901-4

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This book validates the wisdom, knowledge, and experience you have about your own health. Because you know more about it than anyone else, I offer the following heartfelt counsel: its always a good idea to seek out and carefully listen to intelligent and perceptive health-care advice. Its always a bad idea to act on that advice, including my own, without fully accepting your paramount role in safeguarding the perfect health that comes to us all as a precious human birthright and legacy.

CONTENTS

YOU KNOW:
An Informal Introduction

THIS BOOK IS A CELEBRATION. It is about the whole worldyour world, your life.

It is about beliefs, actions, and consequences; about the truth concerning your deepest thoughts, where they come from, and what effect they have on your health and well-being.

Both the mutable facts of constant change and the immutable perceptions born of change fascinate me. Our home planet, a shimmering blue-and-green orb first seen in Apollo mission photos barely forty years ago, is a constantly changing place. Five centuries after Columbus boldly sailed west to reach the East (the first recorded case of disorientation, since he really only arrived in a backwater of the Western Hemisphere), the fundamental rounded shape of things seems to have been flattened by technology and relentless systemic upheaval.

The world continues to change. Humankind has evolved with a remarkable ability to change that has allowed us to survive, whereas most other life forms have not, and the majority of our earthly cohabitants are long gone. For some reason, the losers lost their innate ability to change: They depended on certain conditions temperature, fresh water, sunlight, and the like. The ultimate survivalists are able to adjust the menu.

The human ability to change is linked with our internal monitoring systems. By paying attention to what the monitors perceive, we can alter our behavior.

I believe, however, that we are learning to ignore our internal mechanisms of perception to misuse important tools like our emotions, which have long protected us from surprise changes in the environment that are life threatening. Many of our monitors react automatically. For instance, they release immune cells to counter an infection long before a patient consciously notices a sore throat. Others depend on the individual to react by avoiding stressful behavior, taking a nap, or running away from a fight.

Medical science is attempting to cut those automatic links. We cant afford to let that happen.

The ancient Greeks imagined the life journey as traveling through a confusing labyrinth. I invite you to imagine with me that just around the next blind corner on a wall, inscribed in gold lettering, is an observation, inspired by spiritual teachings known as the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism: Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

Who left the message? A seekersomeone just like you.

I intend to remind you of what it is that humankind has long sought and what you already know: truth dwells within; only awareness provides access to the enlightenment of ancient wisdom forged from experience. This book offers a renewal of that awareness, a renewal that leads to (and from) a powerful inner certainty about your health. Humankind possesses roughly a million years of practical, operational experience in dealing with pain. Yet starting comparatively recently, many of us have been beguiled by the idea that medical science knows so much about the inner workings of the body that this or that drug or surgical procedureoften with damaging side effectsoffers the only real hope to those who are in pain.

It can be a comforting notion. Fortunately, though, when we try to command our bodies to shut up and butt out and get on with whatever breakthrough program is being presented to us by caring, dedicated, highly intelligent, and well-educated men and women working for our largest industry (health care), we cant help but notice the stirrings of deep misgivings. They are nothing less than beliefs that refuse to be betrayed, beliefs forged in the white heat of emotional experience and trutha force inside that understands us more thoroughly than any other human being possibly could. Ignorance is a poor excuse for that particular form of bliss. We know: seeking to know is what we strive so long and hard to do. Despite what the experts tell us, our bodies, which are driven by hyper-vigilant sensory perceptions that I briefly touched on earlier, refuse to surrender a deep set of beliefsperhaps lifes most fundamental beliefs. Refusal is what this book is about, not the rejection of pessimism nor negation. This is a book of absolute optimism rooted in an amazing, bulletproof, nearly perfect belief system that functions in harmony with an equally amazing cellular/ molecular-level command-and-control juggernaut.

Juggernaut? Probably an overstatement. Yet it is certainly a word that comes close to describing a mechanism that directs 60 trillion cells in a whirling, lifelong dance of unimaginable precision and complexity. In this case, the inaptly named juggernaut, partnered with the almost too familiar, too trite rubric of spiritual belief, is relying on that stubborn human trait (at the very least, obstinate doubt aimed at the notion that the body is frail and easily broken) to keep you skeptical and scrappy long enough to rediscover the healing power of inner truth.

Bravo! Thats the good news. For a change there is no bad news; not from this quarter anyway. For nearly five decades I have had one simple paramount goal: help people who experience musculoskeletal pain recover their health without destroying the bodys genius for recovering from accidents, illness, and aging and without surgical intervention or taking dangerous pain killers and other toxic drugs. We can do this. The book you are reading right now, as well as the DVD thats included, will serve as an easy-does-it guide and mentor. I started out in the 1970s making house calls. Thats right, house calls. Today the Egoscue Method has worldwide reach with twenty-four clinics in the United States, Europe, and Asia, along with a growing legion of independent alternative-care professionals Ive been privileged to personally teach and certify.