The Stress Prohibited Summit Blog Series: Elizabeth Kipp
The Stress Prohibited Summit Blog Series:10
I am delighted to provide another opportunity to meet one of the amazing contributors to the Stress Prohibited Summit held earlier this year. With such a wealth of valuable knowledge and experience shared, it made perfect sense to create a blog series, so this fantastic advice could be recorded and used by many more of you in the future. Welcome to blog number ten!
Elizabeth Kipp
Elizabeth Kipp is a Chronic Pain Specialist, Trauma-Trained and Yoga-Informed Addiction Recovery Coach, Ancestral Clearing® Practitioner, Yoga and Meditation Teacher, and international best-selling author of “The Way Through Chronic Pain: Tools to Reclaim Your Healing Power. She focuses on helping people realise the power of their inherent healing, offering one-on-one and group sessions.
Elizabeth healed from over 40 years of chronic pain, including anxiety, panic attacks, and 32 years of addiction to prescribed opiate and benzodiazepine medication. She now works to help others achieve the same healing that she experienced directly from the work she teaches.
In her own words
“My experience with stress has been long and deep. Having spent most of my long life suffering from chronic stress, pain, anxiety, and panic attacks - and having healed from all of it - I now dedicate life to helping others find their way through the suffering of chronic stress and learn how to manage their stress in the moment as they are experiencing it.
I feel I have helpful knowledge that was hard won over many years. It is knowledge that I have used to help me move in the world with ease and peace.”
Elizabeth’s top tips for stress management
1) Harness your attention - where is it? Where your attention goes, energy flows.
2) Leverage the power of the conscious breath - a total game changer in handling stress.
3) What meaning are you making of this moment?
4) Can you be present or are you stuck in the past (regret over what cannot ever be changed) or the future (worry about what hasn't even happened yet)?
5) The greatest healer lives within you - so YOU are your greatest healer - Own it!
Dealing with chronic pain
Chronic pain presents us with predicaments that block our ability to heal. In chronic pain – any pain (physical, emotional, spiritual) that’s felt for 15 days out of 30 for 3 months or more – the victim cries louder than the criminal, or in the case of chronic pain, the scene of the crime. Chronic pain presents us with predicaments that block our ability to heal. So, wherever you think the problem is that usually isn’t what’s causing the problem.
Chronic pain is a disease of the brain. We may have had an original injury to an area of the body and experienced acute pain. When the pain lasts 3 months or more, it is considered chronic, and we are subject to changes in the way our brain operates because of it. The problem is no longer at the site of the initial damage; the problem is now in the brain and how it is processing the experience of pain.
There is a phenomenon termed “negative expectancy” that occurs in someone with chronic pain. This refers to an accentuated negative bias. We experience this physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Our beliefs about our experience feed this system, too. There are ten “P” beliefs that we buy into as chronic pain sufferers. They are all lies we tell ourselves about pain and our experience of it. These beliefs and their consequent behaviours help lock in and feed our pain experience away from healing and towards more distress.
Private: We perceive our pain as private since we cannot share our experience and it isolates us.
Personal: We take pain personally. Because chronic pain steals our attention away from other things to it, we can see it as invader.
Pervasive: We believe our experience of chronic pain is pervasive because chronic pain steals our attention away from everything but itself.
Powerful: No matter how hard we try to resist, fight, deny, turn away, or numb the pain, our actions feed the pain even more.
Problem: We take on chronic pain as a problem to be solved. We try to figure out our situation and so, we spend our time locked in the mind. We forget to simply be.
Persistent: Chronic pain is persistent if anything.
Progressive: We view the chronic pain experience as one that is both continuous (persistent) and progressive.
Projection: We project our fears into our pain experience because of the negativity that we feel. We project about our future, fearful that it will be the same or worse.
Perpetual: Another negative expectancy is the pronounced tendency to ruminate, and so believe pain is ongoing and everlasting.
Permanent: We can become so lost in our fears and feelings of powerlessness in the chronic pain space that we lose hope and feel that it will be our permanent state. This is the most dangerous lie of all.
You can see how our reactions to chronic pain – our predicaments – feed it. Chronic pain is its own kind of addiction. We can become trapped in its web of lies. We get locked in its negative spin and if left unchecked, we can end up in hopelessness and believe we are doomed to live a life of suffering. This is the biggest lie we can buy into because you CAN heal form chronic pain. It is NOT a life sentence.
Five Ways to Relieve Stress – Free Offer!
Suffering with stress, anxiety, and fear in your life can lead to chronic pain. But it doesn’t have to be that way!
In fact, you’ll be amazed at the positive impact shifting your awareness around your experience with chronic pain has on shifting your physical wellbeing and, on your life.
Over five days, Elizabeth shares some of the tools she has used to unleash the healing power of the body, calm the mind, and live a more peaceful and fulfilled life.
Click here to find out more!
Watch Elizabeth’s intervention FREE on the Stress Prohibited Summit platform:
Getting in touch with Elizabeth
Web: elizabeth-kipp.com