Rewire the Chronic Pain Pathways with Steve Ozanich

In this Episode

• • [01:56]Stephan welcomes Steve Ozanich and sets the stage for the discussion on mind-body health by asking Steve to define TMS.
  • [07:07]Steve discusses Dr. John Sarno’s influence on his incredible healing, acceptance, and overcoming anger.
  • [14:01]Steve outlines the real healing mechanisms needed for people.
  • [19:38]Steve elaborates on how the brain creates distractions through physical symptoms due to repressed emotions.
  • [22:30]Stephan and Steve delve into the power of attention and awareness.
  • [29:45]Steve emphasizes the impact of ego on the healing process.
  • [35:21]Steve addresses repressed rage and perfectionism in chronic pain.
  • [42:08]Steve highlights the influence of smell, sight, and sound on physical symptoms.
  • [46:32]Steve shares his personal experience of vision loss due to emotional trauma.
  • [59:46]Stephan relates concepts to quantum theory, the double slit experiment, and observing reality.
  • [74:49]Stephan and Steve stress the importance of disclaimers and advise medical checkups along with consulting a TMS doctor.

Jump to Links and Resources

Steve, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thank you for the opportunity to spread this message.

Yes, and what a great message you have. It’s so empowering. I’ve had conversations with you before this interview, and so has my wife, Orion. You’re doing amazing work, and I’m so excited that you will share this with my listeners. First of all, let us describe TMS to our listeners.

It’s a term that has evolved over the years. It came from the late, great Dr. John Sarno. He was a professor and a medical doctor at New York University and was very frustrated with his patients’ outcomes. He was the head of the Rusk Rehabilitation Education & Research at NYU, the first outpatient center in America. It’s a pretty prestigious place. But, he wasn’t very happy with his patients’ outcomes after surgery. It didn’t seem to be working. Everything works a little bit. 

He was frustrated, so as a good physician, he went and looked at their records, and he noticed that they suffered a lot of other health problems along with back pain, allergies, sleep problems, tinnitus, and skin problems. He began to put it together and talk to his patients, which is actually very novel today for a doctor to speak to the patient. They just don’t do it anymore. People complain, “Hey, my doctor never looked at me. He walked into the room, looked at my chart, scribbled a prescription, and walked to the next room.” 

TMS, or mind-body syndrome, is one of the greatest discoveries in medical history. However, very few people believe it, and that is a tragedy. Share on X

Well, he didn’t do that. He talked to them, and he started to notice patterns in them. “Hey, these people are goodists. They’re responsible people. They worry a little more than the normal person. They’re perfectionists in many things.” And so he started to talk to them. He would say, “Do you think it’s possible that you could forget the herniated disc on the x-ray and the MRI, that it doesn’t mean anything at all, that maybe this is just unconscious anger within you due to your personality type?” Of course, most people would say no, so they would live a life of suffering. 

The ones who did say yes basically all healed because the truth is, there’s nothing wrong there. So, he first called his discovery TMS (tension myositis syndrome)because the muscles were locked up in the hips, backs, and knees. He described it as the most painful thing he’d ever seen in clinical medicine. He was not engaging in hyperbole. He didn’t talk like that. He was a very humble man. So for him to say the most painful thing he’d ever seen, listen to that. And so it was attacking the muscles, he thought. 

Through years of astronomical success, he noticed it was also attacking tendons and ligaments. And so he changed that phrase from tension myositis to tension myoneural muscles and nerves. But then, at the end of his life and career, he realized through great success that it was attacking everything, the whole system’s immune system—cancers, MS, neurological problems. The phrase TMS has evolved from tension myositis to tension myoneuro to mind-body syndrome, TMS. So today, we call it the mind-body syndrome. But in my work, my company is called TMS Consulting. 

The TMS stands for TM for The Mind-Body-Spirit because, as you already know, my work has to do with the spiritual problem. These are spiritual issues at the highest level of understanding. They’re not physical body problems, although they do manifest in the physical body. We know that the physical body is a manifestation of the spirit and the soul—the mind, body, and spirit, and ultimately, it’s working. Many people may not recognize me with the beard because I just got ended. A massive four-month fast of raw fruits and vegetables, and I’ve lost 20 pounds. But I’m watching people heal almost every day: late-stage cancer and MS symptoms. 

The physical body is a manifestation of the spirit and the soul.

I helped a lady get her hearing back in California. She went deaf, had skin and sleep problems, you name it. Every day, I get questions, “Is this TMS, Steve?” It’s one of the most asked questions. I have to tell them, “I’m not in the medical industry. I’m a teacher of presence, a teacher of TMS.” It’s all part of the mind-body-spirit process because I’m watching it through my eyes and experience. It’s one of the greatest discoveries in medical history, and very few people believe it. This is the tragedy. Dr. Sarno called it a tragedy. You’re looking at a guy right now who didn’t believe it. I thought he was crazy.

You experienced incredible healing because of Dr. John Sarno and his work. Could you elaborate on that?

That’s a good way to go here—my own story. He even told me when he read my manuscript, “Your story’s the heart of that book.” I said, “Well, I kind of thought so, but it was good to hear it from somebody.”

But by the way, I love that quote that John Sarno gave to you on the back cover of The Great Pain Deception. It says, “I recommend this book because the author, Mr. Ozanich, has lived through the experience of having unsuccessful conventional treatments for pain attributed to structural abnormalities of the spine. Once he became aware of and accepted the diagnostic premises of the tension myoneural syndrome, his pain resolved, and his experience highlights the significance and power of knowledge in overcoming psychologically induced symptoms.”

Yes, and what’s wild is that’s the way he spoke. He spoke in very polished language terms. That was just his everyday colloquial speech right there. But I came into this world with an endowment of health problems. I was in the hospital at seven years old with rheumatic fever. You don’t hear much about it anymore, but tonsil problems like everybody else. When I turned 14 years old, my back started to hurt. Although I’ve worked with younger people than that, that’s still pretty young. 

And, of course, we got this roundabout treatment, the boilerplate treatment. “You might need surgery someday. This is a disc problem.” Those words kept me in pain for 30 more years because it wasn’t the back pain; it wasn’t the structure of the spine that was the cause of back pain. I know people listening to this might think that’s crazy, but I thought it was crazy, too. I actually threw his book when I first read that because my left leg was paralyzed in the late 1990s and because, for 30 years, I tried everything. There was core strengthening, sit-ups, acupuncture, hanging upside down, and it waxed.

Acroyoga or whatever it’s called.

If it came along, I tried it, and as I said earlier, everything makes you feel good for a little bit.

So, Chinese herbs, herbal teas, and everything else are used.

Program after program after program, I did it. But in the late 90s, it got really bad. I had gone through quite a bit of tragedy in the 1980s, and it was catching up to me, and I couldn’t walk anymore. I had a foot drop in the left leg and couldn’t get out of bed anymore. The doctors would say, “What’s your pain on a scale of one to ten?” I would say 11. I couldn’t think. I hear Howard Stern talking about how it saved his life and said, “I was going mad.” You go mad with pain. It is the most painful thing in clinical medicine. 

I got his book and didn’t believe him, as some people listening may not believe right now. I threw it, and it got worse because when the truth is kicking us in the face or the back, it will worsen if you don’t listen. It started to get worse, and I began to just give up on life at that point. There was no hope for me. Then, a friend of mine introduced me to Dr. Sarno’s book. I went back to it a second time, and I saw the beauty in it. I saw the genius in it. I started to do the work, which took me longer than most people because I didn’t have anybody like me to come to; nobody was doing the work back then. 

It took about a year and a half. Although I can help people sometimes in a Zoom session or even faster, I think it was psychologically safer for me to heal slower. I noticed people who heal slower actually heal deeper and longer. Quick healers, sometimes it comes back.

He discovered that this personality type, which we call type T person for tension, generates high tension. They’re movers and shakers. They’re business people. They get lots of college degrees. They want to excel at everything. They want to win, win, win. Or, as he used to say to his patients, “You push, push, push yourself hard.” 

The ego will destroy people's lives, and they won't even know it. It's the silent killer. So open your heart and mind to the truth. Share on X

But people don’t often realize that because they have no other frame of reference. “This is all I know. I’m me. I’ve been me since I was a child.” Perfectionism was the only word I believed in. I didn’t believe the rest of it, but I knew I was a perfectionist. That word kept pulling me in, reeling me in, and eventually, it ended up working. But he proved clinically that this is not a theory or philosophy. He proved this over a 50-year career. These people generate tremendous amounts of rage, but they don’t know it because it’s called unconscious. 

Unconscious means you’re not aware of it, and so people immediately dismiss it. “Oh, I’m not angry.” Well, that’s why you have the pain, because you’re not angry. You auto-repress it or automatically repress things that bother you. I’ve had so many people write to me that my book helped them to heal after decades of pain when they read this line in my book. “Perfectionists go around angry all day long, but they don’t even know it.” It does something to them, this truth, and they’ll get tears in their eyes and understand. “I’ve been an angry human being.” It upsets them at one time but frees them on the other end, and they begin to heal. 

So, if you could accept the premise that whatever is on the MRI doesn’t mean anything, even if it’s a tumor, that’s still a mind-body process, but that might have to be taken care of surgically. Possibly, of course. But we’re talking about regular back pain. It’s not coming from herniations, stenosis, osteoarthritis, spondylolisthesis, or all the labels they give. It’s coming from rage. I call it silent rage because you’ll never feel it. That’s a big hurdle for people accepting the truth. 

They showed me my MRI, and you can see clearly that the nerve is pinched. It’s clear, ostensibly. Dr. Sarno’s telling me, “Don’t pay attention to it. It’s not being pinched. Not at all.” Well, that was tough. I had to drag my left foot for nine months. My wife was a paraplegic herself, and so there was only one leg between the two of us. I used to tell people that I didn’t want my back operated on. I didn’t want anybody to touch it, and thank God I didn’t listen to them. They wanted to operate. I listened to him, and it resolved. 

So, some internal work needs to be done with people. But the real healing mechanism is knowing what’s going on. As he used to say, “The back surgery is not the wrong modality. It’s the wrong diagnosis. It’s not a herniated disguising or back pain. It’s TMS, rotator cuff, meniscus in the knee, or plantar fasciitis.” It goes on forever. They can give it a label for eternity. Almost all those things are from an emotional process.

The real healing mechanism is knowing what’s going on with your mind, body, and spirit.

I’ve heard before that, for example, some hip pain can be traced back to TMJ, to grinding and clenching at night. And what you’re saying, go even deeper than that—go beyond the physical to the metaphysical. There is a spiritual root cause or emotional root cause that you need to uncover. Don’t pay attention to the doctor’s diagnosis and prognosis, their prediction of a dire fate for you. Just focus on your own truth, that you’re a cell of God.

That’s well said. Better than I could tell. In other words, you can do all the anger work you want in this life. That’s okay. It might even save your life at some point. But my contention is, why are you getting angry? Why is the more important thing you can do boatloads of anger release work? But guess what? It keeps coming back. As long as you keep getting angry, why you get angry is still there. It still exists. So, judging things and taking strong stances is a spiritual thing. With me in consults, people are asking me what I should be doing for a career that can generate a lot of rages when you’re going to work every day, and you’re not aligned with your soul’s purpose and why it came here.

It can be deadly at some point because you’re fighting your soul’s energy, the peace that we’re trying to find in this world, the karma, we’re trying to burn off all of those things. I see it working over and over. But people don’t believe it. And there are two reasons. The doctors don’t want to believe it because you don’t have to do anything to heal. Dr. Sarno didn’t believe they would ever pick up on it in the medical industry. He said if they did, it would collapse economically. The second group of people who don’t want to heal are the sufferers. I know it sounds weird. But the reason that they’re giving or doing it to themselves—they don’t realize it; it’s outside of their awareness—is to help them cope. It’s a coping strategy. 

Through traumatic times, pressure-filled, stress-filled times, getting a degree, starting a new company, and getting married. These people often they’ll immediately get pain. They don’t realize that there’s nothing wrong with the body. It’s just the demands that are made on you at that time. But you’re unaware of those demands because the ego is very sneaky. It’s very sly. Like David Hawkins used to say, “Your ego doesn’t give a damn about your life,” which is right. It doesn’t care about you. It sought for itself. 

The ego is one thing we focus on. But you can come at this from thousands of different angles. People say, “What’s the main problem?” I can name it a thousand different ways. It’s an anger problem. That’s one way to say it. It’s a fear problem. That’s another way you’re deeply conflicted. That’s another way you can keep on and on. It’s an addiction, too. That’s why Joe Polish and I became friends. His work and this work are combined to address addiction.

By the way, what an incredible interview I did with Joe. If our listeners haven’t heard it yet, they must listen. It’s really, really great. And by the way, Joe is why we’re talking right now, and we’ve had other conversations outside of this interview. What an amazing connector and soul Joe is. He’s so intuitive. He’s an action-taker, too. I told you this already, but I haven’t shared it in the episode yet, so this is really cool. It’s just another example of a beautiful synchronicity we’re living in. This beautiful illusion is all divinely orchestrated, and it’s a completely rigged game. Except it’s all rigged in your favor. 

Some people generate tremendous amounts of rage, but they don’t know it because it’s called unconscious—you’re not aware of it, and so people immediately dismiss it.

And so, two days prior to Joe introducing the two of us via text message, I just popped into my head to tell my wife, Orion, to listen to your interview that Joe did. I don’t remember how old it is, a couple of years old or whatever, and I hadn’t even listened to it myself. It came up a month prior because one of my guests, Dan, wanted to talk about TMS and Sarno’s work, and he mentioned you. It had been in my awareness for a month, but then it disappeared. And then, it just popped into my head. I told Orion, “You got to listen to this.” She was experiencing some pain. Two days later, out of nowhere, Joe Polish introduced us. I hadn’t even met you. We’ve never spoken. I’ve never heard you speak or present anything. I love how the universe works.

The pieces are coming together. As long as they’re good intentions, they’re coming together. Joe has great intentions here. He sent a lot of people this way, and they’re basically all healing. Or he would stop sending them had they not been healing. But they’re coming with weird things, more and more bizarre things. Your brain can do anything it wants you to do. In other words, Dr. Sarno defined TMS this way. It’s a distraction. Your brain is trying to distract you from your physical body and away from the emotion.

Perhaps you can move away from elevating your spirit and your soul to the next level in this video game.

My higher self is saying, “You’re not on the right path for 30 years.” I’m not getting it because I’m attacking my problem as a physical problem. If you look at the physical body through an electron microscope, there’s nothing here. It’s all energy. The field of consciousness is space. And so I started to see the truth in what Sarno was saying. I was holding energy in my back in the form of anger.

As you said, it’s not just in the back. It could be anywhere on my left index finger. I’ve had a decade of pain. What was diagnosed? Finally, after multiple years of having no answer for me, they figured out it was a Morton’s neuroma. But nothing shows up on the MRI. Nothing shows up on any scan. But it is incredibly painful. If I bump into the side of the tip of my finger, it feels like someone took a hammer to it. I’ve been managing that for a decade now. I recognize it now as a gift. It helped me to understand some stuff about my grandfather and my childhood and how my grandfather, I should forgive him, basically, for abusing me as a child.

There was an incident that I hadn’t remembered where he hurt my finger from his rage and his violence. That was the origin of it. But I wouldn’t have looked for that long ago, passed on. So, I wasn’t looking to resolve anything with my grandfather. I thought, “I’m fine.” But talking about repressed and even completely unaware rage, I still had ill feelings towards him that I hadn’t processed or I hadn’t even recognized. I thought I’d forgiven him, but I really hadn’t. It all started because I was looking at the spiritual root cause of that, Morton’s neuroma. 

So now I’m at peace with it. I love that it happened. I can have this release of pent-up potential energy and turn it into light and goodness. Everything is for the good. I love that this happened so that I could get another lesson in that the pain is still there. I don’t resist it as much. I don’t pay as much attention to it. I would love for it not to be there. I bump into it and bump mine. The side of my finger doesn’t throb in horrific pain. That’d be awesome. So, I’m very interested in hearing more about TMS and how it could be applied to my situation.

There’s a great example, probably the top example in the world. One of Dr. Sarno’s patients, he called her Helen. Her name probably wasn’t Helen. He protected his patient’s privacy fiercely, so it probably wasn’t, but she was crippled with pain so bad that she was bedridden. I got it in my finger here, and I couldn’t walk. It sounds funny, but it’s so devastating you can’t think. Your whole body is curled up in a fetal position. It’s so painful. She was bedridden for two years or more. The family heard about him in New York, so they got her there.

We create pain to protect ourselves from confronting these deeper emotions—pain becomes our protector.

He knew that because he was good at what he did, he knew if you needed to go to his lectures, he held a weekly lecture to explain it, or if you needed therapy or psychotherapy. When they told him that she’d been bedridden for two years, he said, “I don’t think that the lectures are going to get it here. Why don’t you talk to my people? They’re good people.” So, they got her into psychotherapy and intense therapy. They pulled out of her that she was molested by her father when she was five years old. She didn’t know it well. 

They sent her to an inset support group, and in the group, she got worse, and she started to panic. So she called Dr. Sarno and said, “Dr. Sarno, I believe you. I believe this is TMS. I believe this is the cause. But I’m not getting better with your understanding of what’s going on. I’m getting worse.” But she said her husband was standing there, and he said, “You know, though, you’re talking about 42 years of repression,” and when he said that, she collapsed and fell on the floor. 

She said she was shaking violently, and she was yelling at him, “I want to die. Please let me die. I’m so ashamed. Let me die.” In the next breath, she was yelling, “Hold me. Please hold me.” Well, which one is it? Conflict. Within a couple of minutes, all of her pain was gone, disappeared completely, and all of her health problems. And so, being a brilliant observer, Dr. Sarno said, “I see what’s going on here. The pain is a protective device. It’s protecting us from our own rage and sadness and resentment and all those things. So, this is why we create pain: to protect ourselves from it. It’s a protector. It’s like a wall. And that wall melted down in here.” 

He had never seen that happen in 50 years, and that was the only time. But it showed him exactly what was going on. I’ve seen ones since he’s passed. A guy from New York melted down, and his pain disappeared. He wanted to write a book, so he asked me how to write a TMS book. So, yeah, it’s a protector, but it protects us from trauma and fear. Fear, anger, sadness, and resentment are what we call unwanted emotions. But once again, the people don’t even know they’re there. They don’t know it’s there, so they won’t buy into it. But it’s there. It’s there because of the astronomical proof and clinical proof. It works.

You had a rage that you had not processed or recognized. Once you acknowledged it and integrated it, you healed, right?

That was the last piece of the puzzle for me. I understood perfectionism, and I understood goodism. I couldn’t get the rage because people always told me, “And by the way, you have this personality as well.” Type T, we call it—gentle and very laid back. They don’t express themselves well emotionally. They’re more prone to intellect. I didn’t feel the anger. People would say, “Steve, you’re not angry. You’re such a nice person, you’re such a good person, you’re such a controlled person.” They’re under a lot of control. But now I know that’s the reason I had the pain. The pain is part of the control of it. So, like  Dr. Gabor Maté said, “If you get the message, you’re not good enough when you’re a child.” And every kid gets that message. 

By the way, Ram Dass used to say, “If we would only come in at zero, it would be nice, but we always come in below zero.” Kids fight their way back to zero, right? But if you get the message, “You’re not good enough,” and if you’re molested, or there’s a trauma, or a parent dies, the kid blames themselves. Every single time a parent dies, or they get divorced, the kid blames himself. Maté said you will spend the rest of your life proving good enough. He said, “There are two ways that they do that.” The first way is to become very nice to everybody. That’s the first way they cope with this. The second way is to work too hard, company after company project, because you will prove you’re worthy by succeeding. These scars drive people to great success. Some of the people I’m working with are the best in the world. Opera singers, SEO writers, actors, ballet teachers, professional athletes—they’re the best. 

Their scars have driven them there, but they’re trying to overcome something. That’s not true. You know, that’s the sad part. They are worthy; they are loved. There’s nothing really wrong with them. But this loop keeps looping in the neural pathways, the same thing with the pain. It’s like Pavlov’s dog. You bend over to pick up your baby. New mothers have a lot of demands on them. They don’t realize the rage, “The day before the baby, I was free. Today, I’ve got this little responsibility.” That’s a big responsibility. They’re full of rage. They don’t realize it. 

If you’re not willing to heal, it’s definitely not going to happen.

They lean over to pick the baby up in their back. They feel their back pop or snap, which is impossible for a four or five-pound baby. You can’t hurt yourself. It’s not possible. But there’s tension in there from the demands. So, it only takes a slight move to stop the oxygen flow, sending a knife right through their back. I’ll tell them, “The baby didn’t hurt your back. It’s the demands.” It just triggered it. And once they see that, they heal. It’s elegant. This discovery is just nothing but elegant in its design and its understanding of the universe. 

Anybody who wants to heal will heal, but I focus on readiness. If you’re not ready to heal, it’s never going to happen. If you’re not willing to heal, it’s definitely not going to happen. The ego will take people’s lives, and they won’t even know it. Ego is killing them. So open up your heart. Open up your mind to the truth. I’m not as good as I’m pretending to be. I’m not as perfect as I’m pretending to be. It’s a superego or a persona, as Jung called it. It’s a false mask. Let’s put it that way because I want people to like me. I don’t want to be rejected.

And you said that thing about the ego that I found very profound, that the ego doesn’t give a hoot about you. It’s just trying to protect itself. What came to me is that the ego is not about self-preservation because that would be you, your whole body, and everything else. But no, it’s actually attacking your body. Ego is about ego preservation.

Exactly. It likes the problem, it likes the suffering, it likes the rage, it likes the conflict, and it likes the complaint. That’s its very food. Its sustenance is these issues. It’s never going to give up on those issues.

Because it gives significance to you, right? You’ve got the six human needs Tony Robbins teaches us, one of which is significance. It’s a big driver. Another one is certainty. You can certainly count on your pain once you’ve got a chronic issue. You can count on it showing up like it gives you certainty. “Ah, finally, something that I can count on. Everything else is going to hell in a handbasket, and I can’t predict where things are going.” If next thing, it’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. But I can count on this finger pain.

Did Tony really say that?

Well, he didn’t talk about the finger pain, but he talked about certainty as a big driver of human behavior.

I said long ago, “Your pain is your best friend.” And they’ll say, “What do you mean? I hate my pain.” I said, “No, it’s a best friend. Because what’s a best friend for? It’s somebody who’s always there for you.”

And it gives you significance. What an amazing thing to bring up at a party or over a coffee with a friend. So you get pity, empathy, compassion, and attention. They may even come by and drop off some food, check in on you, call you, and all that. Wow, there is so much significance.

And we don’t know it. It’s like when a baby cries, people come to it. It’s a conditioned response. I have a good story about that. When I first wrote my book and first released it, I thought, “Oh, I’m really excited to tell everybody. It’s a gift for the world.” I went into this fibromyalgia group on Facebook because that heated up, and now it’s disappearing. See, they come in fads, and the carpal tunnel disappeared, mostly. I told them, “I can help you heal from fibromyalgia. I’ve done it.”

Dr. Sarno helped thousands of people heal from it. They came at me like wounded badgers—the little, sweet old lady ran the group. She reminded me of that little lady from Tweety Bird with the bun in her hair and the knitting needles through. I realized, “Oh. I learned a lesson by fire.” This is her very reason for getting up in the day to run this group. I come in like a bull in the china closet, saying, “You don’t need this group anymore.” I was taking her reason for existence away, and I realized, “Oh, you know what? Everybody has a different need, a different time and everything.” 

So, we learn not to push this message. We wait to get invited by people like you to talk about it because people do not want to hear it. They just give you the finger, scream at you, and walk out. If the TMS doctor tells them, “There’s nothing wrong with your back, and it’s an anger problem.” They’ll get up, slam the door, and get a new doctor. And the new doctor tells them that it’s a physical problem.

As you said earlier, it goes against the medical establishment, the medical industrial complex. So you have to be careful about having all your disclaimers and everything. By the way, none of this is medical advice. This whole episode is for educational purposes only. All disclaimers apply. Right?

It’s for entertainment only. 

You have to protect your backside.

Well, there are always anomalies, too. I saw on the Discovery Channel, a woman who was her own twin. She had two sets of DNA inside of her body. She was her own twin. There’s always weird things that happen like that. So you got to get a checkup. If anybody’s listening, get a checkup. Make sure it’s not bleeding. I saw an aneurysm in the spine one time. You got to get that stop. An ulcer is like a paragon of TMS, and if you don’t get that bleeding stopped, you can die. 

So it’s very important to get checked up. I’m glad you said that. Get a checkup. We’re not doctors here. I’m a teacher, and I can show anybody ready and willing to heal how to heal. And pretty much all of them are healing, except a couple of people in 24 years who have no intention of healing. These people have zero intention of healing. They want what you just said—just to talk about it.

Tension is this rigidity within the person that’s cutting off the blood flow and causing all kinds of health problems.

The significance and the certainty.

They’re severely traumatized. They need a good therapist because in their childhood, something happened there deep, and they need the distraction to their body. They need something like that. So be smart with your own life.

What was the rage about that you had to face and accept?

I started to think maybe it was a Helen thing. Maybe I was molested. I started thinking about that. Then, after a few weeks, I thought, “No, I think that maybe my ego is trying to make something up that never happened.” Dr. Sarno had shifted the consciousness of this planet, and he had changed the medical industry forever. And they made a documentary about his life at that point. And so a news crew came in to talk to him, and he asked the news lady, “Why did my patients develop into these driven-to-succeed goodists, perfectionists, and nice people?” She didn’t even hesitate and said, “Trying to please our parents.” He said, “Exactly. You just described my career. You should have been a psychologist, not a news reporter.” But that’s basically it—all of his patients. 

I think that’s what I was trying to do. I played sports for my dad. I thought I was playing for myself. I didn’t realize it was for somebody else because our parents were gods to us when we were little kids. They created us—feed you and clothe you. They seem to know everything when you’re a little child. And our biggest fear is that they’ll abandon us. There’s no greater fear than being abandoned. That’s the number one fear in children. “They’re going to leave me.” So we start to morph into the Jungian persona or the superego that Freud talked about, this false mask to please them. And by extrapolation, teachers, coaches, and friends, we’re pleasing everybody. We don’t realize that if you’ve got a lot of health problems, you’re pleasing a hell of a lot of people out there. This is why this great lady is so important. I don’t know if you have time to talk about her. Anita Moorjani. Do you know who that is?

You’re holding up a picture for our listeners who are not watching the video.

She’s interviewing me live on Facebook. She’s holding my book up.

Tell us about what’s going on here.

Hers is an unbelievable story. In 2006, she died from late-stage cancer. Her flatlined organs shut down, and her brain flatlined internal organs. The family was called in. She won’t make it through the night. She went into what they call a near-death experience because she’s back, of course. I mean, she actually did die, but they can’t call it death because you’re back, right? She left for 30 hours. Right as the brain was dying and the body was dying, she had this amazing moment of clarity. She could see exactly her whole life, the whole field of consciousness, and why she got sick. It was her focus on it. She was focusing on cancer. That’s how we create things. And so her guides met her. One of them was her father. He told her, “You can go back into the body if you want.” But she says, “I don’t want to go back into that sick body. That was a living hell.” He said, “Knowing what you know now, you won’t be sick anymore. Knowing that you created it and that you are the universe, you have the entire power of the universe behind you to heal. You’re not this little helpless victim of a disease or pain.” 

People play the victim too much like I did—my poor body. I was born with a bad back or something. But she came back into the body, and four days later, the cancer was gone. And I talk about her because of her book’s title. It’s, in my opinion, the greatest healing book title in the world. I even asked her, “How long did it take you to come up with that title?” She laughed. She said, “About a year. My husband and I went back and forth. Should it be this? I was in a deep sleep one night, and the universe sent it to me. The universe told me, this is your book title.” And it went to number one in the world. And I think they’re making a movie about her life right now. But the book is called Dying To Be Me.

You recommended that book to Orion, and she’s been reading it and loving it, by the way. It also has 4.6 stars, just like your book, but with 11,800 ratings.

She has a huge following. She loves Dr. Sarno’s work, so she’s been trying to help me with my message. Her reviews went up when Wayne Dyer invited her up onto the stage on the PBS special. That helped.

And I see that he wrote the forward for her book, too.

That helps, too. It’s an amazing book. She’s an amazing human being—a beautiful, beautiful human being. It’s about becoming yourself, peeling the mask off of the persona and the superego because of tension, which T and TMS stood for. It’s from not being genuine. When you’re authentic, you’re relaxed all the time. You’re flowing with life. Everything’s easier. Tension is this rigidity within the person that’s cutting off the blood flow and causing all kinds of health problems. 

People have their necks locked up like this. I remember having to turn my body sideways to look at people because I couldn’t turn my head. And people say, “Well, you slept wrong.” You’re sleeping, not in a state of peace and harmony. It’s a state of conflict. You’re squeezing your neck muscles while you’re sleeping, and you wake up, and it’s frozen shoulder. I’ve been compiling a list of what the doctors called body problems that are actually TMS. I’ve got over a thousand labels right now. I’m sure it might be even more, but more of the common ones—chronic Lyme disease.

Dr. Sarno was brilliant. He healed hundreds of people who supposedly had chronic Lyme. He told them, “It’s not Lyme’s, it’s TMS, okay?” If you get bit by a tick, you get infected. You take an antibiotic, and it goes away every time. If the symptoms don’t go away, the doctors call it, “Oh, you waited too long. It’s too bad. Now you’re going to have to live with it.” That’s not true. Your brain actually latches onto the opportunity of the symptom to start testing. It won’t let go of the symptom. 

In my third book, I talked about their Volvo experiment with these two Volvo cars. They strapped these people in, and they did a virtual crash. The whole scenery was flipping and flipping and flipping, but the people’s necks never moved. After the virtual crash, 20% of the people had whiplash; remember, they never moved. In the long run, 10% of the people had chronic lip lashed whiplash. They could not get rid of it. They were probably sorry that they got in. But this is what the psychologist discovered.

Did the car company get sued for that experiment?

By virtual law?

That sounds awful.

They have been sued by virtual lawyers, and they send them virtual money. But what the psychologists discovered was that the 10% who had chronic had become chronic. They were under extreme stress in their lives. And they’re looking for a trigger, like bending over to pick up your baby or doing something at work, and you feel a pain in your back. There’s an infinite number of triggers. Some people smell certain smells, and they go into severe pain because they were abused children, and maybe something was cooking at that time in the kitchen or certain sounds or songs. It’s bizarre.

Sometimes, people tell me they work at their computers and that the screen is their trigger. If they close their eyes, their pain disappears in their fingers. But if they open their eyes, it comes back in their fingers every time. It’s just triggers. So you can remove the triggers or the cause of the pain, which is actually from your mind. Now, I need to say this. You’re not imagining it. People get very offended when you tell them it’s from the mind that you’re faking it. I’m not saying that. Nobody’s faking it. It’s a serious stuff. People can die from things like this. We’re saying that it begins in the mind.

You know what you remind me of when you said people can die from this? In the movie The Matrix, if you die inside the matrix, your body dies because your mind is driving the show. And if your mind thought, “Hey, I just died, I just got shot.” Well, it doesn’t matter what your body’s up to. In the pod, your body shuts down because your mind just said, “Oh, that’s it. I’m out.”

That matrix, in some ways, is a TMS movie. We talk about that quite a bit. Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon was also a very TMS movie. His intellect versus his feelings became a genius because Jung said, “Thinking and feeling are polar opposites.” So, to shut down how we feel, we move, we become intellects. We move up here as a defense rate. 

There’s a famous whiplash study by Harald Schrader. I think he was from Norway. They noticed that there was an epidemic of whiplash in Lithuania. There was not one person in Lithuania with whiplash. Everybody in Norway had it, but they had the same population and the same amount of rear-end collisions. And so, how could this be? They took a team down there, and they started talking to the people who got hit from behind. Post-collision trauma, they call it. They say, “Doesn’t your neck still hurt from that crash?” They’d say no. “Why would it? That happened a year ago. Why would it hurt?” 

They were complaining about the government. They haven’t fixed my bumper yet. So they went back and talked to the people of Norway and Lithuania, and they put it together. Norway had an elaborate medical system to handle whiplash—very sophisticated. “Expect it. Expect it. Oh, where are the braids? Always be careful how you move.” They had them so afraid of it that they planted the seed in their mind that their necks would hurt. And it actually does. They’re not faking it. So, there were no seeds planted in Lithuania.

Wow. I wonder if a seed is planted in America because all these billboard ads say it got hit from behind. The ad copy says on the billboard that we’ll get you a million dollars. Yeah, call 1800 lawyer.com or whatever.

Well, the unconscious mind has its own motivations. We may not understand it all the time, but we can see the symbolism most of the time. Like in trigeminal neuralgia, a person is not able to speak up and express themselves. I helped a girl in Toronto who recently had terrible trigeminal neuralgia. She grew up in an orthodox household where women didn’t talk. You don’t talk, so she had to close her expression once she understood it came back. There’s to say the pain disappeared.

By the way, that reminds me of something I learned from Tina Zion, an amazing healer, psychic, and medical intuitive. I think she said that the sinus infection was caused by repressed tears.

I had it here, globus pharyngus. It feels like your Adam’s apples being squeezed with pliers. People could hear my voice changing like this. I said it sounded like Donald Duck on helium, but it’s the repression of tears. So there’s a lot of symbolism in it. Back pain is often considered a financial problem. And knee pain, support and shoulders have weight, taking away the world on the lady who lost her hearing. 

I said to her, “You know I’m not a doctor, right? But what was going on at the time it disappeared? That’s very important to me.” She said, “Well, I heard my brother was going to die.” I said, “Can you see what happened or hear what happened?” It was too emotionally painful. So, your brain shuts the hearing gate off?” Hearing’s a gate. Our soul lives on earth through our senses: sight, taste, touch, sound.

The unconscious mind has its own motivations. We may not understand it all the time, but most of the time, we can see the symbolism.

That’s just how we grow through the senses. Casey called the sensual realm. Well, it was just so emotionally painful. As Dr. Sarno predicted, her brain shut off that gate. She didn’t want to hear it. And once I explained that to her, it came back. That symbolism is easy to see in my own life. I had trauma after trauma in the 1980s. Everything was going the wrong way. The wheels were coming up. I started to lose my vision. I couldn’t see people’s heads. It was just the black bar crashed there. That was frightening. I thought I was going blind. I tried to read things, and whatever I looked at was gone. I was really scared until I read Dr. Sarno had the same thing, and I felt better. “All right, somebody else has this. I feel better.”

So whatever you focused on, you couldn’t see, and what you could see was just in the periphery?

Yes. Whatever I was starting to look at was gone. It was black, which is called a scotoma. Ironically, scotoma means you see what you want to see. That’s what it means. I got that from the Tom Hanks movie, and I didn’t want to see what was happening then. So Dr. Sarno said, “The brain does you a favor, withdraws the blood. The oxygen doesn’t get to these nerves in the spine and the knees, and things like that create a horrific sensation.” But most of the time, we can see the symbolism. Sometimes we can’t understand it.

None of this is random. It’s not like certain things shut off and other things stay active. It’s all very precise because we live in this beautiful illusion called reality. And if it’s on the left side of your body or it’s on the right side, that is significant. That is by design. The left side is the receiving side and kabbalah. The right is the giving column. So I have one dimple. The other one is not pronounced at all. I have one dimple, and it’s on the left. That is significant. I did not know its significance until a few years ago, but I am here to receive joy on the left side. My son has one dimple on the right side and is here to give joy. And what a joy he is in my life and my wife’s.

That’s right. I often ask people, “What side of the body is it on?” I break it down into quarters, but you can break it down into halves.

Your brain can do anything it wants you to do. It's a distraction—a way for your brain to shift focus from your physical body to steer you away from deeper, underlying emotions. Share on X

By the way, do you know how I found out about the dimple thing and its significance? It’s a podcast episode. I interviewed Anne Marie Pizarro, an Akashic Records reader, and she opened my records while we were on the podcast. It was related to a question that came up when she was doing the reading. That was so cool.

That is pretty cool. All of my problems were on the left side of my body. That was always the case. I was always told it was a feminine side, the left side, which makes sense to me.

It seems to me that this is also the receiving side. The feminine side is the receiver.

I never would have accepted joy back then. Now, I accept it; it is all I can take. It should be joy. But back then, it was always about duty, getting things done, accomplishing things, and satisfying the ego.

So you were not very good at receiving gifts, right? You were fine with giving them.

Terrible. I love giving. I was terrible. You know, and then I found out from a psychologist people will get complimented, and they’ll go, “Oh, you’re crazy.” And the psychologist said they do that because they want twice the compliment in return. They want you to keep coming back and going, “No, really, you’re the best. No, get out of here. No, you want to keep hearing it.” That’s what it’s saying. Now, if I get a compliment, I take it. I try not to let the ego get it because if the ego gets involved, you get really bad when the ego is involved. But I would say, “Thank you.” “I liked your book.” “Thank you.” I used to say, “No, that’s not that good.” I just take it now.

“Oh, no, that came from God. That’s God’s.” Which is true. Everything is God’s. We’re just instruments of them. But accept the compliment and then simultaneously direct it quietly, internally to God, as a gratitude for his involvement in your life.

Well, I didn’t write it. I thought it was at first.

It’s beautiful to take a compliment, accept it, appreciate it, and send it directly to God. Do not deflect or negate it; do not let your ego grab hold of it and get bigger. It sounds straight to God.

Well, it sounds funny, too. You have to be mature enough to accept the compliment. You do have to be mature enough to say, “Hey, thank you.” I say thank you to people now. But the highest compliment I can get is when somebody heals.

And you’ve had so many people do that, like, beyond all odds, against all odds. And that’s a real testament to the power of what you teach, the power of TMS, and what Dr. John Sarno channeled and brought into this world.

Beautiful, man. I started a wall of victory on YouTube for people told they couldn’t heal. They’re all healed. Never listen to anybody who tells you you can’t heal. Because that plants that seed within the unconscious mind, the unconscious may run with that and not allow you to heal. It has its own motivations. One of the TMS doctors who I really admire in New Jersey said he was giving away free consults if you didn’t heal. But he noticed the pattern because he’s a smart man. A few hundred dollars didn’t mean anything to the wealthy people or as much to them. They were all healing. The people who could not afford it were not healing. 

You see, the unconscious will do things for its own motivations. They wanted the money back unconsciously. It was preventing them from healing. And so he stopped the whole program. He said, “I can’t give it free anymore, but I’ve seen weirder patterns than that.” The unconscious mind can do anything it wants to you. It’s bizarre, but I’ve seen some weird, weird, weird symptoms in people, and I don’t even want to talk about them because I don’t want people getting them. 

Dr. Sarno made that bold statement. Where have all the ulcers gone? Where did they go? In 1950, when he first started practicing medicine, he said, “It seemed like every other person was streaming into my office with an ulcer.” If you watch the old 60s shows and 50s movies, “Oh, my ulcers acting up,” you’ll see a lot of it. It was in vogue. But he said, “I haven’t seen one of those in many, many years in my office. What happened?” Well, he was a smart man. 

He looked into the postural muscles. There became an epidemic of neck and back pain, which was not the case in the early 19th century. He said nothing was written about it in the medical literature. You couldn’t find anything. If you had back pain, then you were a freak. Now, 80% of the world has it because it’s gone vogue—I should say it’s gone rogue.

The unconscious mind can do anything it wants to you.

Vogue, and it’s gone viral. Do you know what a meme is? I love this definition of a meme. It’s a copy of instruction backed up by threats and or promises. I learned that amazing definition from a meme expert and a memeology professor. That definition stuck with me. Years later, I can still remember it. Why can’t a certain syndrome, malady or chronic issue be a meme? Just like a funny photo getting passed around the Internet, many people catch it because it’s in “vogue,” as you say.

It used to be called social contagion. And we do catch each other’s. Here’s my chapter nine. What did you mean by that? I talked about memes quite a bit when I researched them. It’s a virus.

It is. See, I got your book right here, too. “What did you mean by that?” That’s a cute pun. I like it.

There was a guy who emailed me to say, “Wow. My company came in and warned everybody about ergonomic workstations, okay? Nobody had any problems.” They warned them about this and that and proper posture, and all of a sudden, everybody started getting paid. “The company I worked for before had the same number of people. Nobody had a carpal tunnel problem or shoulder problem. Nobody. Not one person. This whole new company, which was ergonomically correct, crippled everybody.” And that chapter I called, subchapter, Meme Corp. International, the old Kmart’s used to have everybody wear back braces. Remember that? They were telling them to prepare for a bad back. 

Wow, that blows my mind. Now, if you put back brace on as a worker, let’s say, in a warehouse or whatever, you are preparing them for back pain.

They are also saving themselves from a future lawsuit. If the person hurts their back, they can say, “Hey, we tried. We had them wear back braces.” So many things are going on there, I suppose. But the back is the strongest part of the human body. It can take a lot of weight and twisting. People want to get rid of back pain. They have to become fearless. I had a paralyzed leg, and Dr. Sarno said, “Go golfing.” I’m like, “Oh, man, I can’t even breathe. The pain is so bad.” “You got to start getting back physical again.” Well, I did it first, and it got really bad and dropped me to the ground. But I kept going and kept going and kept going, and months and months later, it was gone. The pain was gone, just as he said it would become more physical.

Do you know Steven Kotler’s story? He’s the co-author of some books on flow state and so forth. He’s a brilliant guy. He had debilitating pain and couldn’t walk without help. The way he got healed was surfing, which sounds crazy to somebody who couldn’t even walk on their own. I don’t remember the story, but it’s an incredible story. Somehow, he got it in his head that he’s got to try surfing. This might be the thing that heals him. He would get into a flow state as soon as he stood up on the surfboard, and he would surf. 

Then, as soon as he got back to the beach, the pain would kick in again, and he would just keep at it. “Okay, I’m going to go surfing tomorrow, too.” The pain stopped enough times on the surfboard, and it’s like, it doesn’t compute. “How can you be not in pain on the surfboard and then be in pain when you’re standing on the beach?” Therefore, remove it.

It’s because he’s present on the surfboard.

Yeah, he was in the flow.

He’s in the mood. That’s what you’re calling the flow. I worked with professional dancers and professional musicians, and they’ll tell me, “The only time I’m not in pain is when I’m doing my work craft.” Because you’re in the moment, you’re calling the flow the moment. That’s exactly how I try to teach people to heal and get into that flow. This is how I healed 24 years ago. I was playing golf one day, focusing on my swing plane and the angle of attack and balance, and I realized, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m not in pain. When was the last time I had any pain? I couldn’t remember.” They stopped thinking about it. This is how reality is created. It’s the whole field of possibilities. Focus on that. You collapse that. There’s a singularity. That’s your reality, which is what the Buddhist Heart Sutra says. “Reality exists only where you put your focus.”

And this is quantum physics. It’s the double-slit experiment. It’s an interference pattern of light as a wave that’s captured on the film behind the two slits until an observer is set up until there is a camera capturing the light being shined through the two slits, and now they collapse into particles. You only see two lines in the photographic film when you use a camera to watch the photons. It was a wave and a particle, and now the light is just particles because it’s being observed. It’s collapsing all infinite possibilities into one version of reality. You are the observer of your reality, of your universe. You are that camera, watching the infinite possibilities of all those different options of light and collapsing those based on your faith, trust, positive expectancy, hopefully, or conversely, your fear, negative certainty into whatever the reality ends up being.

Anita Moorjani even confirms that after she left her body. Her consciousness left her physical body. She says it is like being in a warehouse where you have a flashlight in your hand. If I shined it over there, I could see over there. If I shined it over there, I could see everything over there. In other words, the flashlight is a metaphor for her attention and awareness. If she shined it over there, the whole field of possibilities. But wherever she shined it over there, her awareness was there. There she was in that moment. 

We have to be very careful where we put our attention. The medical industry wants you to constantly run to your doctor every time you get a little of this and a little of that. Keep running there. Keep your focus on it. But you don’t want to do that. I hate to say that because there could be something serious, but I’m telling you, get a physical exam first, and then whatever they tell you, ignore it. Just make sure you’re not dying. Make sure you’re not in danger.

All disclaimers apply.

Make sure you’re not going to be crippled. If the doctor clears you, then get into the TMS work. Yogananda told people not to think about disease. Don’t even think about it because it’s entering your field of awareness. And so, it is quantum physics. It’s everything that Buddha and Jesus told us. Of course, they were the first quantum physicists. Dr. Sarno proved it as well. From a medical doctor’s standpoint, people heal and say, “Oh, it’s way too broad. You can’t say it covers everything.” I can say it covers everything except injuries, of course. If you fall off the roof of your house, you’ll need some help or transplants. 

The medical industry has done some amazing things. I’m nothing anti-doctor at all. We need good doctors. We need one who knows the difference between a mind and a physical problem. There’s only a small handful of Dr. Sarno trained. A lot of them are retiring now. I don’t know how many are being retrained, but I’m going to start training some people here soon with a training set because I get a lot of doctors writing to me, “How do I tell my patients about that?” So, at least some people want to know about it. Some people are good. By the way, there are some good people out there in this world. It doesn’t mean a doctor who doesn’t buy into it is bad. It just means they don’t know about it at all.

I’m nothing anti-doctor at all. We need good doctors who know the difference between the mind and a physical problem.

They’re just unaware; they’re asleep. Whoever is plugged into The Matrix and doesn’t know about The Matrix hasn’t woken up yet, and that’s okay.

That’s right. That’s what Neville Goddard called the number one man. He’s the Adam, the one who’s sleeping. Number two man needs to step in, which he called Christ. Adam was asleep. He said Jesus was awake. You go through those states of consciousness, and this healing is about awakening. It’s that simple. That’s what it’s about. You don’t do the healing. It’s not something that you do. It’s something that happens.

It’s a being you are one with. Am I?

Am I? And if you say, “I am happy,” you begin to heal. You say, “I’m broken,” and then you stay broken for the rest of your life, forever. Because the ‘I am’ is creating the words that follow that. You have to be careful with your internal language. I talk about internal language. As Hawkins said repeatedly as well, “Your health problems are coming from your negative attitude.” You would tell people this and that. So take control of your life. Don’t be the victim. Don’t think small. I have control of my life. I have control of my body. I’ve seen people who were terminal heal their lives. Turn it around.

This is a beautiful piece of wisdom. I’m not sure if it’s in the Bible or an ancient Jewish Talmud, but it goes like this: the whole world was created for you and to serve God. That’s a really important part of the sentence. The whole world was created for you, like you, specifically in this case. I’m talking to you, Steve, and the listener, whoever is listening, and that was for you to serve God.

As you mentioned, live your life as though it’s rigged in your favor.

Yeah, because it is.

It’s rigged against me, like my back pain. It helped me awaken a bit more and become a happier person. Or, as Anita Moorjani says, “Cancer didn’t kill me. It saved me. It was there to help me.” But people don’t see it that way. The ego doesn’t see it that way, that’s for certain. The ego is not happy when things aren’t going the way it want to go. It likes problems.

Another piece of great Jewish wisdom is that there are no problems or challenges. There are only blessings. There are two kinds of blessings. There are the revealed blessings and the unrevealed blessings. The unrevealed blessings are what we call challenges, problems, tragedies, or whatever. They just have not been revealed to us as blessings yet. We might have to go all the way through our lives to our death, to the life review, and finally see the blessing in it. But hopefully, we see it a lot sooner than that.

Take control of your life. Don’t think small.

That’s the Zen. You know, The Story of the Zen Farmer whose horse ran away. 

I love that one.

Is it worth repeating here for anybody who hasn’t heard it?

Yes, please.

This farmer’s horse runs away. He’s a wise farmer, but that was his means and livelihood. The neighbor’s farmer came over and said, “Oh, you poor guy, your horse ran away.” The wise farmer said, “What do I know of such things? It’s unrevealed.” 

The neighbor says, “This is bad news.” The guy who suffered the loss of the horse says, “Good news, bad news, I don’t know.”

The next day, the horse that ran away comes back with 40 new horses. The neighbor comes over and says, “You lucky guy.” And the wise farmer says, “What do I know of such things?” The next day, one of the new horses kicks and breaks his son’s leg, so he can’t help work in the fields. The neighbor says, “You unlucky guy.” He goes, “What do I know of such things?” The next day, the army comes to conscript his son into war, and his son can’t go because his legs are broken. They’re being revealed later. Being grateful is a big part of healing. One of the biggest. It’s the most underrated thing I’ve seen in healing—being grateful instead of wishing more or something different. It always comes back to the present moment. Whatever you have now, be happy, at peace, and content because a more beautiful story is coming. Anita Moorjani has no fear of death. She said it’s a great joy coming.

Me, too. I didn’t have a near-death experience, but I was shown the nature of reality in a dreamlike state. I wasn’t asleep yet. I was just praying for a job, and I didn’t know what I was praying for exactly, but The Matrix—the illusion, what Hindus call Maya and Buddhists call Samsara—was revealed to me. It was shown to me, and I was blown away. It changed everything for me.

Yogananda said that Jesus referred to that as Satan, the veil, and so many names, I suppose, but it’s just an illusion. We’re not seeing the real reality the way it is. Although the more you want to see it, the more you seek, the more you will find. And many seekers are coming my way, which is very heartfelt. They want to talk about spirituality, which is the only thing I really like to talk about. I don’t want to talk about healing because there’s nothing really to heal. There’s nothing wrong with the knee or the back of this. But then I will send you the audio of rabbi Benzion Scheinfeld. Did I send that to you?

No.

Maybe I sent it to Orion. I can’t remember. But it is one of the greatest examples of this work. He was crippled. His name is Benzion. He was in Manhattan, up where Dr. Sarno lived and practiced. He couldn’t function because his back was so painful. So he went to a surgeon, and the surgeon took an MRI, and it showed a fragmented disc, the intervertebral, the soft disc, had broken off. So the surgeon told him, “You need immediate surgery, or you’ll be paralyzed for the rest of your life.” That’s the subtitle of my book. Faulty medical advice is making us worse. Well, he got worse because the anger went through the roof. 

When we think we will be injured, it goes through the roof. He didn’t want to get surgery, so he went to three more. He went to four in total. They all told him the same thing. You have a fragmented disc. You need immediate surgery. Are you at risk of being paralyzed? Well, he said, “My options are out. I tried to avoid surgery.” His father told him to avoid surgery. He said, “My options are out. But in the meantime, with divine intervention, a man used to sit next to him, and he said the man was in a special pain chair. I looked one day, and the chair was gone. The man was back in a normal chair. So he immediately asked him, “You know, what happened to that pain chair”? And the guy told him, “I want to talk to this doctor in New York,” and it went away. 

He says, “I’ll send you the clip,” but he says on the audio, “I never heard anything that ridiculous in my life.” Somebody could talk to you. They can go away. I do this work, and it still sounds weird that somebody can talk to you. This is how powerful knowledge is. Well, he made an appointment with Dr. Sarno because that was the guy that the guy talked to. He said, “I took my MRIs in, and I knew what was going to happen.” Sarno was going to look at it and say, “This is not TMS. This is an actual physical structural problem. You’re going to need surgery.” But he didn’t say that. He looked at the MRI and looked at me and said, “Son, there’s nothing wrong with your back at all. Nothing.” 

Your pain is your best friend, a protective device shielding you from your buried rage, sadness, and resentment. Share on X

He said, “Wow, it rocked me because I just had four people tell me if I moved the wrong way, I might be paralyzed. This guy is saying nothing’s wrong with me.” Of course, he said, “I didn’t believe him, four against one.” But he said, “Dr. Sarno, well, if there’s nothing wrong, look at this fragmented. Look at the stenosis. Look at that bundling of nurses there. Look at that.” He said Dr. Sarno told him he could show him a thousand MRIs that looked the same as that, and the person has no pain at all. This is not coming from your physical body. He asked the golden question. The people who do this work more than anybody in the world ask, “What do I do?” That’s the golden question every day, emails on the phone, in person, “What do I do? What do I do?” 

Even when I tell them, “You’ve got to become more and more present.” They’ll say, “Well, what do I do?” He asked Dr. Sarno, “What do I do to get better?” And Dr. Sarno said, “What do you like to do?” He said, “I like to ski.” He said, “Then go skiing.” And when you listen to the audio, everybody’s laughing in that synagogue. There were over a thousand people in there, I was told, and they were all laughing hysterically because it sounded funny. He’s crippled. “You’re going to be paralyzed. Go skiing.” He said, “I still didn’t believe him.” But he went to the lecture. He held a weekly lecture. No, that is pretty much what I do in consultations; I usually lecture them. But he said he was asking Sarno so many questions. It was driving Sarno crazy because Dr. Sarno was a very blunt man. 

He said at one point, Dr. Sarno pointed his finger at me and said, “You can’t ask any more questions.” That’s the way he spoke. But he said I left there that night, not fully believing it. Two days later, the pain disappeared forever. This is what I’m seeing as well now. Not always in two days, of course; sometimes it takes months, but sometimes while we’re zooming, you never know when something has to click in there and say, “I’m okay. There’s nothing wrong with me here.” In other words, as Neville Goddard would say, “You see yourself healthy first, and then the body begins to change to match your perception of reality.” If you see yourself with a bad back or bad knee, if you see that as your reality, you keep recreating that falsehood. I guess at some point, how do we know whether it’s TMS or a real problem? Well, the TMS doctors are good at that. I would look up one of those.

would highly recommend our listeners who—if they’re still listening—are intrigued, I think a good next step is for them to have a consultation with you when you’re available.

If they’re interested in understanding more about it. The books are always there as well. A lot of people don’t want to read the book because it’s long ago. To the author, that’s up to them. Dr. Sarno’s book, still the number one best-selling book in the world, still holds that number one slot. You can’t knock them out of there. It’s the top book.

Now, what’s the name of that one?

Healing Back Pain.

Your book, which is also an amazing bestseller, is The Great Pain Deception. How do they reach you to book a consultation?

Well, if my website’s still up there and working, they can go there.

Steve Ozanich, which is steveozanich.com.

Yes, you told me that there were some things that weren’t working on there. I did not know that because I never went there. Thank you for telling me.

You’ll get it, folks. I’m going to highly encourage our listeners to contact you. Book a consult, even if you aren’t in pain but you know somebody in pain. This is a call to action to get them in touch with Steve and get them this modality in their toolbox. It could be the thing that changes everything.

Yes, and thank you again for the opportunity to tell people because a lot of people don’t want to hear it. They all agree with TMS. Everyone says, “Oh, that’s absolutely true. But not me. I’ve got a bad knee or bad hip or bad back.” They’ll say it’s true for everybody else. But if they want to make sure, go see a TMS doctor if they can. If not, just get checked up to make sure there’s no danger there,, there’s not blood flowing somewhere or something like that. I’ve heard that bone-on-bone thing too many times. It’s not causing the pain. 

My ankle is like a big ossified lump of arthritis. It’s not even an ankle anymore. I sprained it seven times while playing sports. That pain disappeared, too. It’s all bone on bone, and there’s no pain there. So, I would dismiss those. Of course, I always have to put the disclaimers in. Want somebody to dismiss something that needed to be looked at? We don’t want anybody to get hurt here. We’re trying to help people here today.

This discussion is about pain. It’s not about structural damage. It is about healing the pain, addressing the pain so that you don’t have to go through life with pain, because it’s just shining a light at what you need to look at and address.

If it’s become chronic, it’s pretty much time at that point because the human body is designed elegantly to heal fast. Dr. Sarno used to point out that the femur is the biggest bone in the body, and it heals in four to six weeks if it’s correct. So anything that lasts 5 or 10 years or 30 years is not a body problem. The body knows how to heal itself. It’s brilliant.

Amazing stuff. Thank you so much, Steve, and thank you, listener, for your open-mindedness and support while listening to this show. Stay with us and make it a great week. We’ll catch you in the next episode. In the meantime, blessings to you. This is Stephan Spencer, your host, signing off.

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