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Could Your Excruciating Back Pain Be Emotional? My 30-Day Healing Journey & How You Can Begin Yours
The mind-body connection has been studied, applied & used extensively to heal from aches & pains and chronic health conditions, equally. Louise Hay cured her cancer. I've cured many of my own physical & mental health ailments over the years. My blessing is that you welcome abundant wellbeing & relief through this blog post. :)
Priyanka Sawhney
6/27/20267 min read
What Triggered My Excruciating Mid-Back Pain?
It was the last week of April.
I had just started my Sudarshan Kriya practice as the next step in my connection to self & life, to invest in my breathwork, calm, contentment & clarity.
But what came next made me doubt my decision completely. Calm, clarity, what?
What I was met with was excruciating back pain, the unresolved emotions beneath, the chaos of experiencing them & then the relief of finally releasing them and healing my back pain.
What a ride, but a fulfilling one, I must say!!
My experience of the first 3-4 days was unlike anything I had heard about the program or wished for. Or of the participants I had learned with.
Sitting in Vajrasana (for the Pranayam/Yoga), followed by intense breathwork was suddenly my new nightmare. Not because of the practice itself. But because of the intensity of pain I felt mid-spine.
Being a mind-body practitioner & metaphysical student and teacher myself, this was not something surprising to me. I had had similar experiences before.
But the intensity of the pain I felt out of nowhere, everyday, during practice, was excruciating.
So much that I had to slip out of practice for upcoming few days & even completely stopped sitting in Vajrasana.
If you have read Louise Hay's Global Bestseller, Heal Your Body, you would have by now understood that my body was trying to communicate to me. Breathwork just helped me hear the call so much clearly & easily.
If not, let me explain with some context.
The Mind-Body Connection: Can Emotions Cause Physical Pain?
Our body is not separate from our mind. It responds to all our thoughts & patterns of thoughts.
Wellbeing is its natural state. Except for when we refuse to stay in the present & hold on to past & future and to our emotions and pain.
Our body was never meant to carry the weight of our old emotions or suppress them.
It was meant to feel those emotions (emotions = thoughts in motion) and then let go & release them, through breathwork, movement, somatics, self-soothing & self-expression.
But when we learn early on that our emotions are unacceptable, or our anger is bad, or not to cry, we learn to suppress them & also often bypass them, just to appear calm.
When we do not fully feel our emotions, our body keeps the score & brings our attention to these emotions. These unprocessed emotions can take form of contraction, sensations, pain, numbness, itching, & creation of dis-ease.
Diseases or physical symptoms in every part of our body are related to mental & emotional patterns, which when healed, released & transformed, bring healing.
If we do not work on the mental & emotional patterns but only on the external symptoms, these symptoms then mostly show up in different organs, unless paid attention to and worked upon.
The body keeps bringing our attention to the underlying issues (false ideas in consciousness about ourselves or life.)
(More can be read in Heal Your Body - Louise Hay. Amazing, must read book. Also. I lead workshops & coach clients to work through their thought & emotional patterns based on the principles & techniques in that book.)
The Hidden Emotion Behind My Mid-Spine Pain:
Guilt.
It was my stored guilt that I could not face (hence the excruciating pain in my mid-spine.)
And I knew about it. I had just not paid much attention to it or made attempts to resolve or release it.
Guilt demands punishment & causes full body pains, especially mid-spine, says Louise Hay.
I see it as hollowing your backbone through self-blame & unforgiveness of the self.
For someone who has lived with mental illness for so long & often felt less & blamed myself for wasting my potential, guilt & shame have always been a huge part of my experience.
But this guilt was different. It was about choosing myself & leaving so much unattended.
How Guilt Was Showing Up in My Life:
Changing careers. Exhausting my savings. Working on my healing. Investing in programs.
Cutting expenses at home. Not taking enough care of my old parents. Feeling split between my new career that needed attention, my own life & my desire to travel, expenses & leaving dad alone at home, I had started blaming myself so much. Only if I was better or did more, when I did not feel like doing more.
So much that the free life I myself chose felt selfish to me. And burdened me with so much guilt.
Also, being a team player & used to working in Corporate, managing & working alone never motivated me enough. Instead of supporting myself through it, I felt guilty.
About the delays. About the lack of execution. And about my seeming disinterest in burdening my life with more.
And slowly, I felt guilty about living the beautiful life I had built for myself, which meant slowing down the rest.
My mid-spine pain grew. What could once only be felt intensely during Sudarshan Kriya now became my 24*7 companion, dull, not loud, yet present.
It felt like a fractured vertebra & felt scary to me. Just like another obstacle in my path.
Because it meant that all my hopes of fulfilling my responsibilities were diminishing. Getting delayed. And out into the unknown. I told myself that this was going to be the next excuse I will cling to, to keep myself small.
Which was true. But I was being very harsh on myself. Even that was true.
But all this pain really was, my body asking me to slow down even further. Slow down in a life where I felt I was already very slow & lagging behind. And pay attention.
After feeling upset for a while, I decided to do what I could, at that time. Pay attention.
The body is your best ally. Your biggest supporter. And if you listen carefully, it will tell you exactly where & how you are abandoning yourself.
So, I started listening. And allowing the pain to be. That's all I could do. I was far too aware to just ignore, suppress or neglect it. So, I accepted it.
Releasing The Guilt - That Helped Me Heal:
Every night, before bed, I would light up my beautiful scented aroma oils, sit on my chair with a pillow support & scribble in big letters in my notebook.
I feel sad that...I feel angry that...I feel bad about...I feel guilty about.. & SO ON!!
Some days, the letters were big. Some day, rushed. Some day, illegible.
Everyday, they felt like proof of my shortcomings. My inability to show up. Most of all, they were just my hatred for self.
My unforgiveness towards myself.
Out of nowhere, I realised how guilty I felt about living the life I had taken so long to build. And I just stayed with those emotions every night & breathed through them & wrote them down.
I realised how much I was internally beating myself up for not living up to my expectations. And the number of justifications I had built up to prove myself, even when there was nobody to ask me anything.
But then, just in case. :) There was the shame. Lurking around secretly.
The dreams I once had & my own parameters of success & responsibilities caged me. My life was fairly okay on its own without these parameters as well. I was happy, free & peaceful. I was free.
Just that, out of nowhere, I didn't feel that way anymore.
Because I started judging, comparing & abandoning myself.
Isn't that what we all do, at some point or another?
We have dreams & goals and family & responsibilities to fulfill but we slowly let these suck the joy out of our lives.
In an effort to make life better, we just suck the joy out of our own existing present & outsource it to our performance, our actions & our achievements.
Or our responsibilities. And their fulfillment.
And mostly, we focus on the shortcoming of these.
Because human mind was meant for survival, remember & scans for the negative & threat first?
But what if this is just a way of thinking & not the reality (which can be seen clearly when we let go of our judgment of self)?
The more I wrote every night, the more I had to write & the more horrific those late night notes became.
I didn't know I carried so much guilt. About being free. About being me. Choosing me.
But when I allowed it to flow, it came out.
And with that, I started writing even more.
Self-Acceptance That Releases All Resistance & Welcomes Wellbeing:
I started writing notes of acceptance to myself.
They read something like: I am where I am. I accept myself where I am. I am doing fine. I think I am doing well. I love myself exactly the way I am, where I am.
I stopped feeling the spine pain eventually because I did my Sudarshan Kriya without Vajrasana (that intensified the pain.)
My attention towards the pain became lesser & lesser.
Until one night at 1 AM.
I stretched my back to feel the pain & gauge the intensity of it.
The very stretch that I dreaded for around 4 weeks. The very stretch that said there was something wrong with my spine (that would add to my problems: notice the fear tell me false stories?)
And I felt nothing. Just a dull sensation.
I was so surprised that I tried doing the same stretch 2-3 times more.
What was once excruciating pain now felt like a mild trace of pain (reminding me where exactly it hurt.)
I immediately expressed thanks for this beautiful miraculous healing (although the intellect & wellbeing of the universe say that such healing is just natural) and I stopped my fearful thoughts in between, before my fearful thoughts invited the pain back.
For the next few days, this became my night time routine. One that made me super happy. And one that brought me closer to myself, in acceptance & appreciation.
Self-acceptance works in miraculous ways because what we resist persists.
This works beautifully with clients who want to let go of perceived bad habits & negative traits. Once they stop criticising themselves for them, they disappear miraculously.
Because self-acceptance is the key to making positive change. (Louise Hay, wise woman.)
The Daily Practices That Supported My Healing
Gentle breathwork
Emotional journaling
Writing self-acceptance statements
Allowing emotions instead of suppressing them
Resting without guilt
Choosing self-compassion over self-criticism
This is one of those experiences where I have healed with faith, by listening to my body. (I have healed my cervical issues, episodes of depression, my panic attacks, my furuncles & skin issues, my psoriasis, my migraines & headaches, my stomach issues & so much more by working with my emotions.)
Which makes me tell you: Our body is not our enemy, out there to punish us.
Our body is our dearest friend, always ready to point out to us, how we have been abandoning ourselves & punishing ourselves through our self-hating thoughts.
The back represents support. Most back issues are feeling unsupported.
And taking up too much.
Similarly, every part of the body & every related disease represents various thought patterns.
These, when worked on, restore natural wellbeing, mental, emotional & physical.
If this story resonated with you, perhaps your body is inviting you to slow down, listen, and offer yourself more compassion.
Healing does not begin with doing more to fix, get rid of or neglect the pain.
It begins with listening, to the pain & to the body and its messages. And the body knows how to heal itself.
For more tools & support, please check my guide to breathwork (that includes Body Scan for emotions & fear, stress & anxiety) or book a FREE BREAKTHROUGH SESSION with me.
This blog shares my personal experience and does not deny the importance of medical advice, medicines, tests or treatment. If you are experiencing severe or persistent pain, by all means, please consult an appropriate qualified healthcare professional as well.