PD Revelation

[Updated: 8/12/20; 8/18/20; 8/21/20]

The importance of experiencing feelings in your heart is a recurring theme in Janice Walton-Hadlock's (JWH) writings on PD. She explains that many people with PD have difficulty with this. So it is well worthwhile spending some time nurturing our ability to experience feelings in the heart. More specifically, the feelings take place in the pericardium. Searching the PDFs for Stuck on Pause and Recovery from Parkinson's for “pericardium” will turn up passages that inform most of the comments below.

JWH addresses feelings in the heart from a number of angles: In the dialogue with the other you want to talk from your heart. In general you want to be guided by your heart, live from your heart. (Perhaps more precisely, you want to be guided by the “other” through your heart.) The feeling of safety necessary for coming off pause starts as a feeling in the heart and, on the other side of the coin, speaking from the heart begins to engender that feeling of safety.

For months I struggled to bring about or notice much in the way of feelings in my heart. I did notice that the “lips on the heart” technique described in Stuck on Pause triggered a slight feeling, perhaps like a slight tension, in the area of my heart. Maybe that was actually some resistance to feeling in my heart. Still, even that is a start! It did make it easier to feel the tingles that, for me, seem to signal some success at feeling the presence of the “other.” But I was not feeling the sense of expansion in the heart that JWH describes in number of places.

Lately I seem to have made some progress in that regard. It came after adding my own version of the portion of the instruction for the “centering prayer” mentioned in an earlier post. That part of the instruction, concerning adopting the right mindset for entering into the centering prayer, is to “Allow your heart to open toward that invisible but always present Origin of all that exists.” To do that, in dialogue with the “other,” I simply say, “I open my heart to you.” For me that usually triggers a clear feeling in my heart.

I then added a variant of the second of “the new exercises” (Recovery from Parkinson's). Inspired by JWH's suggested request, “Let me feel your joy and love inside of me,” I focus more specifically on my heart in asking, “Let me feel your love in my heart.” Even better can be, “Let me feel your love fill my heart.” Lately, in response to these requests, I've been experiencing what does seem like a feeling of expansion in my heart. I think this is an important sign, a key piece of the puzzle falling into place!

On the advice of one of our daughters (thanks, B! <3), I have sometimes added a small but effective enhancement to this routine, simply placing one hand on my heart to better focus my attention. (In this video you can explore this hand-on-heart option more fully as one part of a potent technique for reducing anxiety.)

I believe the “lips on the heart” technique prepared me for this by engendering initial feelings in my heart that enabled me to take the next step, experiencing the feeling of expansion. Though it's a bit early to tell, I seem generally to be experiencing a bit better energy and mood since beginning these efforts. Another good sign, I think!

Update – 8/12/20 – A caution:

A day after writing the post above I have concluded it was indeed a bit premature to be talking about improved mood and energy as a result of the techniques described. Because I wrote the post over the course of a few days, most of my comments in it reflected my conclusions from a couple of days or so before posting. Just before posting, I noted that it might be too early to tell about those particular results, largely because, for the prior day or two, I'd experienced a small downswing in terms of fatigue and anxiety. I have now concluded that this downswing may have been triggered, at least in part, by my use of the statement in dialogue with the “other,” “I open my heart to you.”

Here's the problem: In Recovery from Parkinson's and Stuck on Pause JWH says more than once that she learned, through experience with her patients, that positive affirmations do not help to turn off self-induced pause. She even says such affirmations may “strengthen and embolden the Blocker” (Recovery from Parkinson's, 2019). I Believe the problem with affirmations comes when they nudge you assertively a bit toward surrender or coming off pause. The wary parts of your brain may take that as a threat, triggering anxiety and pushing back.

Well, I think the statement “I open my heart to you” may constitute a sort of positive affirmation, fine for the average person, but problematic for someone on pause. Compounding the situation for me is that I have for some time experimented with other statements that might technically constitute affirmations. I have actually been careful to structure them so that they're not affirmations per se. But that may have been a mere technicality. They may have functioned as affirmations. (I may well write a whole post about this at some point.)

So this has me going back and reassessing the various statements I have used to see which ones may act problematically in the way affirmations can. For now, for the second of the “new exercises,” I am reverting mainly just to the requests JWH recommends in Recovery from Parkinson's. I may add back in some embellishments and alternatives as I come to understand more clearly the issue with affirmations.

I think we have to keep in mind the big picture: the idea is to increase our sense of safety to the point that we naturally turn off pause. In the JWH protocol we do this by keeping ourselves in the presence of the other through dialogue and through the comforts offered by the second exercise. This is quite different from trying to push oneself to surrender or to turn off pause. Those things will happen as a natural result of feeling safe enough.

Now the following might seem like splitting hairs, but in some of these instances I suspect a verbal, affirmation-like statement might safely be replaced by a nonverbal adoption of a particular attitude or feeling. So, rather than saying “I open my heart to you,” I think it might be okay, if you can do it, to use something closer to the original instruction for entering into the centering prayer: “Allow your heart to open toward that invisible but always present Origin of all that exists.” That might be tweaked to become, “Allow your heart to open toward the 'other'.” If you follow that instruction, and can simply enter into the feeling you're comfortable experiencing, I believe you may avoid the problem of pushing yourself to the point that your brain takes it as a threat. The same may hold true for certain other statements that create affirmation-like problems.

That said, the above ideas are new and speculative on my part, so please take them with a grain of salt and form your own conclusions.

Update – 8/18/20: Having had a few more days to reflect on this, I believe my concerns above may have been a bit excessive, though I have not reached any precise conclusions on the questions involved. With regard to the statement designed to open your heart, I do think it's quite safe instead simply to wordlessly follow the instruction associated with the “centering prayer,” if you're able. I have also tried making it verbal while making sure to structure it differently from an affirmation. So something like, “I want to open my heart to you” (rather than “I open my heart to you.”) may have the desired effect without pushing you beyond what your brain currently accepts. Yet this could be an example of one of those statements I mentioned that might still be too close to an affirmation. I'm not sure. But my experience suggests to me that it's probably safe to experiment a bit with different possibilities, simply backing off if a statement seems to trigger anxiety.

Update – 8/21/20: I should clarify that it's my impression that the affirmations that can lead to problems, as described above, are those aimed directly at feelings that can have an impact on the dynamics of pause. That is, they are affirmations that might nudge you toward turning off pause before your brain feels ready. Presumably there are other kinds of affirmations that should present no problem. That said, I'm still unsure whether my diagnosis of the problem in the first update was even correct. So... grain of salt!