Hello.  My name is Jennifer Gait and as a nurse, researcher, and policy analyst, I worked in the healthcare field for almost 40 years.  However, it was not until I had a back injury that left me with severe chronic pain that I learned that health is an inside job.  Doctors, nurses and the health-care system can only do so much.  It’s up to each person to maintain their health or to trigger healing within themselves if their health breaks down.

My back injury and the pain resulting  from it were a gift.  They gave me the time and the impetus to look at what I could do to help myself  heal, and in doing so I changed my life.   I had already had surgery so all that the health-care system could offer was pain killers – these helped somewhat, as did an excellent water therapy program, but I was still far from being remotely functional.

Because of the pain I could sit, stand or walk for only a linited time, so was constantly alternating between them, then after an hour or so would lie down for a rest.  These rest periods were  spent reading and watching videos:  first on pain management and then on  holistic medicine, meditation and visualization, eastern beliefs about the body, quantum physics, mind-body medicine, energy medicine – in fact anything I could find about the body and creating healing.

It took me several years to beome fully functional, mostly because I did not have a guide so was inventing my own wheel.  Along the way I studied the nutritional needs of the body, lost weight,  learned Reiki and visualization and practiced them daily, learned to release unwanted emotions and beliefs, studied a Course in Miracles and Buddhism, meditated, learned about mindfulness and the neuroplasticity of the brain, and had psychotherapy. It is not necessary to do these things to heal, though some of them, or other modalities, may be helpful for some people.

I hope that I can be a guide to help you create health or healing.

Mental traps lead to unproductive thinking.  You can improve your thinking process by avoiding them, but first you need to know what types of mental traps there are.  A previous post discussed the mental trap of persistence.  You persist when you continue to work towards a goal that no longer has meaning for you.  You amplify when you work harder or longer than necessary to achieve a goal that you value.  Both persistence and amplification are unproductive thinking processes because they waste time that could be spent more productively.

Amplification is like using a sledge-hammer to swat a fly.  There are easier ways to do it.  People tend to amplify for two reasons.  Firstly, they over-prepare for things because they want to avoid possible outcomes they see as unacceptable.  Over-preparing for a speech, or continually re-packing for a trip fall into this category.  While it is possible that one more run-through of the speech  will lead to an improved presentation, or that one more re-pack will bring to light something that has been forgotten, the law of diminishing returns make these outcomes less and less likely.

Repetition, as seen in the above examples, is more likely when it’s difficult to tell when the goal has been attained.  How do you know when you are rich enough, or famous enough, or truly loved by your partner?  In the latter case, no evidence may be sufficient so looking for more is useless. This is the time to learn to trust that you are lovable..

In the case of wealth, fame or power, achievement of a goal may lead to setting a higher goal because you now compare yourself to different people.  The question to ask yourself is if you want to spend your life chasing an ever-expanding goal of wealth, power or fame, or if there are other ways you prefer to spend your limited time on earth.  Is “I am the richest (most famous…most powerful…most…?) person on earth” going to be the thought that sustains you on your death-bed, or are there other things you might achieve that would have more meaning?

In his book Mental Traps: Stupid Things That Sane People Do To Mess Up Their Minds, Andre Kukla goes into a lot more detail about amplification and the 11 other mental traps. He suggests that by being attentive to the present moment, people can break away from habitual thinking processes that lead to mental traps.  Thinking is replaced by attention to the moment until the moment requires thinking. The compulsive need to always be working on things in order to stay on top of a future situation is thus allayed.