Real Life vs Virtual Life

“Our bodies know they belong to Life, to Spirit. It’s our minds that make us homeless.”

- John O’Donahue

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new episode of Healing Your Own Pain. Today’s podcast is called: Real Life vs Virtual Life. My name is Greg, I’m an expert level MFR therapist and owner of Glen Ellyn Myofascial Release, an in-person and on-line treatment center for pain relief, injury rehabilitation and physical and emotional healing.

If you google “virtual reality” one definition you’ll find is: a complete immersion experience that shuts out the physical world, or “a simulation or imitation of real life” or “not reality in fact”, “having no physical reality.” Or as we like to say in MFR: living outside the body.

Real Life = In The Body Virtual Life = Out-of-Body
So, in the new global reality, virtual living, including: work, education, medicine, social gatherings, family reunions, even dating has become more and more, an on-line or virtual experience, or un-real experience.

Some years ago, a common spiritual or meditative goal was to achieve an out-of-body experience. What I’ve come to know through my own practice and those of my patients is virtually everyone is already living an out-of-body life and are unaware of it. By the time most of us have reached adulthood we’ve had a number of physical, medical, or emotional traumas that caused us to leave the body as an unconscious self-protective reaction. We may feel numbness or tingling in some part of the body, or have soft tissue restrictions, tightness, disuse, over or underuse of muscles, and pain. We’ve become as disconnected from our bodies as we are from the earth.

In order to heal anything, we must first come back to the body. There is no healing outside the body. We must feel to heal. There are three steps to healing. First, re-connect with the body. Second feel and release the physical and the emotional restriction. Third, rehabilitate using only the correct posture or muscles that have been compensated for, or misused due to injury or poor habits.

Ok, so what does it actually mean, to reconnect, or come back to the body. What I mean is to actually drop your locus, or center of gravity from the head, from thinking into the body’s interior. Many body-centered meditations direct you to feel your feet on the floor, the chair you’re sitting on etc. and that’s a good start. Next is to feel beneath the skin, to the interi