Today I want to tell you something important about pain and how you can get past it and get back to doing the things you really want to do.
First let me say that some pain can be a good thing.
It’s important to know when something is damaging you. It’s important to know, when you’re sitting at the campfire in the dark, that your foot accidentally went into the fire. That kind of pain has a good biological function.
But there’s another kind of pain I want to talk to you about that isn’t normal. It’s not good for you. And it doesn’t really play a useful role.
For instance, you have to sit at a desk all day and you start to get low back pain. You run or do aerobics and the tendons in your ankles and knees ache all the time.
Now something has gone wrong, and doesn’t fit with the evolutionary role of pain. It wasn’t meant to be constant, every day. Then it starts to have consequences that are more than just pain.
You weren’t built for that. Your body’s normal response becomes mismatched with what nature intended. And now, instead of helping you, that pain is a disruption of your capacity to do what you want.
I’ve been showing my patients how to solve the problem of chronic pain for more than 20 years. No injections, no synthetic drugs – and no side effects.
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Lemongrass from my friend Westi’s garden. The tea is refreshing, and many Balinese also keep a little in a spray bottle because it’s also an insect repellant. |
But with a lot of help from Nature. Because fortunately, nature has co-evolved with us, and provided us with remedies for almost any pain you can think of.
Now, I can’t promise you I can make all pain go away. But I have learned ways to help you move past it so you can still get things done.
Because let’s face it, what we really want is to be able to go ahead and do whatever we want to do without the pain distracting us.
So let me share one easy and effective solution that’s safe and natural and gets rid of those aches and pains right away.
Have you heard of lemongrass?
My friend I Madi Westi has hundreds of these plants growing in his garden in Bali. When you crush it in your hand it has a wonderful lemony smell. Westi and his wife Lelir use the leaves for cooking and to make tea. In her shop they extract the essential oil for formulas and balms.
And if you have chronic pain, especially connective tissue pain, you’ll be happy to hear that the essential oil is great at soothing ligaments, tendons and cartilage.
I have lemongrass growing in my yard in Florida. It’s good for relieving inflamed tissue like from a sprain, tennis elbow, or Achilles tendonitis. And it works for rheumatism and arthritis.
You can get the oil your local health food store on online. It’s very effective. In one study, animals give higher doses of lemongrass oil had 100% of their pain relieved.1
Look for pure Cymbopogon citratus on the label. It may also be labeled “Melissa oil” in Ayurvedic shops.
Tea made from the raw leaves relives pain, too. I don’t recommend the dried leaves for tea because they’re fibrous and not very appealing floating in your tea.
I like to make the tea right from the plants in my yard. To make it, all you need are some fresh lemongrass stalks and a quart of water.
1. Boil the water, and in the meantime you can clean fresh stalks of lemongrass. Then cut and discard the green upper part of the stalks. The white part is what you make the tea with.
2. A trick I learned from Lelir is to tenderize the stalks by gently pounding them. This will release the oils into the tea.
3. Put the stalks inside a teapot and pour the boiling water over them.
4. Then you steep for 5 minutes and serve.
You don’t even need to add anything to lemongrass tea. It tastes good all by itself. You could add some honey if you want, and in Bali they add turmeric to the lemongrass stalks before steeping.
1. Viana G, Vale T, Pinho R, Matos F. “Antinociceptive effect of the essential oil from Cymbopogon citratus in mice.” J Ethnopharmacol. 2000 Jun;70(3):323-7.