Dear Friends,

Thanks for stopping by, and welcome to MASTER your back pain.  Here you’ll find not only information, but education about all things related to your back pain. What you won’t find is a quick fix, a drug recommendation or a suggestion that your back pain can be cured by just implementing one particular thing.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Lindy Royer and using the internet to deliver information about natural solutions for your back pain is a valuable tool that’s new and exciting. I’ve been working in the fields of physical therapy, Pilates and sports medicine for many years.

After watching the internet explode in the last 10 years, I’ve overcome my stubborn resistance to it and am now embracing the concept of being a part of the 21st Century. Still, I have a lot to learn and am constantly amazed and challenged by all that we can accomplish in cyberspace.

Which brings me to why I’m here.

If you’ve ever been embarrassed by your struggle to get up out of a chair, or had the wind knocked out of you just by climbing out of bed in the morning, you’re in the right place.

Back pain is a bear.

I know, because I’ve suffered from it too. Even though I worked in the health care business as a physical therapist, I couldn’t seem to cure my own back pain. After about 20 years of “on and off”, random, back pain I was pretty frustrated.

During this time I worked as an inpatient and outpatient Physical Therapy, specializing in Sports Medicine, Orthopedics and Spine rehab. Ironic hey? Here I was treating others for their ailments and I couldn’t help myself. I felt like a hypocrite…and a failure. I felt like a “bad” person.

About 10 years ago a few things happened in my life that resulted in a Perfect Storm health-wise. I ended up quitting my job for about 6 months, learning a lot about myself and miraculously, my back pain and my other aches and pains got less. Not completely gone, but definitely very manageable.

Since 2000, I’ve been on a new journey that has led me to open my own practice and open my eyes to a more complete approach to health and healing. At my Center, we look at the whole person, not just where it hurts. I’ve come to understand that getting rid of my back pain wasn’t about doing any one thing in particular, but about following a system that addressed my entire being: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

I realized recently that I’ve been creating a system for myself that’s finally working. I’ve taught it to some of my patients, and they’ve been helped too. They’re always asking me about how they can share the same system with other friends and relatives across the country or around the world….”I wish my mother in New Jersey could come here and learn this”. “Can you tell me how I can share this with my fiend in Chicago?”, “Why don’t you put your program online?” Ah, Ha! These urgings have gotten so persistent that I’m doing something I thought I’d never do - put my system online.

It’s a huge undertaking, and quite frankly, a bit overwhelming, but I’m ready to teach this system to you.

The purpose of this blog is to learn about your personal struggles, share some of my personal experiences with you and find out more about what frustrates you about your back pain, the health care system and whatever else you’d care to share. I want to make sure that I’m giving you what you need to be successful in your pursuit of a healthy back (and healthy body, mind and spirit too).

I won’t be doing this alone. There are a few of us who will be sharing our insights and expertise with you. We all have a holistic approach to health and are here to help you. Along the way, I’ll explain more about the MASTER your back pain system and what it’s all about.

Maybe you’ll find it works for you, or maybe it will lead you somewhere else that works even better. Whatever the case, my hope for you is that you have lots of options for mastering your back pain and that your journey leads you to the greatest, most wonderful, vibrant health possible.

Love and Healing,

Lindy

Filed under: The MASTER System by lindyroyer
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In the last post I gave you a bit of background about my purpose in starting this blog. This week, I’d like to tell you more about the MASTER System.

I was lying in bed last night thinking about how to describe the concept of the MASTER System, and it occurred to me that the process of going to bed is a lot like the MASTER System. I usually have a very consistent ritual that I go through every night before going to sleep. I’d say that 90% of the time I use the same preparation and pre-sleep sequence, no matter where I am or what time I’m going to bed.

This ritual is a combination of small steps like putting on my P.J.s, cleaning and moisturizing my face, brushing and flossing my teeth, kissing my children good-night and finally, climbing in to bed. In bed, I always arrange my pillows in a particular way that I’ve found to be the most supportive and comfortable for me, and I always do some reading before turning off the light. My reading usually consists of an inspirational passage or two, as well as something fictional, out-of-my daily experience.

My husband, meanwhile, has his own personal nightly ritual as well. It, too, is pretty much the same every night.

And if we don’t perform all of the ritual, we often don’t sleep very well.

We humans are very habitual creatures. It’s estimated by experts that measure this stuff that we operate by habit more than 90% of the time. Even though we think we have free choice, many of our thinking, movement and emotional patterns are unconscious.

I read a funny example of this recently. It was about a lady who always cut the end off the tenderloin when baking her traditional Christmas roast. She was teaching her daughter to prepare the traditional meal, and her daughter asked, “Mum, why do you cut the end off the roast?”

To which her mother replied, “That’s the way my mother taught me.”

So the daughter called up her grandmother and asked, “Grandma, why do you cut the end off the Christmas roast?”

Her Grandmother replied, “I always used to cut the end off the roast because my pan wasn’t big enough. I got a new roasting pan years ago and now there’s no need to cut the end off.”

What’s this got to do with your back pain?

Your movement and postural habits are the result of adaptations you’ve made, mostly unconsciously, to avoid something or to effect something. You probably don’t even know why many of these adaptations were made in the first place. For example, if you were bottle fed as a baby, your mother probably held you in the same particular way every time - a pattern that was unconscious for her.

You learned to turn your head toward your bottle in that direction, and a movement habit was established. You found out that turning you head in that way resulted in a satisfying reward. Not to mention the nurturing you experienced by learning this pattern.

All through your life, you’ve layered movement and body habits on top of each other, based on all kinds of stimuli: convenience, pain, surgeries, injuries. And just like in the story of the granddaughter and her roast, you continue use these patterns even when the reason for them no longer has a purpose.

The MASTER System is a recipe for gaining control of your back pain, and it is comprised of multiple components. Because I’m here to tell you right now - there is no Silver Bullet. Don’t let anyone tell you that there is. Your spine responds to many different stimuli, and you need a whole body, mind, spirit approach to master your symptoms permanently.

One component of The MASTER system helps you assess your postural and movement habits and find out which ones are contributing to your back pain and preventing you from creating an environment that promotes healing. You can’t begin an exercise program until you re-program your movement, alignment and postural habits to restore balance. If you do, you’ll simply be strengthening the dysfunction that got you into you pain/injury cycle in the first place.

There are other essential pieces to the MASTER System, and I’ll discuss those in a future post.

What are all the elements of a successful back program from your perspective? I’m sure you’ve discovered techniques that work and some that don’t. These could be small changes like sitting differently at your desk or car seat, or large ones like taking up daily exercise or meditation. Please leave you comments - I’ll bet you’ve got some tricks we haven’t even thought of…

Filed under: The MASTER System by lindyroyer
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