PD Revelation

A Parkinson's recovery journey

[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.

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Just a note to mention that some posts contain updates. I have indicated this at the top of any post where it applies, and have generally made clear where an update is within the post.

[Updated: 7/30/20; 8/11/20]

A friend and I would like to invite interested readers to a monthly support group to be held via Zoom session or conference call. Our hope is to generate support, information sharing, and inspiration in a small group of like-minded folks interested in the Janice Walton-Hadlock approach to PD. This will be free and leaderless, though my friend and I are glad to handle the logistics. To gauge interest in such a group I invite you to email me through the contact form on my regular website. If we get enough interest we will work out the details through email and schedule the first session. Let me know if you're interested!

Update – 7/30/20: We've had enough response that the group will almost surely be happening. Details will be worked out soon through email.

Update – 8/11/20: I'll incorporate subsequent updates into the pinned post about the support group at the top of the page.

[Updated: 7/22/20; 9/21/20]

Following on the recent post on emotional surrender, let's look a little further at that idea. I hope coming at it from a few different angles will help fill in a picture of how surrender might feel to someone following the Janice Walton-Hadlock (JWH) protocol.

First, here's a helpful article on the benefits of surrender for anyone, including tips for entering into it.

Note Amy Johnson's observation that “control is rooted in fear.” For anyone on pause that gets to the nub, pause involving a perception, on some level, of a risk of imminent death.

Trust becomes a key feeling in the JWH protocol, trust in the comfort of the “other” (or the universe or higher power for which the “other” may be a representative), trust that the “other” will not mislead you and is keeping you safe.

Johnson submits that “Surrender = Complete acceptance of what is + Faith that all is well, even without my input.”

Note how similar this is to JWH's statement quoted in the prior post on surrender: “The 'surrender' was simply the admission that, no matter what, even if they did nothing in self-defense or self-maintenance, they were actually safe: safe enough to go back to living via the heart.”

The Johnson article provides several worthwhile ideas for helping to enable the experience of surrender. I especially like the imagery of the boat, dropping the oars, and going with the downstream flow. Note the suggestion that surrender means “to stop fighting. Stop fighting with yourself. Stop fighting the universe and the natural flow of things. Stop resisting and pushing against reality.”

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Well worth a listen...

[Updated – 9/26/20]

This will be the first of two or more posts on this topic.

Emotional surrender has been on my mind lately. In Recovery from Parkinson's (2019) Janice Walton-Hadlock (JWH) writes, “As it turns out, an ability to emotionally surrender is a better predictor of recovery than a determination to 'succeed'.” So this would seem to be a pretty important topic!

Let's talk about what emotional surrender, an important phenomenon in various spiritual traditions, might involve in the JWH protocol. First, note that coming off pause certainly qualifies as the most pivotal event in the recovery process. So, given the quotation above, it seems fair to say emotional surrender must be centrally important among the internal processes that ultimately prompt coming off pause.

How does surrender link with turning off pause? Successful surrender clearly requires a strong feeling of safety, the key ingredient in coming off pause. Pause and emotional surrender seem incompatible. Pause includes a kind of wariness, a guardedness (~ the opposite of feeling safe) that surely runs directly counter to surrender. Pause would appear then to stand in the way of emotional surrender, suggesting that if you can accomplish the latter you have likely (and possibly via that very process) eliminated the former.

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I want to share some inspiring news. Emmy, at Gezond met Parkinson, whose recovery process has centered on the Janice Walton-Hadlock (JWH) approach, let me know she recently visited her neurologist. The neurologist admitted she has recovered, that she is now free of Parkinson's!

Now, we already knew Emmy had recovered, but to get that concession from a neurologist is a rare thing! As JWH has written, when recovered patients return to their neurologists to report their news they are almost always met with dismissals of one sort or another (see, e.g., p. 15 in the currently available chapters of Recovery from Parkinson's). So I would say Emmy has made a little bit of history here! Congratulations Emmy! (Also, this neurologist deserves credit for being open to a possibility generally rejected by the mainstream medical establishment.)

By the way, Emmy is now offering coaching for those with PD. See her website for details. The site is in Dutch but easily translated with Google Translate or the Chrome browser. (Emmy speaks excellent English.)

While I work on a more time consuming post it seems a good time for another inspiring song. This one needs no introduction. If you're following the JWH approach you might find you hear it with new ears.

As I mentioned in the first post on this topic, some symptomatic benefits can result from this process prior to coming off pause. I expect to document more of these benefits as I go along, but am waiting to discuss some of them when it is clear they are definite, lasting changes.

Here I will just report on one small but clear change. About 2.5 to 3 months ago, a patch of seborrheic dermatitis which had lingered on the side of my nose for several years simply disappeared. This may not seem a huge thing, but it's worth noting a couple of points.

First, seborrheic dermatitis accompanies PD so commonly that neurologists often look for it as one of many small signs that can help confirm the PD diagnosis. Second, this minor skin condition had resisted a few go-rounds with prescription corticosteroid creams. It would show only partial improvement, and would come right back every time I stopped such a medication. Its final disappearance came many months after the last use of such a cream. A good sign, I think!

P.S. I've added a significant update to the first post on symptomatic benefits.

To elaborate on one part of the recent post on emotional openness, it matters how you deal with new ideas and emotions. Recall that in Stuck on Pause Janice Walton-Hadlock (JWH) writes, “When you do feel these new and/or deeper level thoughts and emotions, and feel the love behind them, actually feel them rather than mentally assessing your emotions and behaviors, you will very likely find yourself turning off pause.”

So it is of fundamental importance to fully grasp those ideas and to register those emotions on a very palpable, feeling level rather than merely an intellectual level.

The need to feel increasingly safe, for example, is central to the protocol. The point here is that you can't merely acknowledge the rational thought, “I am safe” or “I'm in no danger of dying right now.” To fully grasp this new idea of safety, you have to feel it. You have to actually experience new feelings of safety. The same could be said for related ideas/emotions such as trust, being loved, the experience of letting your guard down, and other ideas and emotions that come into play.

Of course thought may precede feeling. And turning over an idea in your mind may round it out and give it nuance, ultimately fleshing out the feeling.

At any rate, I've been mulling this over a lot lately, as I have a strong sense that if I can grasp these things more fully, really embrace them on a feeling level, my progress will accelerate. This then has become one of my major goals.

But how to do that? I have just a couple of thoughts. First, notice that JWH's “second exercise” is all about enhancing the feeling level. So if, for example, you ask the “other” to hold you, and under those conditions consider that you are feeling safer, or even add something like, “Let me feel the safety you provide,” then you are focusing on palpable sensations, a focus that should help promote a feeling rather than rather than just an idea of safety.

Second, it's going to take some time, revisiting new ideas, repeatedly and from different angles. (There is food for thought in comparing this with views on “insight” in psychoanalytic therapy.) In any event, I try not to be too quick to assume I have fully grasped a new idea/emotion. I try to stay open to new levels and facets of it. And I still have a ways to go! Perhaps the gist is that we want to grasp these things on a “gut” level.

Please email me with any thoughts you may have on this! I'm always trying to build on these ideas.

“I grow silent. Dear soul, you speak.” ~ Rumi