admin – Vic Shayne

How I conquered headaches and back pain

For more than forty years, I have studied psychology, trying to better understand the human condition — what makes us unhappy, discontented, angry, excited, and so on. The deeper I have explored how the mind is related to emotions, the body, the brain, and thoughts, the more I’ve come to understand it as the source of most psychological and physical ailments, as well as chronic pain and suffering. Over the generations this hasn’t changed a bit, and yet we as a species continue to ignore what’s right in front of us and what to do about it.

There is a rather predictable pattern that repeats itself when the mind is not at ease — and this takes its toll on the body in myriad ways. My goal is to help clients change this pattern of thinking and ensuing bodily reaction. Then we can move past the pain and regain the joy in life. This approach worked for me, and it can work for you as well. It’s not a quick fix, but it’s a permanent one.

My own story of back and headache pain
One sunny day in 1987 my wife took our three-year-old son to the store and I stayed home to watch our one-year-old daughter. The baby and I were in the kitchen and then she began to crawl out into the living room and I followed. Tired of chasing her, I bent down to pick her up, and that’s when I had such a bad spasm in my lower back that I fell to the ground. It was as if an invisible, tightly wound cable snapped in my back and ended my ability to stand upright. My daughter thought it was a lot of fun to have Daddy on the floor beside her, but Daddy just couldn’t get up. It was all I could do to turn over and get to all fours. Over the next hour my back relaxed just enough for me to stand and get around, but this was the beginning of what is so commonly called “a bad back.”

I chalked up my chronic back pain to being a weightlifter since the age of 14. I reasoned that I was anything but cautious when it came to loading up the barbell with heavy weights every time I went to the gym. I figured that I must have damaged my lower back muscles to the point of being irreparable. So I suffered from the pain. I never went to the doctor for it, because I was afraid of what they might recommend in the way of drugs and surgery. I figured the back pain was a better choice than the possibility of a medical error that could leave me permanently incapacitated, or worse.

The strange thing is that the pain didn’t stay; it came and went, periodically flaring up. I would be pain-free for weeks or months and then suddenly I could hardly get out of bed in the morning or lift my brief case on my way to work.

Beside the chronic back pain, I had suffered from headaches since age 12. I attributed these to the climate in Miami where I grew up. When I was in my late thirties I had a close friend named Gil who was a chiropractor with a lot of knowledge about nutrition. I asked him why I got such a bad headache every time the weather became very humid, especially when it was just about to rain. Gil told me that the weather had nothing to do with my pain and I should try cutting certain foods out of my diet, especially dairy, peanut butter, and fried foods. I did as the doctor ordered and noticed a fantastic change for the better. My sinuses were clearer and I stopped financially supporting the Kleenex company. But I still continued to suffer from terrific headaches from time to time.

A treatment from the Civil War
Having minored in History in college, I was particularly interested in the American Civil War period; and a few days before Gil and his wife came to visit us I came across an interesting letter that a young soldier wrote home while he was sitting around a campfire with his comrades. The infantryman wrote that he suffered from horrible headaches, but found that a couple of strong cups of coffee would make them disappear like magic.

When we all went out for dinner — Gil and his wife Betty and Janice and I — I happened to have a headache so bad that I could barely think or see straight. I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but when we sat down at the restaurant I immediately ordered a cup and drank it down as soon as it had cooled to a tolerable temperature. And then I called over the waiter and asked for a refill, and I drank that cup as fast as I could. Like magic, my headache completely disappeared. I was beyond amazed and thought that I could have been using this coffee cure instead of suffering for the past twenty some-odd years! I felt like Benjamin Franklin the moment he discovered electricity. Or something like that.

Although the coffee cure worked each and every time I had a headache, no matter what the weather was like or what I had eaten, I was nevertheless bothered by the idea that this really wasn’t a cure; it was a pharmacological treatment. The coffee was acting as a drug, albeit not a very harmful one, although it did seem to make me feel like passing out if I happened to get up too fast after drinking a cup or two. I needed a real cure with no side effects.

Fast forward to my cure
Another couple of decades went by before I would discover a cure that I at first refused to believe was real. At the time I was working out with my jiu jitsu instructor and told him that I had to go easy that day because my bad back was flaring up. He told me that he used to have the same problem but read a book about how back pain can be cured just by thinking in a certain way about it. I did what most people are apt to do — I politely smiled and told my teacher that this was interesting, but inside I thought it was crazy. So my pain continued.

Another couple of years went by and I was interviewing a World War II fighter pilot for a book I was writing about his life. I was sitting on his sofa in his living room and I grimaced because my back was really hurting bad. The man asked me what was wrong and I told him that I had chronic back issues. He then told me that his son had the same problem until he read a book by John Sarno, MD, a New York University physician specializing in psychosomatic pain. The title of the book was Healing Back Pain. Within minutes after reading the book the son’s problem was cured. Again, this sounded nuts, but at this point I was willing to try anything, so after we finished our writing session I gingerly walked to my car and drove to the closest book store, let out a loud moan as I stepped out of my car, and made my way to the shelves. I read the book that night, and two days later my chronic back pain came to a complete stop and never came back.

Here’s the solution
Oddly, many times when a client learns how physical pain is caused by their subconscious emotions, brains, and body, their pain goes away within a day or two. But in most cases I have found it takes several sessions. This is because we have all been psychologically conditioned to think a certain way about the mind, body, and pain — and it isn’t always easy to reverse this lifetime of conditioning overnight.

My experience and research have shown that pain is not only caused by the way our minds have been conditioned to think about life, but even the sense of self — the person we take yourself to be — is created by all sorts of ideas and experiences. This leads to a lot of issues over the course of our lives, and it is helpful to understand this process of how secondhand information, culture, beliefs, and memories shape our self-image, as well as the image we have of others and the world around us. I would go so far as to say that this sense of self is the cause of almost all suffering that we human beings experience in our lives. But it’s good to know that there is something that can be done to make your life much better, happier, and fulfilling!

And now I can help you with your pain and suffering!

What is this idea of spiritual awakening?

Spiritual awakening is a phrase that is tossed around all over the internet, but it is actually most often misunderstood. Life is an illusion of sorts, and people are looking to escape their unhappiness and become something greater, perhaps even supernatural. However, it is the sense of self, driven by thoughts, fears, and hopes, that is always seeking something better, superior, and a promise to solve all of one’s suffering and problems.

Self-enquiry is an ancient way of deeply observing your own sense of self to see what lies beneath the illusion of what we believe we are. Since the earliest age we have been conditioned with thought by our parents, relatives, teachers, religion, and all sorts of other sources of authority. As a result we have formed a sense of self, often called an ego, or “me.”

The self believes it is separated from the rest of reality, including its own proclivities and negative aspects. And this causes all kinds of problems due to the ensuing internal conflict.

Self-enquiry isn’t a belief system. It is a practice of observation without judgment, presumptions, or criticisms. It’s just looking at what you are, how you tend to think, what you tend to think about, and so on.

In the form of a novel, I present many of my own realizations — issues of the self and how to step out of its habituation and conditioning — in my book 13 Pillars of Enlightenment: how to realize your true nature and end suffering. If you are one of the few people who have always wondered about the fundamental questions about who you really are beyond the persona and the world of problems and suffering, this book may help you.

Plus, you can read my articles on self-enquiry on substack.com.

The Enduring Myth of the Buddha

The story of Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, connects the human psyche to the transcendent. My new book, The Enduring Myth of the Buddha, is rich in metaphor that touches the heart and has the power to turn the egoic self back onto itself to question your very essence.

Maybe you’re wondering: What the heck does this mean?

The egoic self is what we commonly call “me,” and we are referring to a person who we only believe we are — complete with ideas, memories, dispositions, preconceptions, fears, biases, and attitudes that interfere with our seeing life for what it really is, which is the source of suffering. To move past this egoic self is to end suffering and find a life of compassion; and this was the core of the Buddha’s teachings.

Siddhartha ultimately discovered that we suffer due to the way our minds are psychologically conditioned to believe we are separate from all others. Because we do not realize that everything is available to us, we are always desiring to get or attain something to make us feel whole and happy. To truly understand this fact of life takes enquiring into your own sense of self to find out what you are beneath this conditioned mind. And this is what Siddhartha had done, and once he knew he became the Buddha — the awakened one.

This book has little to do with Buddhism as a religion, and mostly to do with Buddha as a mythical figure whose life, actions, words, and relationships are full of power that bring to the fore compassion, humanity, love, respect, deep thinking, caring, and the transcendence beyond human suffering and desire. This is a light and interesting study that appreciates the metaphor and myth in the Buddha story to reflect on your own life. While it is most common to regard the life of the Buddha as an historical fact and a suggestion to quiet the mind and avoid attachment, the Buddha myth is really a much deeper teaching, and I have used the teachings of other enlightened persons who were able to elucidate what it means to be awake in a world otherwise perceived by the limited mind of the egoic self.

I am not a Buddhist nor a Buddhist scholar, and The Enduring Myth of the Buddha is not an academic work; I leave such writings to the experts. My interest in writing this book was to explore the depths of the myth, as well as to make it clear that a myth, despite popular misuse of the word, does not equate to a lie. Rather, a myth is a story that guides you back from the objective to the subjective to find out who you are at the core. As such, it does not matter whether you are a religious person, an atheist, or merely interested in a subject that moves your thinking about your self beyond materialist, scientific, religious, and academic thinking.

The Buddha’s teachings have endured for millennia for a good reason that is fundamental to who we are as human beings, and if we regard his story literally then we are apt to miss the richness of his hero’s journey.

Do we create reality, or are we reality itself?

Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

For many years I had read how we create our own reality. This was a great puzzle to me. Of course, it’s quite easy to repeat what others have said and then convince yourself that it’s true. This is called belief. Belief is not knowing; it is not a realization. You can believe that out-of-body experiences are real, but unless you have had one or a thousand then you don’t really know what it feels, looks, or sounds like. It remains an idea, but not a realization. You can also believe that life has a purpose, but it is only the conditioned mind that tells you this out of belief and not as a fact. And you can believe that you create your own reality, but unless you fully see this then it remains a belief.

Consciousness is the totality of all that is. It is existence at all levels, including all emotions as well as pairs of opposites that we call duality. Consciousness is a field of potentialities pertaining to what may or can happen, as well as the entire range of experiences, phenomena, expressions, and thoughts. The contents of consciousness is consciousness; it’s the whole enchilada, uninterrupted. And this totality is each one of us. It is as much in us as it is us.

Consciousness as the totality
Everything is consciousness; it’s the singular movement of life, and because we are all consciousness then we know of all of the dualities of hot and cold, good and bad, caring and uncaring, smart and stupid, loud and quiet, tall and short, wild and controlled, chaotic and ordered, and so on. It is the brain and mind that makes this possible.

The writer creates reality
As consciousness, we all are the creators of our own reality, each and every waking moment, as well as in every moment of a dream or daydream. When you look into this to see for yourself you can consider that all of the good, bad, and indifferent are within you.

A leap into unalloyed consciousness

When I wrote Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience, I knew I was jumping into turbulent waters, because there is such a huge divide between materialist science and spirituality. Strangely, as I discovered in the process of writing, both religious people and materialist scientists base their opinions about spirituality on beliefs. Both ends of the spectrum swear that they are right and that they have the answers to life’s questions, including what consciousness is. But it turns out that a belief is a belief, which means that the believer has no idea of what the truth is, yet this is what shapes most people’s opinions and actions.

Consciousness isn’t a book for everyone, because it’s quite honest in its approach to who we are and why we see the world in our own unique ways. Honesty does not sit well with the egoic sense of self. The self has been conditioned since birth to believe it is a body and all of the attachments and identities that go along with it. In essence, people are not who they take themselves to be; they are amalgams of thoughts that are unreliable, ephemeral, and changeable.

Although we are quiet complex people, this book is easier reading than it looks!

In Consciousness, I discuss all sorts of ideas of what consciousness is, according to the experts who ironically really do not know very much outside of their own guesses and iffy conclusions, whether they are scientists or self-proclaimed New Age experts. If you are alive, you are experiencing consciousness.

This book also dives into the many experiences in consciousness — near death and out of body experiences, dreaming, lucid dreaming, intuition, hallucinogenic trips, imagination, quantum entanglement, and more.

It’s so easy that it’s hard
So how do you get to the bottom of what consciousness is? The answer is so easy that it is mostly overlooked. In addition to my experience with many years of self-enquiry meditation, I turned to some of the most respected and profound teachers who have realized their own natures by waking up to what they are not. That’s right, what they are not. This means that we all have the ability to observe our own state of being and see where thoughts come from, how they rise and fall, and how they accrete to form a sense of self.

A number of gurus have taught about finding one’s true nature as consciousness down through the ages, from Buddha to Rumi, and from Jiddu Krishnamurti to Ramana Maharshi. These individuals have all said the same thing: You cannot rely on information, teachings, rituals, religion, ideas, thinking, or practice to realize consciousness; you just have to observe with great persistence, desire, and interest, and eventually it dawns on you who you are.

If you are too tied to your beliefs about who you are, as well as the teachings of New Age philosophy, religion, or materialist science, then don’t take this book personally. You can read it for an intellectual understanding. Or if you are brave enough you can look into your own self at the deepest level and in the process let go of your preconceptions and suppositions. Read the book and investigate your own nature. It’s quite rewarding if you can do it.

Happy reading!

#neardeathexperiences #outofbodyexperiences #dreamsÂ #quantumentanglement

Find out who you really are beyond the sense of self

Recently I published several books about the mind and how it creates stress, happiness, illness, and even reality. The books are Stressing Out Over Happiness, and The Guidebook to Stress, Meditation and Happiness and 13 Pillars of Enlightenment, a novel based on my personal experience about what it means to awaken to reality beyond the limited sense of self.

This new work is a short narrative novel that leads you to find the most mysterious and illusive aspect of life throughout the ages. It’s been called self realization, enlightenment, illumination, and realizing your true nature. However, such terms are relatively meaningless except on an intellectual level. At best they can point to what exists behind that which we call the mind, body, and reality.

New book: Stressing Out Over Happiness

My newest book, Stressing Out Over Happiness, is the culmination of several years of research and writing. It began as I was doing research for a novel (not yet published as of this writing) and I wanted to delve in to the protagonist’s particular sense of angst and trauma. As I was doing this, I thought that all this research would make a good book in itself, as a nonfiction self-help book.

Stressing Out Over Happiness is primarily about three things: Stress, Meditation and Happiness. It is a look at stress and happiness from the vantage point of several sciences, including psychology, neuroscience, biology, psychoneuroimmunology, and quantum physics. And, I bring into play the work and teachings of sages throughout history that now seem to be substantiated by leading-edge science.

If you are stressed out or sick, this book will help you. If you are unhappy, depressed or anxious, this book will be great for you to read. If you wonder why self-help, positive thinking isn’t doing a thing for you, this book is perfect for you.

If you are wondering about the meditation part of the equation, then let me tell you. There are two types of Buddhist meditation that have been studied at major universities in conjunction with happiness and stress reduction. I discuss these in the book. One is called mindfulness meditation and the other is loving-kindness meditation (also known as metta, or compassion meditation). While these are not the only types of meditation that are in existence, these are the ones that are most studied and have yielded empirical results.

Within a week or so, a companion to this book will be released. It will cover some of the same material but a little more in detail and with a less formal and more exploratory angle. The idea is allow you to think about the subject matter and to stimulate your impressions and ideas.

Happy reading!

What professionals are saying about The Super Foods Diet

Here are some great reviews on Vic Shayne’s latest book, The Super Foods Diet:

“It’s so refreshing to read a book about real food nutrition and not crazy gimmicks. Dr. Shayne’s book is a must read for anyone interested in how real food can make all the difference your health. It’s time we take back control of our health from the corporations and this book is perfect roadmap for doing that.”

Josh Boughton
Natural Products Director
Village Vitality, New York

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“Finally! A book that combines the latest super food craze with actual science. Now I can invest in my health knowing that I’m not wasting money on the latest fad. I found this book to be an easy read, highly informative and to the point without a lot of extra fluff that so many authors put in to make a book longer. Thank you so much Dr. Shayne. I highly recommend the Super Foods Diet to everyone interested in staying young, healthy and active..”

Tamara Star
Daily Transformations Huffington Post columnist

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“In his book, ‘The Super Foods Diet,’ Vic Shayne continues to us teach safe and effective ways of using whole food nutrition to promote health. In contrast to the trendy diets and fads promoted by many authors, Dr. Shayne takes us back to nature to find safe, reliable and effective ways to use food for healing and general health. I have studied and used his protocols in my practice

broccoli for over 20 years and know him to be a man with a strong conscience and one who does not compromise his values.

— Dr. Allen Kowarski DC, PT , Fairfax, VA

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“Dr. Vic Shayne’s latest book: ‘The Super Food Diet,’ picks up where the work of Drs McCarrison, Price, and Pottenger leave off. But with one big difference. Where they documented the travesty of modern foods of commerce on our health, Dr. Shayne documents the benefits of whole foods and hopes of everyone wishing to eat to live and not just to live to eat. He guides us in how to nutritionally slow down the ultimate aging process so that we can enjoy life as it is meant to be, naturally. More than just a manual, it is a guide to healthy nutrition.”

George Siegfried, D.C., N.D. Portland, OR

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“This book should be essential for any physician’s library. Dr. Shayne’s work has been the backbone of my nutrition advice to patients for many years. In this internet-based world, there is so much misinformation out there, almost none of which I trust. But reading his clear style of writing made me realize very quickly that he is one to listen to, with a self-evident ability to cull the poor information from the reliable, or the cutting- edge and possible from the hoaxes. He has an open, brilliant, and discerning mind, all backed by decades of experience. I trust him completely.”
Dr. N. Duryea, Boulder, CO

The Super Foods Diet is super for your health!

The Super Foods Diet is the culmination of more than thirty years of research in discovering which foods we should add to our daily diet that provide the most nutrition for a health, prevention, and recovery.

The Super Foods Diet is all about eating specific foods in which scientists have discovered amazing biochemicals known to support cellular function, growth, recovery and optimum health. This book shows how and why super foods are so essential for good health.

The Super Foods Diet is a way of eating that achieves all of the three most important reasons for changing your diet for the better:

• weight control,
• promotion of good health, and
• fighting even the most serious diseases

Food is our best medicine
A diet full of SUPER FOODS, while avoiding so-called junk foods known as a staple in the modern world, can take you out of the running for the most prevalent diseases of our era: cardio-vascular illness, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and more.

Illness isn’t a matter of genetics for most of us; it’s a matter of ignorance, exposure to toxic substances, poor dietary choices, nutrient-depleted soils from poor farming methods, indifference to the state of the planet, and abstinence from earth’s most nutritious foods found right under our noses!

Books on the Self and Happiness

The Self is a Belief

The Self is a Belief is one of my recent releases, and is a close-up look at the self, or egoistic mind, and how it is formed to create what we think is an individual self. For millennia sages of the East have been teaching about this false sense of self as the cause of most suffering. This is because the self identifies with the body and all sorts of objects and people.

The mind is a tool that has evolved to separate all things by way of the five senses. It does this to differentiate shapes, sounds, textures, tastes, and so on. But when this mind becomes conditioned by myriad influences over a lifetime then it comes to apply this same separation to life for psychological purposes. And this is where the self, the egoic self, is born. This conditioned mind becomes attached to ideas, memories, situations, accolades, the body, and on and on. As such it presents a false image of the world and all that is contained within it. It loses the knowledge that it actually exists in one flowing consciousness and that nothing is separate from consciousness.

In The Self is a Belief I bring in a great many voices to weigh in on this idea of consciousness, the self, and the problems that arise from this belief. You can read about yogis, sages, mystics, quantum physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who all have something interesting to say on the subject.

This book is based on my own personal findings, and at the end of the book, my wife Janice describes the process of self-enquiry that leads to the realization that the self is only a belief. It is a practice that anyone can do if interested enough to uncover the ceaseless cycle of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.

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Stressing Out Over Happiness
— exploring the effects of stress, meditation and happiness

BOOK RELEASE

Stressing Out Over Happiness is a new self-help book that merges the wisdom of ancient sages, neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers and quantum physicists to explore the nature of happiness, the physiological and mental aspects of stress, and how the mind works. This book also delves into theÂ two forms of Buddhist meditation that have been shown in university studies to lessen the effects of stress and lead to greater happiness.

If you are stressed out (who isn’t), anxious, depressed or wandering in a daze, this book should prove very helpful to you. If you are a natural health practitioner, nurse, or therapist, you should read what this work has to say because there is definitely a missing link in today’s health care picture — a holistic paradigm.

The mind is very complicated instrument. Or is it an instrument at all? The truth is that, despite our scientific effort, we are no closer to understanding the mind in terms of its shape, form or existence. We know it by its actions, but we cannot measure it or observe it except by means of its effect on the brain. To study the mind, we have to look into the nature of consciousness, and that is a big undertaking. In this book, though, we do just that. My hope is that this book will compel you to ask your own questions and explore the workings and nature of your own mind and your own existence. In the end, this should not only bring down stress levels, but it should also make you much happier.