Chapter 6 - Where Ocean Meets Sand and Sky

Coincidence Speaks

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Happy Friday, and welcome to Chapter 6 of Coincidence Speaks! Please head this way to start at the beginning.

Chapter 6 finds Paul Endrum in the immediate aftermath of an extraordinary question about the nature of his incurable disease…

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Chapter 6

Where Ocean Meets Sand and Sky

Paul could feel the seeds of truth latent within his question. The events of his own life were somehow speaking to him through this inconceivably timed coincidence.

Without a second thought, he dragged himself across the floor at top speed to his garage, clattering down wooden steps and unfolding into a spiderlike tangle of limbs on the barren cement floor. The journey took well over a full minute, but for Paul, it felt like breaking the sound barrier.

There in the garage, already propped against the wall at the perfect angle to accommodate his leg, was a cracked and ancient relic of his old life - a giant 5’ x 5’ mirror once used to practice his precious golf swing, now covered in dust. He clunked his broken body down on the unswept cement and stuck his afflicted leg in the gap behind the mirror – cobwebs, disgruntled spiders and all – inspired to try out a DIY version of the mirror therapy he’d just seen on television.

Wiggling his swollen lobster claw RSD toes in tandem with his healthy toes while gazing intently into the mirror, Paul was quite amazed to see the image of two normal, healthy legs operating perfectly well. He really didn’t expect it to look or feel so real. Even though he knew it was an illusion, his brain didn’t.

And in that split second of immersed amazement, his attention was so absorbed by the image of two healthy legs that the pain… disappeared.

The fleeting painfree moment zipped by so fast he’d hardly noticed the burning had gone by the time it was already back. Not that this brief distraction was any kind of proof that mirror therapy was the be all end all capital A Answer. But this was something, after all. 

This was a start!

Paul couldn’t believe his good fortune. In fact this felt like something of an altogether different nature.

Inspired questions kept sprouting within the soil of his newly fertile mind, and he rushed to write them down in his journal: 

“If this incredible coincidence happened when I accepted and faced and FELT my worst fears, let everything go, and reached out to something beyond my limited Paul Endrum self for help… what if that support is always there – and all I have to do is ask for it? What if my everyday ordinary life IS the answer, and all I have to do is be open and patient and listen for guidance to show up within it?”

So he humored himself, asking aloud to the world with real sincerity: “What is the real reason I am experiencing this pain in my leg? Please show me,” feeling a little foolish about it.

Then he watched, and he waited. 

After all, he hadn’t gotten an instantaneous response from God Him(or Her)Self the first time he’d asked, so he resolved to be patient and stay open for further direction and guidance to show up in whatever way, shape, or form his life wanted to provide it.

Sure enough, there was no miraculously timed television documentary that somehow tuned directly into his thoughts and spoken words. But by the simple virtue of asking, he naturally began to give more conscious attention to the pain mechanism itself throughout the day. Instead of trying to avoid the pain at all costs, he slowly allowed himself to become more curious about it, more vulnerable to it, to feel more of it, to listen to what the pain itself might have to say. 

This turned out to be much easier said than done, and he was unsuccessful a lot of the time. In fact he failed almost all of the time.

But in the process he did manage to notice something quite interesting - while there was always a baseline burning undercurrent, the pain levels would still fluctuate up and down a good bit throughout the day. And at certain times there were actually major differences in intensity.

So he asked again, aloud for extra emphasis, “What’s causing the fluctuation?”

Soon after this new question, he noticed something else very interesting – certain types of food had immediate, realtime impacts on his pain levels. He could feel the difference – within seconds - by the increased burning sensation in his leg. It didn’t take long to discover that things like sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and processed foods were the worst perpetrators. 

“Crap,” he muttered to himself, “of course it’s all stuff I like the most that’s the worst for me.”

But everyone knows a better diet means better health. This was just common sense, not revelatory information from some kind of Bionic Leg Oracle. And there were plenty of people Paul had read about on the internet who had completely revamped their diets, even going on extreme cleanses and consuming strictly regimented foods, who still dealt with all kinds of illnesses and chronic conditions. So how could diet be the answer? 

Still, he couldn’t afford to take any chances, so he decided right then and there to completely overhaul his food and drink intake, cutting out as much caffeine, sugar, and processed foods as possible in favor of less inflammatory options. From that moment on, Paul resolved to do the absolute best he could in trusting what his body had to say.

Paul certainly wasn’t just relying on his Bionic Leg Oracle to tell him what to do, and he never stopped studying and sifting through case studies, medical abstracts, and online forums about RSD. But even though he was always on the lookout for stories of recovery, he kept coming across tragic personal sharings of broken families, of suffering, of suicide. And in all his online travels he couldn’t find even one person who’d actually been cured of the disease.

It was then Paul began to notice the pain mechanism operating in a brand new way that nearly blew his mind.

Sometimes while he was reading, he would very clearly feel an increased spike of pain in his leg. And when he synced up the timing of the pain response with the specific content of what he was reading, he realized that the pain was flaring up precisely while he was reading about negative health outcomes. In other words, the very act of reading about suffering was triggering an inflammatory response at a cellular level in real time – completely beyond his conscious capacity to control.

It was one thing to theorize that the disease was “in his head” - it was quite another to directly witness the unmistakable process occurring within his own body.

And just like someone with a fear of heights risking a peek over a high-rise balcony, he wasn’t consciously choosing to have an inflammatory response to what he was reading – it was simply happening at a cellular level, based on an automated, ingrained reaction to a perceived threat. And those stories of suffering and despair perpetrated by a monstrous incurable disease were most certainly being identified as a perceived threat. 

What finally blew his mind wide open… was that he didn’t even have to be reading anything. All he had to do was think about something – anything - in a fearful context and he would feel that exact same RSD pain response kick in. Immediately. Every time. Like clockwork.

His thoughts alone had the power to directly cause real, physical pain.

“The mind makes it real,” he heard Morpheus say once again.

Dumbfounded, Paul realized that a vital clue had been right under his nose all along, ironically within the very name of the disease itself: Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy. Through his frantic crash course study of human anatomy systems, he had recently learned that the sympathetic nervous system was part of the larger autonomic nervous system, which, true to its name, operated automatically - at an unconscious level. It was what kept essential things like the heartbeat, the respiratory system, and the digestive system going.

And the sympathetic nervous response, better known as fight or flight, was an automated, instinctual fear-based response to a stimulus. Under stress, the adrenal glands kicked in and set off a whole smorgasbord of physical reactions: heart rate and blood pressure jumping through the roof, muscles tensing up and getting primed for action, and blood flow to surface areas of the body lessening while flow to the muscles, brain, arms, and legs increases.

More questions took root, watered by a near-constant flow of inspiration. Paul could hardly keep up as he transcribed them into his journal:

“Holy hand grenades... if all of this is actually true…… What if there is a way to consciously access my autonomic nervous system? What if this same inner mechanism could be used to positive effect, through neuroplasticity, at the level of thought itself?

If thoughts charged by instinctive fear can cause the inflammatory fight or flight response, then what about consciously creating immersive inner experiences charged by more coherent feelings, like gratitude, or even joy?

What if I could rewire my nervous system from the inside out, using my own imagination as the tool?”

He scarcely dared even entertain something so absurd. Plus, how the heck would it even be possible to be happy, let alone grateful about anything when immersed in 24/7 suffering? 

But… what if? What if the entire awful disease with its plethora of hellish physical symptoms could be treatable by… inner sensory imagery charged by coherent emotions? He laughed aloud, thinking of the movie Hook, where Peter Pan learned to fly again as an adult by “thinking happy thoughts.”

So Paul closed his eyes, did his best to shut out the pain, and tried to visualize an imaginary scene where he was happy and pain free… 

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         …And it wasn’t even close. 

The only thing waiting behind his eyelids was burning blackness. His body was a maximum-security prison. His mind and his feelings had been commandeered by the constant pain signal, pounding away like an insistent bass line in the background of every single moment. His entire nervous system was emphatically telling him that Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy most definitely existed. And it was impossible to feel any measure of positivity about any of it.

Paul sat there for a moment, stumped. In the silence, inspiration struck again.  

“Wait… but what if…

   …What if I recreated one of my own personal memories in my life before Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, a memory that already exists, a memory where I can remember and tap into the pre-existing feeling of joy?”

He breathed deeply, closing his eyes once more. Maybe recreating a real memory would be easier than trying to create something new from scratch…

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Suddenly he was five years old again, at his favorite place in the whole wide world: the beach. His eyes widened at the world around him - a shining sky melting into an emerald ocean horizon, wisping tufts of cording clouds, and golden sunbaked sand stretching for miles in each direction. 

Meanwhile, RSD pounded away in the foreground, and the beach imagery soon flickered and vanished. He had caught a brief, erratic flash of a childhood memory… but wasn’t fully feeling what it was like actually being there. So he doubled down, willing himself to go still deeper, this time engaging all of his senses, one at a time…

Breathing deeply the salted scent of oceanwater through his nose, ears attuning to the mingling sound of wind and waves, feeling the breeze cooling and caressing sunswept cheeks, letting a smile crease them and crinkle his wide eyes…

The more focused he became on recreating the inner sensory imagery, the more it felt like he was really there… he could almost taste the salt, feel the wind, hear the waves…

Looking down and stomping on a sandcastle tower with glee, warm sand squishing and mishmashing between splayed toes... Looking back up, hot sunlight baking his face, squinting golden light into the crevasses of wide wondering eyes. Looking out towards the ocean horizon seeing scintillating light dancing atop the crests of booming echoed waves.

Looking towards the beach horizon, the endless miles of shimmering sand inspiring a feeling of PLAY, enveloping him in its feeling of pure freedom - and he starts to run.

Running just for the sake of running. Moving for the sake of movement. Running fueled by joy itself. The way only a child can, gritty sand shifting and yielding and spraying up beneath bare feet every floating footfall!

“I can feel it ALL,” the Boy marvels,

“Every sinew, every bone, every muscle, all moving together

I am HERE

And HERE – there is only PLAY in my favorite place in the world, where the ocean meets the sand and sky

Here, there is no pain!”

RSD just faded further and further away, until it became like background radio static, and then… it completely disappeared. His conscious experience was no longer on its wavelength. Like turning the channel of a television, he’d tuned to a different station – one where Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy was not being broadcast. 

Paul snapped out of the vivid memory he had recreated, coming back to the real world, where the pain emphatically reminded him it definitely still existed. And it hurt. Man alive did it hurt.

But he was OK with it now. Because he knew beyond all personal doubt that there was another pathway forward.

Paul Endrum had discovered a curious but quite momentous thing about human neurophysiology – it did not seem to discriminate between external and internal inputs. In other words, it made little difference to his nervous system whether any stimulus was real or imagined.

Combining the flooring implications with the principle of neuroplasticity – the adaptive capacity of the brain to change over time - he came to realize there were really only two elements most essential to his recovery: the emotional response to any given stimulus, and the frequency of that stimulus. How often it was repeated. 

With neuroplasticity, the more often any given stimulus was repeated, the more it would create and strengthen brand new neural pathways. Or continue to reinforce the existing ones. 

Paul began to understand how the constant pain had been wiring his autonomic nervous system to stay on high alert. To stay stuck in that fight or flight, unconscious sympathetic nervous response. This made it especially challenging to calm the pain signals once they’d already commenced and compounded. But through the beautiful neutrality of neuroplasticity, he now realized that the nervous system was equally as capable in unlearning patterns as it was in ingraining them.

The RSD specialist had given him a priceless gift – the lack of a viable long-term solution had compelled Paul to seek out his own. Empowered by his new insights, Paul put together his own makeshift therapy practice and applied it as the new foundation of his daily life. 

It was a simple recovery regimen – gentle range of motion movement combined with mirror therapy and inner sensory visualization. But Paul knew the key to establishing new neural pathways was frequency – repetition – so he didn’t mess around and do it once or twice a day. There was too much at stake. Everything was at stake.

It wasn’t just his life, but that of his family – his own wife and child. The pain wasn’t just his. It was now hurting everyone who had ever risked enough of themselves to love him.

So he did his makeshift therapy practice every ten minutes on the hour, every waking hour he possibly could. And the key to accelerating his recovery, he knew – was supercharging the therapeutic experience with emotion – coherent, wholesome ones like appreciation, joy and even gratitude. Paul would do his best to send those feelings into all of the places he felt pain.

Those precious emotions were incredibly hard to come by, to say the least, so every day Paul practiced going to that ocean scene. Sometimes he went there as a child, and sometimes he imagined himself there as a father with his own child.

The joy he felt watching his daughter play sparked an even greater sense of gratitude, bordering on a sacredness, a reverence for life itself. Sometimes it was almost as if he could feel his physical heart expanding, stretching its branches out in all directions. That immersive scene at the beach was often the last thing he remembered before falling asleep, and the first thing he remembered waking up.

And instead of a short term fix leading to ever-increasing dependence and merry-go-round side effects, the narcotics were reframed as a gateway to a blessed four hour window of reduced pain that he could use to focus on his therapy regimen. Without them, his leg was still so hypersensitive that he could not even bear to touch it. He knew if he wanted to fully recover that one day he’d need to stand on his own two feet without the support of medication, but for now it was not only welcome but absolutely crucial. 

And Paul practiced, and he watched, and he wrote, and he was patient. After all, it had taken a very long sequence of many compounding events to result in the chronic pain phenomenon of RSD, so he figured it would take at least as much time to forge new painfree neural pathways.

The RSD pain signal itself still remained – but now, he had totally reframed its context. Now, instead of being something to avoid at all costs, it had become something to feel into, to understand, to listen to, and to learn from. The pain had a message for him all along, and he wrote it at the very top of his journal, all in caps:

“WHEN YOU SLOW DOWN AND LISTEN – THE BODY ALWAYS SPEAKS.”

One night three months later, Paul found himself flying again. 

He was in the midst of a dream, a very real dream, a dream so vivid he could swear he was awake - except he was hovering on the ceiling of his bedroom. He looked down and he saw his sleeping body in his bed, and this time he could see his entire nervous system like a glowing tree of light replenishing itself, golden filaments branching off the trunk of his spinal cord. It looked like a giant star, with a central power source right in the middle of his chest. Light was pulsing in and out from that heart area in waves of light, radiating out and returning in golden toroidal flows. 

He awoke with a start in the early morning darkness, the dream evaporating instantly. But still, something was… very different. With a sharp intake of breath, he realized it was his leg – he could now feel his leg again, feel it in the old, familiar way. After months of therapy practice working to rewire his nervous system, it was connected – it had become a part of him again.

Over the course of those months, he’d gradually reduced his dependence on the opioids to get him through each day. Even more than the temporary pain reduction, the sense of euphoric well-being they provided was incredibly addictive, and finally letting them go was on par with the hardest thing he’d ever done; every bit as hard as dealing with the pain of RSD itself. He felt such compassion for anyone caught in an addiction cycle now – he’d come perilously close to getting stuck there himself even as his pain levels improved.

Breathless with excitement, Paul fumbled around for a light in the darkness to have a look at his leg, and sure enough – the last vestiges of RSD redness and swelling had almost totally subsided. No more appalling lobster claw club foot - just a normal human limb wiggling back at him with eager toes, as if they were saying hello. And he knew then without a doubt, because he could feel the resonant truth throughout all the cells in his body:

The quarantine had been lifted. He had healed. 

“I’ve re-membered my leg… literally,” he thought, thinking of his childhood beach memory while complimenting himself on the terrible Dad joke. It had been more than six months since the surgery that had first triggered it.

Then he went back to sleep, a huge smile plastered across his face.

RSD left Paul’s life for good that night, never to return.

END PART I

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PART II, Chapter 7 will be released in the immanent future. I hope you are enjoying the story thus far! Comments and feedback always welcome.

In gratitude,

E.T. Allen