Living in pain is like living in hell. I know. I’ve lived it,

survived it, and discovered a great life beyond it.

My name is Daniel Feenstra. I am 47 years old and live in Auckland, New Zealand. I was born with spina bifida, and had over 40 operations by the time I was 13.  At that time I thought I knew quite a lot about severe pain. Yet I was wrong. An event was about to unfold in my life that would radically change my relationship with pain.

Overnight I was suddenly plunged into a living hell where a level 10 pain factor was the center of my life.

The day it all began I was just a teenage kid playing in a tennis tournament. One moment I was having fun in an exciting and competitive game of tennis, the next I was suddenly struck down with the most excruciating knife stabbing pain in my legs and lower back. Even to this day the doctors still do not know what happened.

From that horrible moment, and for the next two years of my life if any air touched the left side of my body it would trigger hot, burning, knife stabbing, pain in my thighs and lower back.

Getting dressed, taking a shower, bath or anything touching any part of the left side of my body, would cause searing, burning, hot knives to enter my flesh. It was like being tortured. Life became a living hell. My mother who was a nurse, did what she could, injecting me with morphine every 4 hours to relieve the pain. Over a period of many months my arms and legs became black and blue.  Months turned into years, and I gradually became a bed-ridden skeleton,  a young teenage morphine addict nearing deaths door.

My days and night’s revolved around two things;

Fear of pain

and

Desire for morphine to relieve it.

Fear and desire ruled my life. My parents tried every faith healer, surgeon, traditional and alternative medicine to find relief for me. I traveled the world with Mum and Dad to find a cure, eventually ending up at Sheffield Children’s hospital in England. I was treated by the leading spina bifida surgeon in the world at the time, Dr Lorber.  Not even he could diagnose what was causing my pain. I returned home to New Zealand without a cure.

Miraculously, grace came from a completely unexpected source. Grace was Dr Brett,. a quirky, psychiatrist at Waikato Hospital, in Hamilton, New Zealand. He was a short stocky man with muscles like pop-eye and a mind like a razor. Dr Brett was in charge of the Pain Clinic, at Waikato hospital.He took me under his wing, and coached me, ( at that time over 30 years ago) in state- of- the- art  bio feedback techniques.  I was wired up to a machine twice weekly and taught how to manage the pain using the power of my own mind! I began a gradual process of learning how to integrate the most important discovery of my life.

THE WAY OUT OF PAIN IS INTO IT !

Let me explain what I learned. Step by step, hour by hour, week by week,  Dr Brett trained my mind to enter into pain instead of running away from it. I faced my pain demon head on. For the next two years I gradually learnt how to navigate  level 10 pain, through learning to control and utilize the power of my own mind.I followed Dr Brett’s instructions religiously.  Every time I got a spasm, I practiced what he taught me, applying the exact training methods to my own pain.

I learnt how to harness my own mind and train it to react differently to the pain that I was experiencing. Two and half years later by the age of 16, I had mastered the techniques that I still live today.

The central key and most potent pain discovery is that your most powerful ally to deal with your own pain is your Mind! No doctor, therapist, healer, surgery, drug, or person, is as  effective, potent, or transformational as harnessing the power of your own mind. Until I got help from someone who knew a whole lot more about pain than I did, I was at the mercy of my bitter condition. Insufferable spasms ruled my life. Life revolved around attempting to avoid any movement that would cause more agony.

Every day I practice pain management on 3 levels, body, emotions and mind. I teach the exact same methods I apply to my own life to live well with pain. There is no quick fix. Real change takes time, practice and perseverance. Yet once you learn the basic methods you will make immediate progress and get real traction to live more at ease with your pain.

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