Courage To Live – The Body Broken

I am featuring and recommending a powerful book “The Body Broken” written by Lynne Greenberg in my April Newsletter for Living In Courage.  Millions of people live with chronic pain and all it’s repercussions daily.  It takes a certain kind of courage to live this way while trying to live a productive life.  Many  of these people live with depression, pain, isolation. The suicide rate is 20% higher than in other patients. Lynne explains what it is like to descend into pain and then reclaim life.

I quote from Publishers Weekly “Twenty-two years after recovering from a devastating car crash when she was 19, Greenberg, a professor at New York City’s Hunter College, began experiencing unbearable neck pain. Several hospital visits and X-rays later, it turns out her miraculous recovery after the accident wasn’t quite that: one of her vertebrae was still fractured. Greenberg chronicles the two years that follow: the contradicting doctor diagnoses; the descent into drugs and depression; the unraveling of her relationship with her two young children. Harrowing stuff, and when Greenberg keeps her prose spare and direct, as when she describes with cold, gory precision watching her leg being sewn back together, the result is powerful. But Greenberg’s account often reads like an extended treatise on pain, overly reliant on metaphor as opposed to anecdote to describe her experience, comparing it, say, to Adam and Eve’s fall in Milton’s Paradise Lost (Greenberg’s field is 17th-century British literature).”

Diane Sawyer  from ABC News says, “We are all looking for lessons in courage. And family. And faith that some of our sweetest hours will come on the darkest days. All are here in Lynne Greenberg’s razor-sharp memoir of life and pain and the miracle of a family bound together by love.”

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Jenny Mannion’s Courage to Heal

I have a friend Jenny who found the courage to heal herself of chronic pain. Here is a small bio on Jenny and  an article from Jenny’s website that I know you will enjoy, about a blind boy who can see, in some ways better than you and I.  Jenny represents Living in Courage to me, so I am excited and grateful to share her blog, Heal Pain Naturally with you.

Thank you Jenny for sharing with us here.

Debra Oakland@LivinginCourage

Jenny Mannion, after having chronic pain for 5 years and being diagnosed with several diseases was told she would always be ill and to prepare for feeling worse. She did not want to be on pain medications at 35 for the rest of her life with 2 young children to take care of. When she saw the movie, “The Secret” her life changed. She learned all she could about the Law of Attraction and the mind/body connection and healed herself of all illnesses and pain. Jenny wrote an e-book on the methods she adopted to heal and maintains a blog on natural ways to heal emotional and physical pain. She is a mind/body mentor and believes everyone can find powers within to heal parts if not all of their life.

Here is an article with a video of Ben Underwood’s amazing journey. Ben and his family are people who Live in Courage, and they encourage all of us to reach deep inside to find and use the full potential and courage of who we are in our every day lives.

Video Continues:

Ben Underwood’s mother is a perfect example of how to encourage your children and I am sure a big part of the reason Ben developed his incredible gift. She told him he could see. She told him he was normal. She did not let him see her upset or ever feel sorry for him. One year after his eyes were removed Ben could see (some might say better than the rest of us with eyes).

I healed myself of some very bad illnesses so I KNOW how strong the mind is. Nevertheless this story amazed me and proved further what I already knew. “Your thoughts become things” and “You need to believe to achieve” — Ben was told repeatedly he could see, believed it and MADE seeing possible. This showed me again how important it is to share these messages with your children.

When I showed the video to my 8 year old son I prefaced it with, “this shows you can do anything you set your mind to.” He is currently studying sound at school and sat utterly shocked as he watched Ben “see” with his ears, much the way dolphins do with echolocation. I could tell it helped him that day as he was about to set out on ice skates for the first time. He is usually cautious and instead was looking forward to it tremendously and he KNEW he would be able to do it. He did in fact discover a new love and I have reaffirmed the power of inspiration.

There are a few books I use to teach my children about the Law of Attraction and to know no limits that are VERY valuable. “Incredible You” and “Unstoppable Me” by Wayne Dyer and “How to Talk to Your Kids about the Law of Attraction E-book” by Robin Hoch with Rich German. “Incredible You” is my children’s favorite bedtime story and the first time I read it my son said to me, “You know mommy — this guy thinks a lot like you — you should call him”. WHAT a compliment — and I am so grateful my children now see me AS thinking like the great Dr. Dyer because for the first 6 years of my son’s life I definitely did not.

Share stories of inspiration with your children and tell them there are no limits to what they can achieve. Can you imagine how great a world it would be if all kids grew up KNOWING this?!

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