Don’t Give Up Trying — Another Post on How I Healed My Knee

Is it worth it to keep trying to heal a body part? I’ve gathered evidence that it is:

Eight years ago, after a year of being unable to walk more than a block without terrible pain in my right knee, I finally broke down and had meniscus surgery. I assiduously did all the rehab exercises (not hard to do as I had a long track record of regular exercise). No progress. Nothing. Still couldn’t walk without pain and extreme discomfort. Six months of that. Still no progress.

Then I heard about the international teacher chiropractor, Dr. Joe Dispenza . I signed up for his progressive workshop, the prerequisite for which is hours of his intensive workshop. All of it is designed to teach us more about the scientific fact of the power of the mind so that we can really believe it can heal the body (note: in his life-changing book You Are The Placebo, you can read about replicated experiments that have shown that when knee surgery works, it may be the belief of the person who has knee surgery that makes it work, rather than the actual procedure. So, if you opt for surgery, make sure you believe in it). After all that study, I started doing Tuning Into New Potentials and picturing my body easily and effortlessly, not only walking but backpacking. After only a month of listening to the meditations, I was walking miles without pain again. After a little more than a year, I was able to backpack again. 

Part of my healing was also the classic 26 postures of Hot Yoga (which was formerly known as “Bikram” Yoga before Bikram Choudhury himself was outed as an abuser). I myself have never met Choudhury nor experienced anything of the kind even though my teachers were trained directly by him. I go to Yoga Loka in East Sacramento which I love because it emphasizes listening to your body over pushing it. I had a strong Bikram practice before I injured my knee, and then I took it back up when I finally was able to walk well. Even then, there were numerous exercises that I couldn’t do anymore, so instead, I would lie down on the floor and mentally picture myself doing the yoga poses with ease. One by one,  I was on my feet and doing the poses that seemed impossible to do before again. A few years back, I went so far as to pair up with Michael Kinsey, director of Yoga Loka, to teach a meditation version of the Bikram Yoga sequence. 

After all that and years of knee health, I went through another bout of knee pain last year, and both walking and yoga got hard again. So, I returned to Dr. Joe Dispenza’s meditations again. In the interval, I attended his Advanced Meditation workshop in Cancun, and made myself a “Mind Movie,” with images of women backpacking in places I want to backpack. You can watch that here if you like:

Using both those tools, I returned to picturing myself doing yoga and backpacking. This time, that alone didn’t do the trick, so I tried a different physical therapist, Eve Martinez, at Alves and Martinez Physical Therapy in East Sacramento. She gave me exercises that corrected the way that I was favoring my knee, and within a couple of months, I was back to walking miles again.

My conclusion: never give up. No one technique will necessarily work forever, but we can always heal as we age. A combination of mental, spiritual, and physical tools will eventually reveal our healing (one way or another).