Chronic Pain – A Silent Epidemic with Elizabeth Kipp

Elizabeth Kipp is a health facilitator specializing in stress and chronic pain management, addiction recovery, Ancestral Clearing®, and yoga.

Her book, The Way Through Chronic Pain: Tools to Reclaim Your Healing Power, is focused on helping people realize the power of their inherent healing. 

"I am not my pain. My pain is in me. That's a very important distinction. We are experiencing it but it is not who we are." - Elizabeth Kipp

Personally, Elizabeth healed from over 40 years of chronic pain, including anxiety, panic attacks, and addiction to prescribed opiate and benzodiazepine medication. She now works to help others achieve the same healing for themselves that she experienced. 

Elizabeth discussed how we are primarily wired to have an initial negative response. This is amplified when dealing with chronic pain. This can lead to chaos in the brain known as brain fog or the inability to remember (short-term memory damage).

Chronic pain is any pain: physical, spiritual, emotional, financial, or whatever is felt for 15 out of 30 days for three months or more. 

The brain cannot tell the difference between one kind of pain and another... they all send the same signal and it hurts. For example, the body can't tell the difference between the stress of running from a tiger to save your life and not being able to pay your bills on time.

The National Institute of Health estimates that 1/4 of all Americans suffer from chronic pain occasionally and the World Health Organization estimates 1 out of 5 suffer from chronic pain worldwide.  

It's a SILENT EPIDEMIC – which is why it is no wonder we have addiction problems, according to Elizabeth. The core of addiction is two things:

1. Lack of connection.
2. Looking away from our own experience, which creates a disconnect as our biology is wired to look for more pleasure and avoid pain.

So when we have pain, we want to get rid of it, push it away or disassociate it from it which is the core issue of addiction. 

When asked if there is a difference between healing physical versus emotional chronic pain, Elizabeth says has not found it to be so. The brain cannot tell the difference.

Elizabeth shares tips for healing chronic pain from her book:

• Learn to stay present.
• Don't judge the moment you experience.
• Be grateful – find the gift of the pain.
• You have to believe MORE in the POWER OF THE BODY to heal than the power of the disease you are experiencing. 

Quoting one of her teachers, Elizabeth says: "Pain is the currency of transformation, be careful how you spend it."

Her shift came when she learned: Moving from the victimhood of "The universe is doing this to me" to the empowerment of "The universe is doing this through me." - Elizabeth Kipp

Elizabeth is an Ancestral Clearing Practitioner™ – and she trained with John Newton of the "Health Beyond Belief™ process. 

Ancestral Clearing™ is based on the understanding that we come into the world with the gifts and burdens of our ancestors. Ancestral Clearing™ helps us to heal or clear unresolved issues of our lineage (traumas of the war, famine, environmental, family feuds, etc.)

In working with clients, Elizabeth describes that as part of her process starts by listening to their story for 5 minutes – they need to be heard from someone who gets it; then she takes them through this ancestral clearing; later asks if they can sit still or and she works with them on that.  She encourages client to have a meditation practice – which HELPS CALM THE CHAOS IN THE BRAIN, which is caused by chronic pain.

We discuss the cycle of suffering:

• Disconnection
• Isolation
• Judgment
• Attachment
• Control
• Resentment

TO BREAK THE CYCLE – Stop judging, be in community with someone else who has had that same experienc