The Spell I Didn't Know I Was Casting
How figures of speech become physical reality
None of us like pain. But if you “like” this post, a little pain-elimination fairy will kiss you while you’re sleeping tonight! (Disclaimer: the placebo effect is real, so the effectiveness will depend entirely on your belief levels.) Give it a shot and light the heart! ❤️
I have a pain in the neck. A pain in the neck that is chronic with acute spells. When it’s really bad, I can’t work, because tension in my neck restricts blood flow and I end up with two and three-day headaches. Over the last twenty years I have spent hundreds of pounds on osteopaths and chiropractors. Bought 3 expensive chairs to improve my sitting posture. Three different laptop stands (along with bluetooth keyboards) to ensure my head and spine and elbows are properly aligned when I write. I have hand-held massage guns/paddles and so many neck-relieving devices that my husband has named them all: Red Squirrel, Grey Squirrel, Frodo, Ermine and my favourite, Tibor (named after an excellent Hungarian masseur who sadly returned to Prague when he split with his girlfriend). I’ve had my atlas realigned (it stopped the migraines; win!) I have seen my GP. I do my physio. I consume more painkillers than I’d like. And still, I have a pain in the neck.
“Stiff-necked sinners” is the Biblical phrase that returns to me often. I am out of alignment with the deep well-being of my source. Yet all this time, I have been overlooking the obvious cause of my discomfort: the words, “a pain in the neck,”
It’s not like I don’t understand the concept of our words being spells that we cast on our bodies. Here I am, ten years ago, in a passage from Devotion.
He takes his journal from behind the row of Jung and writes
words have genuine power. We curse and bless ourselves with the words we use. My father, whose mantra was “I can’t stand”… busybody neighbours, January, chuggers, tomatoes, the council, clothes with logos, multi-storey car parks … gave out at the knees. Was in a wheelchair at fifty-two. Never understood why he was hobbled while his boss was ten years older and still playing squash. Now it seems obvious. He cursed himself. Said ‘I can’t stand’ until it was true. Committed, on himself, a slow but powerful magic.
Unconsciously, we are casting spells on ourselves. My father didn’t know that he’d done so, because such spells work slowly. And because he thinks knees are just physical things, that their cartilage degrades from use, and not because they’re listening to what we say. Yet, why shouldn’t our bodies respond to our thoughts? The placebo effect is well-enough known that every pharmaceutical trial must subtract its power from their figures. If a belief can make us better, it can make us worse. And if you say to yourself ‘I can’t stand, I can’t stand, I can’t stand’, does that not, to the body, sound like a belief it should obediently render into truth?
But we are alarmingly blind to those sins (by which I mean our separations from Love) that are deeply habitual, and especially those verbal tics we catch from our parents. Queues are a pain in the neck. Internet trolls are a pain in the neck. Unnecessary admin is a pain in the neck. This person, that thing, is a pain in the neck. And who taught me this phrase? My mother. She said it as frequently as she ate diet yoghurts. And for very large chunks of my teenage years, she wore a neck brace, because she had a pain in the neck.
She took this pain in the neck to exceptional heights. She worked with kids of the difficult sort who were often (bless them) a pain in the neck. In her mid-fifties, a fifteen-year-old boy jumped on her affectionately as she entered the classroom, and such damage occurred to that vulnerable neck that she spent the next couple of years flat on her back. She ended up in St Thomas’s Hospital, in a room with a fine view over the Thames, after being sliced in several places so a piece of bone from the front of her hip could replace a bit of bone in her spine.
Conventional thinking would look at my mother and me with our matching neck braces, some decades apart, and tell you “that must be genetic”. But there is no gene for “a pain in the neck”. There is a meme, though. By which I mean not a viral internet gag but Richard Dawkins’ original formulation: a self-replicating piece of information. That catchy phrase, that figure of speech, “a pain in the neck.”
I picked up her verbal tic and the resistance that fuels it, and I cast it daily over myself like a spell. We get what we focus on, whether we want it or not. Words have great power: our body is listening. Epigenetics is real, and yes, this is why voodoo has consequences. If you believe in the curse set upon you, replay it in your mind over and over. Including the modern voodoo of medication diagnoses: six weeks to live, etc. The nocebo effect is as real as the placebo effect, and we all need to consider this and listen to our habits of speech.
I have a friend, for example, who developed epilepsy in her thirties. My husband has known her for years, and discussing this one day, he said he remembered when he met her, she often said of her partner, “He is doing my head in.” She still applies it to numerous people and things. “It’s doing my head in” is the quickest way to get into character if you wanted to play her. And epilepsy has severely impacted her life now for decades.
It’s all there in the alternative health guides, from Louise Hay onwards. Bladder problems? What are you pissed off about? Sometimes the connections are a little opaque, but a little investigation will reveal them. This is one of the things EFT is great for: your subconscious will give you the words behind the problem, if you ask it while tapping (and relax to receive it). One of my big revelations, while still recovering from self-loathing 10 years ago, was the realisation (while I was overweight, struggling with IBS) that I was still, somewhere, holding onto the phrase “I hate my guts.” Well, friend, they’re hating you back! Gut love was the obvious salve.
A pain in the neck, for this stiff-necked sinner. And what is behind it? Ah, the sin of intolerance. Not a deadly sin; unlikely to destroy you. But yes, an incapacitating one. And why have I been so blind, for years, to the verbal source of my physical pain in the neck? Because I don’t like to think of myself as an intolerant person.
So I simply turned a blind eye. (And my Mum, the master of that art, literally had one of those: a “lazy eye” that had never responded to the piratical eyepatches of rehabilitation).
Yet I am intolerant of many things. Men who consider women inferior beings. The time-chewing delays caused by adverts; the fact that those adverts are on services I pay for. The extra fiddle (and having to fetch my toxic distraction device) of two-factor authentication.
I love this stuff. I love self-discovery. I love yet more proof of the profound power of words, which I have spent a lifetime learning to wield. But I do not love, oh Lord, this cervical affliction. So I embark on a quest to erase this sin of intolerance. First, simply by noticing. Second, by tapping it into oblivion. Because this separation from Love, that is a pain in the neck.
A shorty this week. Big day for me on Sunday: the one-man version of The Marlowe Papers, hits (hopefully without a splat) a London stage. Tickets are officially “going fast.” But for full members of How to Evolve, here’s a guide to how to discover what you need to release, emotionally, to relieve physical problems: and no, it’s not as straightforward as the index of Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life! Thanks for reading; here’s to fewer pains (in the neck, and elsewhere).