Understanding Multiple Sclerosis Through the Lens of Human Design

In this month’s series, we interview Karen Curry regarding multiple sclerosis and human design. Karen is an international speaker and bestselling author of “Understanding Human Design The New Science of Astrology: Discover Who You Really Are.” Her personal development firm uses Human Design to help her clients discover their unique gifts and best strategies to create a healthier, wealthier, and most fulfilling life. Karen, a former nurse, has also developed a program, “Healing by Human Design” to help people get to the heart of their pain: physical, emotional, mental or spiritual.

What is Human Design

Human Design is a personality assessment tool based on our birth date, time and place.  It incorporates Eastern and Western Astrology synthesizing it with the I’Ching, the Kabbalah, the Hindu Chakra System and Quantum Physics. The result is an amazing tool that allows us to understand our unique blueprint and way of being in the world.

Human Design helps us understand how each of us is meant to use our energy in the world,  how each of us best takes decisions, what our gifts and talents are, where we might lose sight of ourselves and become ill, and our potential for healing.

Human Design and Chronic Disease

Through the lens of Human Design and Karen’s experience, one of the possible root causes of chronic disease is that we spend too much energy being who we are not. Society, our family’s genetic code, our experiences, and our collective beliefs about who we ‘should be’ mold our behaviors and ways of being. When these behaviors and ways of being don’t fit our energy blueprints, they end up requiring our bodies to spend excessive energy trying to hold up an allusion or mask that isn’t us. If one holds this mask for too long, the body burns out. Human Design helps us discover what is our unique energy blueprint so that we can live more in accord with who we are meant to be.

One of the things that Human Design teaches us is that there is no one size fits all formula – for living well, for health, for ways to get burned out, or for getting particular diseases.

Multiple Sclerosis and Human Design

In the case of human design and multiple sclerosis, there might be tendencies in common yet each chart is individual. Each person’s chart can show us where that particular person might spend energy being someone they are not that might eventually lead to disease and burnout. The chart can also show us a person’s individual formula for what their bodies require (time to rest, joy, time alone, etc.) to work optimally.

Here are a few examples:

Gate 49 the Body Barometer

In the chart example below of someone diagnosed with MS, this person has gate 29 defined (see the black vertical line coming out of the red box in the lower-center of the chart). A person with this gate has an extreme body barometer. This means that their bodies will tell them very clearly, “Hey, I’m done. This is too much.” (while someone without this gate defined might not have such an immediate body response when they’ve done too much).

The Defined Will Center

This same chart also has a defined (small triangle on the right) Will Center. Interestingly enough people with defined Will Centers absolutely need consistent cycles of rest. If they save their vacation time for later and stop taking breaks trying to prove their value by overworking; they will become extremely depleted. This center is the center of vital aspects of the immune system. When those with this center defined don’t give themselves consistent cycles of rest (rest meaning play and deep rest not working on your computer in the backyard or lay on the coach but worry about work), they can burn out. This kind of burn out is not just mental (I hate my job), but physical (I have no energy to keep doing this).

In Human Design, areas in our chart that are white or “undefined,” are areas where we can absorb other people’s identity and loose connection to who we are. We can live other people’s stories rather than our own.

The Undefined Sacral Center

The next example charts below, and the majority of charts of those diagnosed with MS that Eva M Clark sent to Karen for this interview, all had an undefined Sacral Centers (box second from the bottom). 30% of the general population have an undefined sacral. This is the center for workforce and life force energy. Because it is white in so many of the charts of people diagnosed with MS, the majority of those with MS “borrow” or absorb other people’s energy. Borrowing energy feels awesome, yet it’s unsustainable as it is not one’s own. If you have an undefined sacral and try to work like you see so many people around you, working from 9 to 5 and trying to prove yourself through your hard work and sacrifice, you will burn yourself out midway through life (35 to 40 years of age sometimes earlier). Those that try to be workhorses when they do not have a defined Sacral Center will eventually find themselves struggling to get out of bed because their bodies will not collaborate. They are wiped out (this kind of fatigue could be what many describe as the “MS sleeps”).  As Karen points out in the interview, a 2-week vacation is not enough if you have run yourself into the ground in this way. This might result in long-term need of rest and restoration. It often times take as long to get unburned out after getting burned out in this way. Not just resting the body, while your mind is a mile a minute, for you burn just as much energy, but a total rest of body, mind, and spirit.

One of our struggles in this society is that we’ve related self-worth with work. Society has erroneously said those with Sacral Centers defined have worth (70% of society) and those that don’t have it defined don’t. What is beautiful about Human Design is that it teaches us how to get off the treadmill of societal expectations and definitions of worth and understand our unique value and to  share that as our contribution to the world.

There is No Formula to Why We get Illness

Just as Human Design teaches us how unique we are, in our energy, in how we decide,  and in our values and gifts, it also lets us understand that there isn’t one reason or formula for why we get sick.  According to Karen and her experience:

• Some people have thrown into the adventure of some kind of illness into their life path as part of their soul’s journey.
• Sometimes people get illness because its the marker that they are out of sync and not being our true selves.
• Sometimes it something they’ve agreed to live out to clear their family system from this energy
• Sometimes its literally the toxins in their environment and it has nothing to do with theirmindset or behaviors but just an unfortunate series of events.

The No-Formula Model for Healing

“There is no one formula for healing as there is no-one else like you” says Karen Curry. She  advises us to listen to different modalities and if we don’t resonate with it, don’t use it!

Know you are not an accident. We all have a unique place in the cosmos. That occupation that you fill IS your contribution. There is not something you have to do as your life purpose and then burn yourself out trying to find that thing to do. According to Human Design, your being and maximizing the full expression of yourself is the purpose.

Your Unique Formula for Healing Multiple Sclerosis and Human Design

To find your unique formula for healing MS:

1. Start following the things that you do that make you feel better. We are so conditioned to think that it has to be hard work and that we will need to sacrifice. In Karen’s practice, she constantly asks her clients “Does that feel good?”. If the answer is “yes” at that moment, then she asks them to do more of it and if its “no” then to stop. Sometimes the body just needs a couch day and if being on the couch feels really good and we are open to experience a couch day, then we can benefit from that experience.
2. Explore the beliefs behind the guilt, resistance and should’s that are keeping you from following what feels good. If we are in resistance, feel guilty because it feels so good or decide we ‘should’ be doing something else because we’ve bought into a formula of some kind of what is appropriate, then we won’t benefit from the experience.
3. Study your Human Design chart and understand your unique blueprint, especially how you are meant to use your energy, your decision strategy, and what areas to address that might be affecting your multiple sclerosis.
4. Work with some kind of energy psychology techniques such as EFT, NLP, and hypnotherapy to unprogram and reprogram your beliefs.
5. Support the process with subtle body therapies such as acupuncture or energy healing to stabilize the energy as you continue to make cognitive and emotional shifts.
6. Give yourself time. It’s not hard, but it does take time.

Resources Multiple Sclerosis and Human Design

To get your free Human Design chart and material to begin to understand your blueprint, visit Karen Curry’s site, Human Design for Everyone.

Visit Eva M Clark’s Healing Multiple Sclerosis Program to unprogram and reprogram your beliefs.  To learn more about the beliefs and patterns behind multiple sclerosis, visit the post The Mental Patterns of MS.

Read and watch our Creating Health presentation on how Chinese medicine and acupuncture addresses multiple sclerosis.

If you would like to receive interviews and models of healing multiple sclerosis, subscribe to our newsletter.

Is there a multiple sclerosis personality? An MS personality?  Behaviors, attitudes and ways of being common to those diagnosed with multiple sclerosis?

Take the Personality Test

What is Personality?

To begin this discussion, we must first understand ‘what is personality?’  Because personality is not “just the way I am!“.  Personality is the behaviors learned and the goals that motivated us in childhood.  And these behaviors and goals became stable over time.

And once they become stable, they become unconscious.  Just like driving a car. Once you’ve learned and done it enough times, it can become habitual, and you drive without much of an awareness that you are doing it. Similarly, we learn these patterns of behaving, and they become our automatic response to life.  It is not your identity. These are adaptations to childhood stressors.

“Adaptations that help you survive the immediate stress in childhood become sources of pathology later on.  They are unconscious.  No one chooses to behave in these ways.”  Gabor Mate “When the Body Says No”

And unless you get a wake-up call of some sort, such as multiple sclerosis, you’ll continue to respond this way.

Is There An MS Personality?

Are there habits, beliefs, and behaviors common to those diagnosed with MS?  Take the test below and then continue reading or watching the presentation.

Note: As you take the test, consider how you were before you began to get symptoms of MS as there are behaviors that you are no longer able to do because of the symptoms (and there is a reason for that that we’ll discuss shortly) –

Take the Personality Test

How is the Multiple Sclerosis Personality Formed in Childhood?

Interestingly enough, the personality traits that were most admired and encouraged in childhood are the ones that later become multiple sclerosis.  Why?  Because as they develop further and gain incredible importance in our lives, they become unsustainable.  The almost superhuman traits cannot be maintained by the human body.

Traits such as being a good student, the favorite daughter or the hard worker or athlete become, as it continues to motivate us and increase its importance, a never-ending strive for success, overachievement, and to do lists.  Things can always be done even better… Even carrying for others develops into an inability to say “no” even when we are exhausted.  Helper becomes an automatic way of being, jumping at any request, and being helped is nowhere in the picture.  Emotions?  Emotions are for others as, through childhood and early adulthood, we’ve learned that they are not ok and thus repress them.

These are some of the examples of how some of the multiple sclerosis personality traits are developed.  Everything is ok and a strength, until these behaviors and beliefs takes over our lives. We need to develop the resources to create balance in our behaviors.

Creating Balance of the Multiple Sclerosis Personality through NLP

NLP can help create the balance of these behaviors that turned into extreme personality traits.  There is no judgment of these behaviors. Instead, there is a curiosity about what created this behavior and kept it in place so many years. NLP presupposes the following:

“Every behavior is useful in some context.”

“Behind every behavior is a positive intention.”

By understanding the positive intention behind the behavior and when it’s useful, we can begin to understand healthier ways to achieve that intention.

Additionally, symptoms of MS are not, according to NLP presuppositions, ‘failure of the immune system.’

“There is no such thing as failure, just feedback”

“Symptoms are a communication about needed action.” 

Symptoms are only feedback.  The body is saying ‘this way of behaving is not sustainable.’  It is requesting action.  Once the action behind the symptom is taken, the symptom is no longer necessary.

Working through the MS Personality to Heal Multiple Sclerosis

“People diagnosed with MS have ingrained habit patterns of the mind specific to their symptoms.  When those habit patterns are transformed using a combination of methods that bring (1) insight into a person’s habit patterns and (2) resources to modify those patterns, the symptoms decrease and frequently disappear.”  – Eva M Clark “The Effectiveness of Hypnotherapy in Treating MS” 

By working through the MS personality traits that have become major problems in adulthood, you could effectively reduce the symptoms of MS.  An example of the work you would do using medical hypnotherapy in the Healing Multiple Sclerosis Program would be –

— Understand the cause and meaning behind MS and each specific symptom

— Eliminate the inner critic and create the inner coach.

— Make peace with perfection.

— Creating inner congruency and balance. Become conflict-free.

— Master anxiety.

— Create strong boundaries around others.

— Removing the belief “I’m not enough / worthy” once and for all.

— Get your needs met. Put yourself first before helping others.

— Understand and harness your relationship with control.

— Become guilt and shame-free.

 — Exploring any unconscious inner obstacle to healing. Is MS serving you more than you think?

— Release the trauma of a negative diagnosis and the expectations it’s going to get worse.

— Creating a compelling empowering and fulfilling future

Healthy Personality Traits

As these personality traits begin to change into healthier mental patterns, they become sustainable and fulfilling, and the body is relieved of its burden and can begin to heal.  The amazing results of those that have worked with me as well as those I interviewed during my journey to develop the most effective healing program for multiple sclerosis is testimony of the incredible shifts that can occur.

Don’t do this alone.  There is help. Your MS personality is not who you truly are; it’s who you learned you had to be.

If you would like to receive these videos on healing multiple sclerosis as they are published directly in your inbox each month, please sign up for our newsletter.

This series was produced by Eva M Clark and recorded at the National MS Society Self-Help MS Group in Santa Cruz, CA. The National MS Society respects the rights of people with MS to obtain any and all information they want related to MS, including information on wellness, medical treatments or complementary therapies, and products or services. The information presented at these meeting does not necessarily reflect the views or official position of the Society, nor carry the endorsement or support of the NMSS.  Read our disclaimer here.

To understand multiple sclerosis pain and how to find relief, we must first understand pain. This understanding will give us the tools to create comfort.

When is pain important?

Pain is an important signal of the body when the body is communicating about:

•  Something is breaking or burning and needs our immediate attention.
• After an injury, to remind us not to use that part of our bodies as often or in the same way until the body has made adequate repairs and healed.
• Body is signaling to “stop” doing something to keep us safe (not physically but psychologically and socially).  A good book to read regarding when the body says “No” is Gabor Mate’s book by that same name.

These are very important messages that alert us to a needed action or caution.

When is pain irrelevant?

Sometimes, however, the signal is no longer necessary. Though it might appear that the signal pain is always important, there are cases when its no longer alerting us to a needed action.  Pain is considered not necessary or irrelevant when:

• The body continues to send the message of pain 20 years after the incident, and the body part has healed (or, in the case of MS pain, when the lesions are no longer active).
• The body sends messages of pain during normal use of that body part.

Receiving pain that appears in the area of a back injury from an incident when we were younger after just a brief walk, lifting something light from the floor, or during normal activities of the body such as digesting food is not relevant.  They do not inform us of a needed action or caution (unless we are trying to lift a couch, push ourselves in the gym, or have decided to rush out the door right after a large meal!).  Small normal activities should not spark the need for the body to message pain. This is when pain can be considered irrelevant, and we can focus on techniques to remove pain such as mindfulness, hypnotherapy or neurolinguistic programming (NLP).

Warning about Pain

Before we continue to understand what pain is and isn’t and when we can help yourself lower the signal when it’s no longer relevant, we need be cautious.  When a pain persists, we want to have a medical doctor test for life-threatening illness and infection before deciding its irrelevant and finding means to reduce the signal.

All hypnotherapists, including myself, will not work on reducing pain unless a doctor has already done the necessary testing to make sure the pain signal is not alerting the client to something that needs urgent medical attention.

Additionally, by informing our primary care physician or pain doctor that we are using a complementary method to relieve pain, they may choose to alter medication or other treatments as we progress with our complementary treatment decreasing our dependence on pain meds.

The Pathways to Pain

Pain is not the phenomena we think it is…  There are specialized nervous system cells called nociceptor nerves cells that create the experience of pain. They are woven into all our tissues, organs, under the skin and bones. Their function is to signal when a strong stimulus is causing tissue damage by sending out a message of pain.

When nerve cells are damaged as in the case of MS, nociceptors in the region can become hypersensitive or may misfire repeatedly.  This causes two sensations – ongoing pain and numbness. Many time these two sensations can be experienced in the same area!  Does this sound like what you are experiencing?  Both of these sensations are no longer giving the brain useful information about a current injury or danger.  These nociceptors are like the story about the sheep calling “wolf!” There is no longer any threat and focusing on the irrelevant pain can distract us from focusing on what is more important in our lives.

So lets looks at the pathway the pain signal has to travel before you experience pain:

(1) When a tissue of the body is broken or burning, the nociceptor nerve cells in the area of that tissue immediately send out a signal of pain.

(2) Messages from nociceptors nerve cells are sent from the extremities, organs or tissue into the spinal cord through a gate.  The pain signal cannot reach the brain unless it passes uninterrupted through the gate and into the spinal cord.

Interestingly, there has been research that shows how a second stimulus will block the passageway of the pain signal through the gate.  This is known as the gate control theory.

Non-painful input, will close the “gate” to painful input, which prevents pain sensation from traveling to the central nervous system.

(3) Once the message enters the spinal cord, the specialized nerve cells, interneurons, act as switches, deciding:

• Whether the messages have priority enough to be sent to the brain
• Considered normal body functioning and ignored.  Pain that accompanies (1) safe and pleasant experiences may be classified as irrelevant and never reach the brain.  Natural body chemicals called endorphins (released during exercise, massage or other positive experiences) switch the pain off in these cases.

What does this mean?  We already have two tools to keep pain from reaching the brain:

• Apply a pleasant pressure, coolness, warmth or other sensation in the area of the pain can prevent the pain from entering the spinal cord.
• If we focus on what we are grateful about and makes us happy about what we are doing at that moment rather than on worrying about the sensation of pain could communicate to the interneurons that the pain is normal body function and get ignored!

(4) Once the pain message enters the spinal cord, and the interneurons determine it’s importance, its sent up into the limbic system.  Urgent pain signals travel through the spinal cord very quickly to the thalamus and directly to the cortex.  All other pain, such as remittent multiple sclerosis pain, goes through a slower route from the spinal cord to the hypothalamus at heart of the limbic system structure. From there it goes through the thalamus and into several areas of the cortex (brain).

(5) From the limbic system, the message is spread to various regions of the cortex (brain). In essence, these pain signal is sent to:

• the effective or mood area of the brain
• the evaluative area of the brain (do we think its normal experience such as during exercise or are we interpreting as “oh no that pain will never go away!”.
• the sensory area of the brain (what sensation we think is happening down there where the nociceptive nerve first misfired).

All these areas are areas we can influence our thoughts, attitudes, and emotions. And that, in turn, affects our experience of the pain message and our ability to achieve multiple sclerosis pain relief.

Emotions and Pain

As we’ve already stated, the pain must first pass through your the limbic system and hypothalamus.  What is that important?  It is the center of our emotions.  It must pass through the filter of our emotions before it is sent out to the areas of the brain.  This has significant implications for how we experience pain!  Several research examples of how your emotions influence the pain experienced are:

• “Does Anticipation of Pain Affect Cortical Nociceptive Systems?” Porro et alia 2002 concluded, using fMRI scans of the brain, that up to 40% of pain is produced by the mere expectation of pain and not by “real” pain.
• “Psychological Factors in Chronic Pain: Evolution and Revolution” Turk and Okifuji, 2002, pp679-680 explain results of several studies showing that in chronic pain, pain-related anxiety or exposure to feared situations may accentuate the pain experience. Fearful patients appear to attend more to signals of threat and to be less able to ignore pain-related information.

Thus, it’s easy to see how your emotions can override positively or negatively your perception of pain and quality of life.

Long-Lasting Pain Disrupts the System

Apart from the pathway of pain from one area of the body to the brain, long-lasting or very intense pain inputs can disrupt the system. This disruption can lead to:

• Hyperalgesia (pain amplification):  the nervous system “learns” to be oversensitive to pain.
• The disruption can alter the processing in the brain so that there is abnormal activity (detectable by PET scans) in the nociceptors in the somatosensory cortex (area of the brain that registers ‘what kinesthetic sensations you believe occurred in what part of the body’).  It is no longer the nociceptor cells in the original area of the injury but the nociceptor cells in the somatosensory cortex.  Hypnotic suggestions can increase or decrease this abnormal.

Knowing this can alert us to focusing on re-establishing the normal messages of the body and not focusing and amplifying through our attention, thoughts, and emotions messages that are no longer relevent.   Unlearning the habit of focusing on pain by shifting our focus elsewhere.

Multiple Sclerosis Pain Relief

Hypnosis and Multiple Sclerosis Pain

Medical hypnotherapy and hypnosis work with multiple sclerosis pain by focusing on:

• Focusing on other sensations in the body that are pleasant. Or in a scene or memory that is positive.
• Giving suggestions to the unconscious to ignore the messages that are irrelevant
• Working on removing the fear of pain
• Increasing the confidence in the body and the client’s general safety

Hypnosis for MS focuses on all the areas that were discussed in this presentation.  This is why hypnosis can be so useful in creating multiple sclerosis pain relief.

This presentation is part of the Creating Health Series. To receive the series in your inbox each month, please subscribe to our newsletter.

Pain is one of the hidden symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Many people do not realize it is a symptom present in up to 2/3rds of those diagnosed with MS. Thus finding tools to manage pain in multiple sclerosis is essential in managing your MS.

Types of MS Pain

Pain in MS can be categorized into two groups:

• Nerve pain, known as neuropathic pain, is attributed to the disruption of central nervous system myelin.  This type of pain can be continuous and steady, such as burning in the foot or tingling. Or it can be spontaneous and intermittent, such as spasms or trigeminal neuralgia.
• Musculoskeletal pain, known as nociceptive pain, is attributed to the effects of disability. This type of pain is caused by changes in gait, posture, muscle weakness, etc.

Fortunately, it is possible to manage both types of pain of MS with hypnosis techniques.

Managing Pain in Multiple Sclerosis Using Hypnosis

There are many techniques that can be used to manage pain in multiple sclerosis.  Most research on using hypnosis for MS is focused on pain management. Here are the groups of hypnotic techniques used in pain management that can help relieve the pain of MS:

As you can see, hypnosis can be used to create anesthesia (not feeling the pain), to alter the sensation or move it to another area that is less painful, and to distract the attention of the mind to something more pleasant than focusing on the pain signal.  In the presentation, Eva M Clark gives us an example of going to the dentist and choosing to imagine herself first at the beach as a way to distract her attention from the pain and then altering the sensation of pain to resemble getting her hair washed at the hairdressers.  Both techniques are good examples of using self-hypnosis to relieve pain.

Hypnotherapy to Address the Cause of MS Pain

An important hypnotherapy technique that can be used to manage multiple sclerosis, not in the first sessions but once the client has become accustomed to using hypnosis, is “exploring the cause and meaning of multiple sclerosis.”  Why is this important?  Because only focusing on reducing symptoms such as foot pain will not heal the disease. And if those symptoms are there for a purpose and the symptom is removed without working through its cause, that symptom will return, or another one might take its place.  Nothing is happening in the body that does not have a cause.  Hypnotherapy can help discover that cause.

What is Pain

To understand what is pain, let’s use the example of stubbing our toe.  When we stub our toe, the nerves of the toe area immediately send a signal to communicate to the body about the incident so that the body attends to it.  It sends this message to attention through energy impulses.  That impulse is transmitted from the toe to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord up to the brain.  Once the brain receives the energy impulse, it needs to translate it.  Un-disrupted, the brain will translate the impulse as “ouch, the toe of the right foot has been stubbed and needs attention.”

Altering MS Pain

If, however, the brain receives, at the same time, other energy impulses or stimulus, the pain in the toe is drowned out or dulled.  That is one of the techniques used in hypnosis. It invites you to practice focusing on other more pleasant stimuli to dull or drown out the signal of pain.

A Baclofen pump uses a similar technique to distract the brain.  It also sends energy impulses into the spinal cord to interrupt and distort the signals of pain.  So, in the example of MS foot pain, when the nerves in the foot send a signal of pain, that signal travels up the spinal cord and joins the signal being sent up by the Baclofen pump.  The brain then receives a distorted signal and doesn’t translate it as pain. Baclofen pumps, just as hypnosis, focuses on altering the signal.

MS Pain Relief with Hypnosis

Hypnosis helps to relieve pain by teaching the client how to alter, distorting and distract the pain signals.

You can read more on hypnosis for MS pain in our next presentation here. Learn more about this alternative treatment of MS and subscribed to our newsletter to receive these lectures each month!