Rock Steady: Healing Vertigo or Tinnitus With Neuroplasticity

By Joey Remenyi

Listen within. You are the expert in you.Chronic vertigo, dizziness, and tinnitus are invisible disruptions to a person’s life that can be unresponsive to traditional treatments, leaving sufferers feeling hopeless. Yet healing is possible using neuroplasticity, the brain and body’s capacity to change itself. So, why is nobody teaching us how to do it?Vestibular audiologist and neuroplasticity therapist Joey Remenyi explains why holistic neuroplasticity is often overlooked; why nobody else can prescribe it for you; and why ignoring, denying, distracting, and avoiding symptoms may not work. Joey gives hope to the hopeless with her pioneering self-study approach to healing chronic symptoms that outlines how we can rebuild a new normal with methodical steps. Using client case studies and her own personal experience, Joey guides the reader to gently feel their way through healing—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.Including home exercise ideas and a heart-centered approach to the science, Rock Steady is the handbook for anyone with chronic unwanted sensations or sounds in their body.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joey Remenyi
• Release date: Nov 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781989603864

Joey Remenyi

Joey lives on Wadawurrung Country with her husband and son in Victoria, Australia. She is uniquely positioned to support and understand folks suffering with vertigo and tinnitus with her background in psychology, neuroscience, acceptance commitment therapy (ACT), cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a master of clinical vestibular audiology, and over twenty years of experience in yoga and the art of experiential neuroplasticity. Joey is the founder and director of Seeking Balance International and the creator of ROCK STEADY, a program that has transformed the lives of thousands of people suffering with persistent vertigo or tinnitus. Joey has presented at conferences and workshops internationally as a world-leading pioneer in vertigo and tinnitus recovery. She offers a highly needed and refreshing perspective on healing for people living with debilitating vertigo or tinnitus.

Book preview

Preface

Your capacity to heal

This book is for everyone experiencing chronic unwanted sensations in their body. Your sensations could be described in limitless ways, from an odd micro-movement to a dull ache and pain; to a ringing tone, drone, or screech; to distorted visual spotting and auras. A sensation is anything perceived though our five senses: touch, sound, taste, smell, and sight. This book is for you to find peace within yourself despite the variety of unwanted sensations you may encounter in daily life. This book is for your family members to learn more about what you are going through. It is also for health professionals who are hoping to better understand ways in which they can support their clients through recovery from persistent symptoms.

Vertigo is any sensation of movement or disorientation when you are still. It can manifest as disequilibrium, dizziness, nausea, unsteadiness, or feeling not quite right (NQR). Tinnitus refers to sound sensations that are heard inside of your body—ringing, buzzing, popping, roaring, squeaking—that are not coming from the external environment. Vertigo and tinnitus are like invisible disruptions to a person’s life that are difficult for the medical world to resolve. Both are related to how the brain interprets neural messages coming from the inner ears.

Every person who experiences vertigo or tinnitus has their own way of describing them. Your sensations are something that no one else can ever feel or really understand. While this is a lonely truth, there is still hope. Regardless of whether you describe your sensations as spinning, feeling disorientated, buzzing, ringing, roaring, rocking, or feeling NQR, you are not alone. There are elements common to every person’s recovery, and you can learn how to better understand this process of healing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for yourself.

If you are experiencing vertigo or tinnitus, I want you to know:

It isn’t your fault.

You don’t deserve it.

You are not going crazy.

Tinnitus sounds or dizziness sensations are truly there inside of you.

They are neural messages created by your brain and body, for you.

These neural messages can change daily. You do not need to feel stuck.

Your body and brain may need support to recalibrate those neural networks so you can feel like yourself again.

This book is to help you cultivate awe for your biology, to explore the management options available to you, and to inspire you to start rebuilding new neural pathways that feel normal again so that you can live a rich and productive life. This process of rebuilding neural pathways is called neuroplasticity.

Over the last ten years, I have worked as a vestibular audiologist, and I have seen the challenges that clients with invisible and chronic symptoms face. I have also experienced vertigo and tinnitus myself. I remember feeling lost, overwhelmed, and alone. I questioned whether healing was even possible, and it felt that everywhere I searched led me to more disillusionment. In the end, it was because of my training in yoga, psychology, neuroscience, and vestibular audiology that I was able to explore the potential of using neuroplasticity firsthand. The next four years became a deep exploration of self-study, where I learned how to bring the theory of neuroplasticity into practice. I changed my brain and I healed my symptoms. This later developed into the ROCK STEADY program, a comprehensive self-study guide for healing with neuroplasticity.

The purpose of this book is to educate you about your capacity to heal within yourself. All case studies are based on real clients that I have seen over the years; however, I changed or removed any identifying features to respect their confidentiality.

The quotes at the beginning of each chapter are from members of my ROCK STEADY for vertigo and tinnitus Facebook group (that you are welcome to join) who answered the question: What does neuroplasticity feel like to me?

In designing this book, I requested a simple layout and clear font so that readers experiencing sensory distortions, or sensitivities such as migraines, could navigate its pages with relative ease. I also kept academic jargon and endnotes to a minimum to reduce clutter or sensory overload. However, I would like to invite anyone seeking to learn more about neural anatomy and physiology to explore university courses or textbooks on neuroscience. To read further academic research articles relevant to neuroplasticity, mindfulness, vestibular rehabilitation, and tinnitus, please visit: seekingbalance.com.au/research-articles/.

This book offers you a pathway to discover your own healing insights. I hope that you are inspired to get started with your healing whenever you feel ready.

Believe in yourself. You are the expert in you.

Part One

Habits

1

Unwanted sensations

I used to be anxious about sensations in my body; now I welcome them and tune in... Knowing how to tend to my emotions when I need it gives me the confidence to go about my business more happily and mindfully than I used to.

Pedro

Many of you reading this will have experienced sensations in your body that you didn’t like or that felt extremely uncom­fortable. Perhaps it felt frightening, such as severe spinning for hours on end. Or a very abrupt loud roaring sound inside of your ears or head. You may still be suffering with these sensations and sounds on an ongoing basis, without relief.

These are examples of vertigo—a sensation of movement when you are still—and tinnitus—sounds inside of your head or ears unrelated to the external environment. Both vertigo and tinnitus can happen to any of us, at any age.

In fact, they are so common that it is quite likely that every one of us has experienced some form of unwanted sensation, even if only briefly. It affects men and women, young and old. It could be a popping sound or squeal that comes and goes. Or dizzy sensations in your head and body. It can be frightening for a few seconds or a few hours. This can give each of us a glimpse at how debilitating and distracting these out of control symptoms can be.

But what do we do if they persist? How do we cope if these unwanted sensations never end despite doctors doing everything that they can?

I hope that reading this book will guide you to answer these questions and walk away with a recovery plan for yourself. I hope that you will gain a better understanding of what your body is going through, what doctors can and cannot offer you, and why you feel the things that you feel.

The dilemma

Vertigo and tinnitus sufferers are living inside bodies that are creating sensations that they do not like. This doesn’t feel warm, cozy, or safe. It’s not something you can run away from. You can’t distract it. You can’t simply medicate it. It can drive you to distraction, make you feel abnormal, or make you question yourself: Am I going crazy?

Let me reassure you, you are not going crazy. You can actually hear it, and you can really feel it. Vertigo and tinnitus are the result of natural pulses (or messages) traveling through your brain and body from neuron to neuron. Regardless of your diagnosis, with all forms of vertigo and tinnitus, you are experiencing neural firing in your body and brain that do not match your current environment. It doesn’t make sense and it feels wrong. It is what we call a sensory conflict. You are seeing, hearing, or feeling things that don’t match reality. For example, you could be hearing a buzzing sound but it is not coming from anywhere. Or you could be feeling a spacey, disoriented feeling when you are standing still or simply walking. These sounds and sensations are coming from neural pulses created within your nervous system.

For now, I want you to understand that these strange feelings or sounds are neural patterns firing in your body and brain. They can occur with completely normal medical results. Trust that your doctors will order relevant medical tests to determine whether you need medical intervention. But you may well have no abnormality detected on your MRI scan, CT scan, blood tests, hearing tests, and so on.

These sensations of vertigo or tinnitus are neural firing patterns that only you can hear or feel. Your body and brain are creating them. Doctors may or may not be able to explain what is causing them.

Most people want to know, Why do I feel this way? Why is my body doing this? Is there an underlying medical reason for this that the doctors can’t see yet? It can feel very frustrating when your doctors or health professionals cannot answer these questions for you. The body is complex, with physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects to its health. Doctors are skilled at investigating the physical reasons for your symptoms, and if they don’t find any medical cause, you may feel a little lost. However, there is another way to gather information about your body. So, what next? Who can we go to for information about our mental, emotional, and spiritual health? And even more importantly, can this help you get better?

You cannot reverse permanent nerve damage or turn back the clock in order to be the person you were yesterday, but you don’t need to do that. You can change your neural pathways using the functional neurons you have. You can feel at ease again despite permanent damage, and you can return to feeling normal sensations again. Using neuroplasticity, you can learn to do this for yourself: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

I invite you to look within. Trust that your body is firing neurons in a particular way for a particular reason. While you may not understand it at the moment, with self-study, compassionate self-awareness, and a practice in self-kindness, you can reveal layers of inner knowing that help you to understand the neural patterns and sensations that you are feeling.

At the time I was healing my vertigo and tinnitus, I had been practicing yoga for fifteen years. My daily practice taught me to observe the layers of health within my own body. Yoga did not necessarily heal me, but rather it gave me skills of self-observation, self-compassion, and nonjudgment. Yoga instilled in me the belief that I could change my body, and I could change my mind if I was committed to it. I had completed over seven thousand hours of training to eventually become a trusted yoga teacher. I was then privileged to see my yoga students change their bodies and their minds as their self-study practices and skills evolved. It was from this vantage point that I realized my yoga teaching skills could truly benefit my vestibular audiology clients.

In yoga, we refer to the self-study process as Svādhyāya (pronounced svah-t-ya-ya). It is a personal enquiry that brings us closer to our inner truth and guides us to self-realization or inner peace. Anyone is capable of self-study. Not everyone needs to practice yoga or become an intense meditator. There are many simple and accessible ways to look within and explore the sensations of your inner world. One of the most powerful yoga practices is the body scan.

Try it now: To try the Body Scan exercise, a self-study practice from the yoga tradition, turn to the Home Practice Exercises at the end of this chapter.

Layers of health

It is often through injury, trauma, loss, or hardship that we learn about our inner lives. When life is good, we tend to become absorbed in the fun and activity of life without feeling the need to look within. For example, you might have very little knowledge about your knee or how it works until you injure your knee and learn about it during the rehabilitation process. Until that point, perhaps you hadn’t thought too much about it, and it didn’t seem important. The knee just worked.

From a yoga perspective, our body is continually talking to us and communicating with us. This includes physical sensations and emotional feelings. Our mind–body communication is often loudest when we are in pain. It becomes harder to ignore what your body is telling you when you are in need of something. It could be that your body is screaming for rest, sleep, or cuddles. It might be in need of better nutrition, exercise, or stimulation. Or maybe it’s looking for support, belonging, or self-love and self-acceptance—or creativity, space, connection, intimacy, and so on.

When we feel good, we don’t really worry about our body or notice it too much. We are too busy living and getting on with life! It is most often pain, struggles, and difficulties that teach us more about our inner world. We feel the parts inside of our inner world that nobody else can touch or experience.

It is a common misconception that we should be happy all the time. We are told through marketing that we shouldn’t feel this way so we should buy this product to solve our problems. People label unwanted feelings such as pain, depression, and anxiety as abnormalities rather than view them as normal and effective ways in which our body can communicate to us. If you are not listening to your body, then no one is.

It can sound odd, but feeling the full spectrum of emotions is normal. Jealousy, hostility, surprise, joy, power, grief, sadness, loneliness, or calm, to name a few. All emotions carry a message of wisdom and teach us something about ourselves and our environment. This includes emotions that are triggered by our unwanted sounds and sensations. Our emotions often guide our choices and drive our actions. Once we learn to connect with our inner world and to support our emotional selves, we can think more clearly and function more efficiently in the outer world.

Yet, more often than not, we are taught to buy this pill or to buy that device and to rely on others to fix us. We can fall into the trap of shaming ourselves, hiding from what we feel and judging ourselves as abnormal. A different perspective would be to tell yourself, I am allowed to feel this way. My body is communicating with me. My body needs something. I wonder what it needs? I can find the support that I need for this. It is normal to feel this way. I’ve got this.

In many cultures around the world, we are trained to suppress our emotions and to display only pleasant feelings to others. We are told, Don’t cry. Calm down. This creates a problem for our inner world. The outer world (society and everything outside of us) tells us we should be happy. But we may feel not quite right (NQR). And we can spiral into shame, guilt, depression, anxiety, and so on. Our inner world becomes full of difficult suppressed emotions that we have never been taught to feel through. So we push them away. And the body keeps increasing the intensity of those sensations and creating a cycle that repeatedly feels or sounds NQR.

It can become overwhelming: you don’t like what you feel, you can’t run away from it, and nobody can explain it. It is invisible and can feel hopeless. It can snowball into a big, dark, difficult situation that nobody understands, and you don’t know how to get through it. Suppressing isn’t working. You are not happy. You may feel abnormal. You try to fake it and push through. But you just don’t feel right.

If you take the perspective that your body is trying to effectively communicate with you, then the sensations become stronger the longer that you ignore them. Your body wants you to talk to it. Not to talk about it. Not to fix it. Not to judge it. Not to get rid of these feelings. Your body wants you to heed the message it is carrying. All feelings are normal. Your inner world is unique to you. It holds all of your memories, thoughts, and ideas; it holds your dreams, nightmares, fears, and desires. It is normal for you to feel whatever is inside of you. Nobody else can understand what it is like to be you. But you can.

Getting to know the many layers within you is important for healing, as it helps you release any feelings that are stuck or snowballing. It helps you to make sense of your inner landscape and to feel at home in your body again. It is important that you get to know your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of yourself so that you can reconnect with your truth and feel normal again. I am not suggesting that you focus on your symptoms; I am instead suggesting that you listen to the deeper message that your body is sending you via these sensory pathways.

Generally speaking, people focus on recovery of the physical layer of health. This focus can lead us to become rigid and obsessive over exercise or diet. Often it is our spiritual, or belief, layer of health that we neglect. Take a look within. What is your body communicating to you? What parts are working well? What parts are you feeling disconnected from?

Don’t change anything just yet or judge yourself. Start by taking notice of the different parts of your inner world. Celebrate the noticing and this discovery phase. You are getting to know more about yourself so that you can feel more comfortable with being the expert in you. Neuroplasticity is a process of self-knowing.

In order for you to create your home practice, you should first learn more about your inner world. Here are some examples of the inner layers of health:

table

The brain

The brain and nervous system are made up of many neurons. Each neuron has a job to do and a message to send. This occurs continuously. A neural firing pattern is created when neuron cells repeatedly communicate messages to each other. They form a neural map or circuit that becomes hardwired during the learning process. This saves us from having to relearn things every day. It allows us to wake up and know how to walk, how to talk, and how to interpret our surroundings. That knowledge and skill set is already developed and hardwired throughout each person’s brain and body.

We create our neural settings by using repetition, exposure, and emotional context. Things that we love or hate are given a higher level of importance than things that we show little interest in. This is why our emotional state impacts our neural mapping. The things that we care about get hardwired most effectively. For survival, we have had to become aware of dangers (tigers, earthquakes, famine, etc.) and our alliances (community belonging, loved ones and friends, etc.). Emotions play an important role in mapping the world as we see it, feel it, and hear it.

Neurons travel from your brain to your body and from your body to your brain. There are sensory messages traveling in all directions. It is beautifully complex and there is so much more to learn about the many neural patterns of the human body.

Whatever you feel is real. Even if science cannot explain it, find it, test it, graph it, or see it. Your truth is that you feel it within you, and this feeling comes from a neural pathway inside of your brain and body.

There are so many neural pathways inside of you that it is impossible to test them all. Many of your neural patterns are healthy in this moment and functioning beautifully. For example, the neural pathways within the language center of your brain are working right now as you read this page. Your language maps are recognizing words and creating meaning within sentences.

During symptomatic moments, some of your neurons are firing patterns of dizziness, disequilibrium, nausea, ringing, buzzing, roaring, spinning, rocking, or swaying. An umbrella term I use to encompass all of these symptoms in a more neutral manner is feeling not quite right (NQR—you will notice that I refer to this term throughout the book). Doctors will investigate the physical cause of these NQR symptoms, and if they can’t find any, then we can thank the medical team for the medical clearance and begin a neuroplasticity approach to healing. Feeling NQR may be an indication that something in the mental, emotional, or spiritual parts of your inner world are out of balance. Your self-study insights can help you understand your NQR sensations and what they mean for you.

In order to heal unwanted sensations and return to a sense of normal, you need to retrain your neural networks. This is something you can do with education, support, and a methodical daily practice. Medication cannot change neurons for you. Neither can your family members, doctors, physiotherapists, audiologists, or psychologists. Only you can change your neural maps, and you can learn to do this using a step-by-step process.

In short, you can use the healthy neurons within your brain and body to override any damaged pathways and to create new neural settings that feel normal again.

To create these new normal sensations, you will need to clarify what normal actually feels like for you. Neuroplasticity is a process of feeling, so being really specific here about what your normal feels like is key. It is not about getting rid of symptoms, but rather about redefining your new normal sensations. Building your new normal neural pathways will then become your daily practice. You build those pathways by practicing feeling them in whatever way you choose.

As you go through your self-study process, you will clarify how you want to feel, how to reset your neurons using neuroplasticity, and how to implement this practice daily. It is your body, so you are the one who cultivates any desired changes within yourself. You choose how you practice and what resources you use to support yourself.

One of the biggest barriers to healing is disbelief that you can actually do it yourself.

Many people struggle to redefine their new normal and get stuck on trying to get rid of symptoms. They can’t get started with a daily practice, as they don’t know what new neural networks to build. Their focus never leaves their vertigo or tinnitus symptoms and they remain feeling stuck. Healing can begin only after clarifying what feeling normal means to you. For example, it may mean to feel at peace rather than an absence of symptoms. Using this insight, you could then begin to find tools that help you practice feeling at peace daily. Each day, your inner experience of feeling at peace can be strengthened by repetition, and new neural networks can grow. With time you can develop a new, at peace, sense of normal.

If you are seeking someone else to fix you, then you may not yet be ready to retrain your neurons. It can be an exhausting process, learning to believe in yourself. Some people wait years for others to fix them and spend thousands of dollars on treatments hoping that it will get rid of their symptoms. It can be a painful process, until

Reviews for Rock Steady

[popovici vali · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not only a neuroplasticity book, but also a book that teaches you to love yourself more.

[Tonje Andersen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is simply amazing to heal in all ways. Not just tinnitus or vertigo. Read it and share it with people you think could benefit from it. Lifechanger for me!