Question

My hand and/or fingers shiver from time to time. How can I work with that not exaggerating it unnecessarily?

Answer

This is an odd sort of question. The person obviously has some sort of either mental thing going on which creates phenomena in the body, or else they actually have a physical disease or illness. You're looking at someone who has Raynaud's disease. This is a very uncommon illness in which the tips of my fingers hurt due to cold. Only once did it ever happen to my toes. But the tips of my fingers can hurt if I get very cold, and if my hands in particular get cold. Even if my body is not, but my hands are in cold water. It's an odd sort of phenomenon which isn't really serious, just something which they have no idea what the cause is. There's no remedy for it except to put on gloves, put your hands in hot water, things like that.

Often when we get questions like this, the first thing we say to people is check it out medically first. We never think, "Oh well, this is a psychological problem," and try to give them techniques for it, we always tell people to check it out medically first. Rosemary and I don't consider ourselves to be medical doctors. We say check it out medically first because we don't want to interfere with something that actually could be a medical problem. So that would be one advice that I always give somebody if they had some question like this, if they had some fingers shivering. There are medical problems like this.

Now, possibly all of you have experienced when you're just plumb nervous. Maybe you get a facial twitch or something else. There are many different reasons why people become nervous, and there are kinds of bodily reactions that we may experience from such thoughts, especially fear, worry, anxiety and so on. So if the shivering, twitching, etc. is coming from that, if you can actually see what it's coming from, that's very helpful. That's connecting thoughts and emotions in the mind to physical reactions in the body. If you can connect those two and you really see that your shivering is due to worry in the mind, then you've got to work on worry, you've got to work on fear, you've got to work on whatever thought it is that's creating the shivering.

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