Hello! We talked to Máté Zoltán Bene, the spine specialist of porckorong.hu about our Endoblog yoga training.
Nóra Árvai:
Almost two million people have seen your videos for spine patients, your training courses have a waiting list, the internet is full of your grateful patients. How did you achieve so much success in the field of non-surgical treatment of spinal diseases at such a young age?
Bene Máté:
Thank you, but unfortunately I'm not young, these are more achievements than successes, and I owe them largely to the fact that I skipped a lot of high school.
Nora:
Tell us.:-)
Matthew:
I was very lucky that my mother had me enrolled in a library before high school, so I discovered relatively quickly that when you choose what you read, it's a different world than when you have to compulsorily absorb the thoughts of sometimes seriously pathological authors. I was a very information-hungry child, and there was no internet back then, so for me the library was an orgy of exciting and otherwise unavailable information. And school would have taken a lot of time away from this source of enjoyment, so I would often cycle up to Fairy Rock instead and read 2-3 books borrowed in the morning. At the time I thought of it as fun, but now I think that's how I learned to be matter-of-fact, to filter information and to be human-centred, which was, after all, the first step of porckorong.hu.
Nora:
How long have you been doing this?
Matthew:
I started karate at the age of 12, and the experience of movement starts from there. The first kinesiology - I would rather skip this today - I graduated at the age of 13 in Óbuda, and exactly 12 years ago I graduated from the Department of Physiotherapy at Semmelweis University. Since then, I have been dealing only with degenerative problems of the spine.
Nora:
After endoblog training sessions, I always find that our participants loved you. Why?
Matthew:
I don't know. It's probably because I want to give a pure understanding of colour instead of over-saturated magic. It is not for a minute inappropriate to say, for example - please don't be scared 🙂 - instead of "retrolysthesis of the intervertebral joint in the sagittal plane", that the two articular discs slide closer together, causing the joint capsule to become loose and thus pinched, so that the upper vertebrae tend to move away. That's what makes the story completely understandable, transparent. Once the understanding is there, it's very easy to go from there to the professionally correct wording and details. The other way round is difficult. If you insist on a competence posture, people leave training knowing that they have heard a lot of clever things, but they don't really know what to do with them in practice. And that is something I want to avoid at all costs.
As the participants see this attitude, a very friendly atmosphere develops in the courses in no time, and they dare to ask questions without any inhibitions, so that all the puzzle pieces can fall into place. For example, once at a conference I projected an RTG image of a German Shepherd dog as an illustration of a human degeneration. I saw a few puzzled grimaces, but no one said a word. I played the same thing in one of my own teams, and about the same time everyone shouted "that's megmiez"... Now that's the kind of free atmosphere in which you can develop at a fast pace, and I think that's what people are so comfortable with.
Nora:
What is your relationship with your colleagues like?
Matthew:
Very good. For example, I hold regular training sessions for physiotherapists and health professionals in hospital professional groups, and I also attend others when I can. Fortunately, more and more of us are dealing with degenerative spine problems. This spine topic is one that you can never really get to grips with, because science hasn't even touched the spine at all for 20 years, so we have mainly known and learned partial truths about how it works, and although we all suspected something was wrong, it is only now that meaningful, useful knowledge is available. It's also only in English and difficult, so you always feel like you're just running after research. It's good that there are more of us, because we can talk and argue, so that those with whom we acknowledge each other's work can also give each other a good name. Fortunately/unfortunately - spine is not a zero sum game, there is no fear of someone not having enough spine disease, so this allows for pleasant professional friendships to develop.
In the world of yoga, I have been known to raise an eyebrow when I have said the exact opposite about the spine or hernia of what the great master of the style who lived a few hundred years ago said, or when I have suggested that a particular practice is massively harmful in today's environment. Fortunately, a few months after the big outcries, my much-maligned content always appears in the critics' materials, slightly rephrased, so I have accepted these grumpy expressions as a necessary evil of the evolutionary process.
Nora:
Do you like your job?
Matthew:
Very. Fortunately. If I wanted to throw around big words, I'd say my goal is to help as many people as possible avoid the hassle of spinal surgery, but I'm increasingly finding that I'm doing this mostly because I'm so damn excited about the subject. Anyway, that's what I think success is. If you do what you're passionate about, something that challenges and excites you every day. The problem is that very few people today are challenging themselves to do what they love in any area of life, and that's a source of a lot of stress and a lot of back problems.
Nora:
So you believe in a spiritual cause of illness?
Matthew:
Is this not a very typical question in a psychological practice?
Nora:
No. I also hate the "if your left side hurts you have a problem with your feminine side, if your right side hurts you have a problem with men, and if your eyesight is bad you don't want to see something" kind of baseless reasoning that goes around in these circles. But obviously chronic stress can be the source of a thousand physical problems. So it's good to go round this issue a bit on a more sensible level. Psychology, for example...
Matthew:
Did you know that psychology is the science that, despite calling itself psychology, denies the existence of the soul?
Nora:
Did you know that you always cut in or give evasive answers when you don't want to talk about something?
But it would be good now, because this is a question of interest to many...
Matthew:
I don't believe at all that the soul makes you sick. I don't have to believe that the brain makes the spine sick, because I know that.
Nora:
Explain this, please!
Matthew: Okay. Before we get too much into this more shaky subject, I would like to say that I deal with the biomechanics of the spine, that's what my prescription was about, and that's what my training is about. As you say, especially in the world of wild esotericism, many healers of this or that method like to claim that anatomy, physiology and evidence based healing in general is "some kind of low level" and that the cause of illness is all kinds of astral bodies, past lives, spiritual causes, etc.... Typically, they are the ones we have to clean up after a lot in our prescriptions. In Chernobyl in '86, the trees after the explosion couldn't have had too many psychological problems, and probably didn't kill enough guinea pigs in their previous lives to be punished in this incarnation, yet they turned red from radiation in minutes. Ergo, if somewhere it is disputed as a matter of principle that the physical environment affects the tissues of the body, it is difficult to enter into an argument based on reason. On this issue I probably think the same as you do, because we can probably work from similar sources. Attitude, chronic stress, the patient's perceptions of recovery can really affect their chances. Many studies show specifically that if a person is simply informed correctly and clearly about the nature of their problem, they recover much more effectively and quickly. In my case, for example, the first part of the treatment was just to discuss why the patient had developed a hernia and how he was going to heal it. We only started the movement therapy when everything was fully understood.
But coming back to your question, I think it's mainly the brain that makes the spine sick, because how you spend your day, how much and how much you sit, whether you make a system out of late-night Facebook rampages instead of sleeping, whether you walk enough on uneven ground, whether you can get off your phone, it's a matter of choice, and the condition of the spine is specifically dependent on that.
Nora:
Is that all?
Matthew:
But getting out of a Facebook addiction or a car and taking the time to walk on uneven ground regularly is not easy. I know that reading something like this makes many people reflexively take responsibility, but the life you create for yourself after the age of 18 is your sole responsibility under the circumstances. If you don't accept this, the chances of avoiding spinal degeneration are very small in today's lifestyle, because our current lifestyle almost manufactures spinal problems
Nora:
And chronic stress, lifestyle, overwork?
Matthew: Apart from these more obvious things, I think it is the maintenance of "chronic illusions" that contributes significantly to becoming a spine patient. You would call this cognitive dissonance, but I like to call it more simply lifestyle self-deception.
Let me tell you a story, it's easier to explain what I mean. I knew a manager of a multi-branch who had a constant backache. He loved cars, he had wanted to be a car salesman since he was a teenager, but his family didn't think it was a socially accepted ( you know? socially accepted ☺ ) profession, so he became an engineer, and eventually a multinational. His only pain was for a few months when it turned out that the company fleet needed to be 'sales-ed' quickly, and to everyone's surprise he was happy to take on the job straight away. Needless to say, he enjoyed haggling with dealers like nothing he had ever done before at work, and while he was mainly doing that, he never felt an ounce of pain. Then he went back to his multinational job and all his symptoms returned.
He was under the illusion, for example, that he would somehow be better off in a job his family thought he could do than the one that would make him happy. Well, I wouldn't be in his shoes on a Monday morning...
Of course, from a scientific point of view, there is no clear correlation between the two, since a thousand factors can influence such a story, so it is not objectively known what caused the temporary improvement.
Yet I believe that in the persistent maintenance of illusions like these, which impose identity, marriage and self-image, one's subjective reality clashes more and more with the outside world, so that one has to justify and rationalise previous decisions again and again, leading to ever more self-deluded decisions, to an ever more self-deluded life, which is not without its tensions. And this tension finds its way into the body, and we already know from a whole series of objective studies what it does to the tone of the most ancient muscles along the spine. From there, it's just a roundabout way to symptom and permanent degeneration. So I think the origin of chronic stress today is mostly when you're out of place either professionally or relationally, but I could also say mentally. This is a very far-reaching subject, let's just say that I think that the most effective therapy in such cases is to stand up, summon up the courage and take the red pill...
Nora:
The red pill?
Matthew:
Oh, you haven't seen The Matrix? When Morpheus meets Neo?
Nora:
No, I have an inherent mystique about the great classics...
Matthew:
Check it out! I think your readers have seen it!:) So take the red pill, wake up from the illusion, and start living authentically, without self-deception. Of course, it takes tremendous strength. When, for example, a lawyer realises that he has been practising law for twenty years mainly because of the strong expectations of the dynasty, but that he has always been happy restoring old weapons, it is not easy to change. When a kindly housewife realises that the reason she said yes to her husband ten years ago was mainly because she was afraid no one else would ask her, but she'd rather go out dancing and live a little... Tough situations. It's hard to make such radical changes. Treating a ruptured disc and continuing to self-deceive is much easier. The question is, is it worth it? I'm 35, for example, you said it was young. But if we think about it without illusions, it's exactly half the average age of a Hungarian man. In fact, we have much less time for circles of honour than we think.
Nora:
I was just being polite. You really are old.
Matthew:
🙂 I find that once you get the strength and get into your place, things usually start to work out very quickly in your life, it's just that so much of the bullshit of a society with distorted values is so ingrained in you that sometimes it's not easy to figure out what you really want and what is just the result of years of family and social hypnosis. That's why I think what you're doing is very useful. But it's not just in the mind, it's also in the body: if the parts are doing exactly what they're supposed to do, nothing gets over-sheared and the chances of degeneration are greatly reduced. If they don't, then there's a tension somewhere, and the wearing parts drink the juice.
Nora:
What do you do in your spare time?
Matthew:
I read research. I used to practice all kinds of martial arts, but that's out for a while due to an injury, we try to go hiking once a week, I take my grandpa shopping, I take care of my new cat, and sometimes my ex-marine buddy and I buy a discount airline ticket and take a small backpack without any plan or concept to some place where the only thing more dangerous than dirt and grime is the risk of infection. Such as.
Nora:
That sounds good. But one of your friends said that as exciting as your training is, you are just as boring in civilian life...
Matthew:
I am. I used to go to a party because I thought I'd miss out if I didn't, but I've found that I enjoy it much more if I'm fresh the next day. Now that you put it like that, I really do live just like my granddad, but for me it's the old age lifestyle that I'm at my maximum ☺
Nora:
Finally, one last question, what are your plans for the future.
Matthew:
I have two main plans. I want to spread this information all over the world, so first porckorog.hu and then launch the training courses in English. This project is well on its way. The other one is a bit more difficult. Nowadays, about everyone has a good chance of developing some kind of spinal disease from a sedentary job, and those who have had it but have recovered have a better chance of developing it somewhere than not. These problems follow a pattern. First, the sitting posture disturbs posture, forcing the nervous system to learn new movement patterns - moving with different muscle action, but also putting stress on the body in a different place than it should. These patterns are recognisable and can precede the specific onset of disease by years, so reprogramming the patterns helps enormously to prevent these diseases. I have started to develop a system for this. I thought it would be easy, but I kept running into fundamental surprises as I collected the material. Research is increasingly showing that we need to go in a completely different direction to keep the spine healthy than we thought, so when the material is ready it will be a major upheaval of the concept.
Nora:
One last question: what is your advice to the participants of the Women's Yoga Therapy training?
Matthew:
I would say to be very sceptical about the spine, because there is a lot of old, outdated information on the subject. And above all, don't believe even your own feelings. The reason people give themselves herniated discs is precisely because they don't have a lot of feeling nerves, so they usually get the worst of it. That's why it's a big mistake to say that if it doesn't hurt you, it certainly can't hurt you.
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Nóra Árvai: psychologist for the chronically ill, perinatal counsellor, specialist writer. At Endoblog.hu, she helps women with chronic illnesses to maintain their self-esteem, improve their quality of life, address problems in their personal life, work and relationships, create psychological balance and develop a positive vision of the future. She has published 7 books, regularly gives training and lectures, and is one of the most popular endometriosis specialists in the country. Facebook page owner.
Máté Zoltán Bene: Teacher of the Bene Máté Spine Academy, physiotherapist, spine specialist of porckorong.hu, expert in the treatment of spinal hernia without surgery. His videos on his Youtube channel have been viewed by two million people. She is a regular lecturer at the Endoblog Women's Yoga Therapy Teacher Training.
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