Are you currently suffering from physical pain? Do you want to learn how to deal with pain mentally? Or deal with the question of how do I stop obsessing over chronic pain? Maybe you have been suffering for years. The nagging feeling, the frustration, the resentment of your body. You just want the sensation to completely go so you can live your life with some degree of painless movement. You have probably tried all of the traditional approaches and want to try something new, something fresh that will give you a certain form of relief. There is certainly hope for you. You are in the right place right now and where you need to be. I understand maybe you do not feel that way, but you have stumbled upon this article somehow, which is certainly a sign of something!
Chronic pain is often accompanied by a nagging distracting feeling that will just not go away. Like an uncomfortable never ending cold bath. Lets move yourself out of the cold bath, dry yourself off, get a nice warm drink and start to look at your own pain from a different perspective. Feeling like your in a continual state of stress is not a joyful experience. Looking at things in a different way can turn that continual cold experience of pain into a nice creative warm pleasant experience. An experience that may shock you and look at physical pain differently forever!
THE MIND IS INCREDIBLY POWERFUL
Your perception of physical pain is governed by the mind. A perception in this case is your awareness of pain within your body. Without perception you would not know if pain ever existed. You would not be alive for a very long time if this was the case. Your first experience with fire would burn you alive as your brain does not view fire as a threat. Dangerous scenarios would become non-threatening. Every moment of the day you would be in danger. Without pain, hunger and the feeling of suffocation wouldn’t be able to be experienced. This could lead us to starvation and suffocation through swimming or any other activity that covers your airways. So we can see that pain is absolutely essential for your basic survival and the mind saves our lives every single day.
The mind being the controller of perception of pain plays a major role in pain regulation. Your mind is the ultimate pain killer if you can view pain in a certain way, from a certain perspective! We can see the minds power through its ability to heal the body. Lets take a look at what’s known as the placebo effect. The placebo effect is when your mind convinces your body a fake treatment is the real thing. Placebo effects have a major impact on the minds perception of pain (Raglin, J.S., 2024). There has been many pain and placebo studies that prove that the mind is more powerful than we give it credit for (Zhang, W., 2019). The mind can be powerful for us in both a constructive way or a destructive way, depending how we interact with it and depending on how we interact with pain in its raw form.
YOUR REACTION TO PAIN
Pain is ultimately a sensation which the mind perceives and interprets. After the initial sensation of pain comes to the brain, the mind then is in complete control of the further reaction to pain. This is very similar to the parable of the second arrow in buddhist teachings. The buddha said that ‘in life we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first’. This teaching explains how some circumstances in life are simply out of our control, its the reaction to these circumstances that is in our control. Just like when the sensation of pain hits our brain to be interpreted, this is the first arrow. The second arrow is your reaction to this. Your preconceived notions and the stories you tell yourself after the initial pain has hit.
We simple cannot control the physical pain that life may present to us. We can only control our reaction to it. This is where the mind comes in, this is where you have the power! Often times we resist our pain. We make up stories about it. We want it to go away, for it to be completely destroyed. This is you resisting the first arrow. Resisting the pain. When you resist the pain, your body and muscles tighten, anxiety increases and stress hormones release. Is this really a conductive environment for healing? A conductive environment for growth? Of course its not. Your body is not loose and free flowing, its tight and bound up as a result of the reaction to the pain. This reaction is causing you more harm than good. Wishing the pain to be gone is not going to make the pain go. It actually does the opposite..it further increases the pain.
Pain has gotten a very bad reputation throughout society. This has certainly had an impact on our individual responses to it. There is a reason why painkillers are incredibly popular. Pain is demonised to the point of complete rejection, but is pain not just part of our own biological bodies. The same way as pleasure is part of our own biological bodies. Yet the two are treated completely differently. One may argue, ‘Yes because pleasure feels much better than pain! Pleasure is a reward and pain is a punishment’. The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is a punishment in and of itself. Its an imbalance within our brains and with anything that’s imbalanced, there must be suffering. In life sometimes you will be feeling pain, that does not mean that pleasure has disappeared. On the other side, sometimes you will be feeling pleasure, but that also does not mean pain has disappeared. You need both pain and pleasure to function. Your body needs them both for its own survival. Too much of either is an imbalance.
In saying all this, how do we actually warm up to pain, how can we at least tolerate its presence and ultimately accept it.
REDUCE YOUR PAIN AND ANXIETY
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TRUE ACCEPTANCE OF PAIN
The acceptance of pain to put it simply comes from not reacting to the first arrow. The first arrow is the arrow of inevitability. That jolt of pain you get in your lower back when you stand up or when you fall and twist your knee. At this point the pain comes up to the brain to be processed by the mind. To allow the raw sensation of pain to just be there in that particular moment, is a moment of strength, a moment of courage. Without allowing any stories or conclusions to be made about that sensation. Just allowing it to be there in this particular moment, the way it is.
You see wanting to change your pain or your current state is a form of rejection which is opposite to acceptance. The act of wanting to change says that you want to get rid of the pain. Once again the concept of balance comes into play. Allowing the pain to be there in its raw form, not attaching to it, but also not rejecting it as well. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. This state of non bias is certainly not natural to our conditioned minds. However with a little bit of thought, awareness and challenging your older belief systems of what you think is possible, you can certainly get there!
The problem often comes after the first arrow as a result of the stories we have already concluded about pain in the past. The conclusions bring us right into a state of rejecting pain. These conclusions could be ‘I hate pain’, ‘Pain is uncomfortable’ , ‘My body is not healing when it is in pain’ , ‘I am suffering right now’. When we conclude all these things inside of our minds after the first arrow, now pain has become a monster, an evil entity, rather than a sensation. It has become something that needs to be conquered and repressed. You try to override and conquer it with all sorts of pleasure based activities or simple through the use of painkillers. However the pain comes back again and again as you keep repeating the same cycle of repression of the very pain that tries to help your natural body.
Being aware and introspective of your response to pain can really help you come face to face with the raw sensation of pain, as it is, without any prejudice. Therefore you can truly accept your pain. Introspection and awareness can allow you to see what you couldn’t see before, changing your complete mindset and perspective on pain. Turning that second arrow around and shooting it back at life!
If you want to develop more knowledge, introspection and awareness around your pain join my Inside timer by clicking on one of the two grey boxes within this article. The box below has a link to my pain course while the box above has a link to my selection of free guided meditations.
See yous all soon!
REFERENCES
- Zhang, W., 2019. The powerful placebo effect in osteoarthritis. Clinical and experimental rheumatology, 37(5).
- Raglin, J.S., 2024. What are placebo effects?: An introduction. In Placebo Effects in Sport and Exercise (pp. 1-10). Routledge.
Nathan writes blogs on Spirituality, Philosophy and Energy healing. He is a meditation teacher and Reiki master who has a passion of helping others go deeper within themselves.
