What To Do When You're in Pain
Pain can be a charged word. When you experience pain, it’s easy to compare the pain sensations to times it’s happened before. Your brain has memorized the pain. And with that memorization, you have memorized your reaction to pain, which is often fear.
Fear is created by thinking “Why is this happening? This isn’t supposed to be like this. Is this going to last forever? I’m not going to be able to get done what I had planned today.” The roller coaster begins with simple sensations in my body. Instead of letting the sensation be what it is, we have a memorized reaction that creates fear in your body. When you experience fear, you’re in fight-or-flight, and your body’s response is to tighten and tense against the pain. The tension leads to more discomfort, and the cycle goes on and on.
But, if you want to find a different approach, it’s going to require love and self-compassion, two emotions that can be difficult to muster in the middle of pain. It can require using new malleable words surrounding pain, ones that are not as charged and fraught with fear from previous bouts of pain. You might words like sensations, discomfort, or vibration to describe your pain. Most importantly though, never lie to yourself and tell yourself that there is no pain or that the pain isn’t real. Because if it exists in your mind and your body, it is real. And there’s no point in arguing with reality.
To choose this new way of relating to pain, it requires 4 simple steps:
- Curiosity
- Self-talk: “I feel you”
- Listening to the message from the body
- Sending message of safety to the body
You start with shifting from fear to curiosity and wonder. Curiosity about the symptoms you are experiencing without a hint of an agenda to end the suffering. Curiousity about where the pain exists, what it feels like, the quality, the type. All of it.
The curiosity allows you to drop into your body and begin to pay attention to the signals that she is trying to send to you. I had some lower back pain a few years ago when I began practicing this concept. I told the pain in my back,
“I feel you. I’m just going to breathe into you, into that spot where it’s really causing me some discomfort right now. I’m going to feel you and you can let the pain get as big as you need to, Body.”
“I’m not going to fight against you anymore. Get as big as you’re going to get, because I’m not going to stop you.” And often, the pain does start to hurt more. But eventually, it starts to subside too.
You don’t start this process to decrease the pain. You do it to understand it and because your body is telling you, “Hey! Pay attention to me.”
So I let the pain hurt, because that’s what it wants to do anyway.
Next, I ask my body, “What are you trying to tell me?” The message that I had from my back pain was “I know you want to do everything and be everything to everyone, but I’m afraid you’re going to go too fast and you’re not going to pay attention to me and we’re going to end up in more pain than ever. So I’m going to make it hurt really bad right now.”
Once you have the information of what your body trying to tell you, talk back to her. Begin to let your body know that she is safe.
Tell her “Okay. I know you’re afraid of that. I’m not going to do that to you anymore. It’s safe for you to heal. It’s safe for you to let go of these pain signals because I’m taking care of you and I will rest. I will do everything in my power to take care of you. I will take care of you no matter what. You are safe to heal.”
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