Ease pain by cultivating hope
Mindset is Everything
Your Pain is Not the Problem
When I was in the depths of my struggle with back pain, I would often find myself telling stories about my future that I couldn’t be sure would come true. You probably know what those stories sound like:
“This is never going to get better
I am doomed to live a life of sadness and immobility
Nothing I try is going to work.
There is something irreversibly wrong with me.
It’s not fair. Everyone else my age is out there chasing their dreams, or living them already, and I can’t even get started.
I must have done something to deserve this, if I can only figure out what it was then maybe this would go away.
What will happen when I’m wheelchair bound in my 30s?
I don’t have what it takes to beat this.
My body hates me.
I hate my body.
I hate my pain.
I hate my life.”
Guess what? These comments did nothing to help matters. If anything they made them worse.
It’s not the pain itself that’s the problem. It’s the stories we tell ourselves about and around our pain that makes it so unbearable. These stories help keep the pain alive by reinforcing its need to be there.
Let’s try a little experiment.
Find a position you can get comfortable in for a couple of minutes, where you can find stillness. Take a couple deep breaths. Now focus on the pain. Where do you currently feel it in your body? Be precise. What are the qualities of the pain? Is it sharp, achy, throbbing, stabbing? If it had a color, what color would it be? really focus in. Where are you feeling it now? Is it in the same place, or has it shifted in location, in intensity? If it is more intense, you’re not doing it wrong.
If you are starting to get bored with this, you may notice some of the stories may have bubbled up, “This is stupid. What’s the point?”
If you can, let those thoughts go and re-focus on the pain. Be with it. Exactly how is it in this moment?
Breathe into the area of your body where the pain is.
If your pain were to have a message for you, what would it say? Maybe it says rest, Maybe it says let go… Really hear the message.
Now check in again on the pain. Where is it now? What are the qualities? Has it shifted in intensity or location. Maybe it started in one area and now it is in another. Maybe it’s hard to pin down. This is normal.
Take another deep breath and slowly open your eyes.
What did you notice, if anything? What did you learn about the pain?
You may have noticed the pain changed locations, you may have noticed it increased or decreased in intensity. You may have noticed the quality of the pain changed. Maybe it disappeared all together.
This exercise hopefully shows us that the pain itself is not a fixed entity. But so often in our minds it is. It is a monolithic, immovable object that is never going to change. Again, it’s the stories we tall ourselves about our pain that makes it fixed.
The more often and the more stories we tell ourselves about that pain, the more the pain sticks around, in just the same annoying way, sucking all our energy, joy and motivation.
But you just witnessed that the pain DOES have the capacity to shift and move. The pain is also a messenger. All it asks is that you pay attention to the message that it’s trying to send. Sometimes in order to do that we have to quiet the stories and really listen in to the pain itself.