Healing Physical Pain

So many of us live with physical pain – backaches, hurting feet, itchy skin, frequent headaches, tooth troubles, upset stomachs, and just plain, good old aching muscles. What is our main approach to our pain? Fix it!! We go to doctors, physical therapists, and use pills, potions, and lotions, all in the hopes that it will go away. If you’re honest with yourself, management doesn’t usually do the trick. Pain often lingers or shows up in another part of our body.

But there is an exciting new science around pain. A very Reader’s Digest version of what has been discovered is that acute pain shows up in a very different part of our brain than chronic pain. And our very resistance to our pain causes these neural networks to keep on firing. (Think of phantom leg syndrome where, even if a person has lost a limb, they can still experience excruciating pain even though the limb is no longer there). Learning how to respond to our pain rather than reacting rewires our brain, calming down the pain.

This is exactly what we have been exploring with our mental and emotional pains. What you resist persists! When you learn how to give your mental and emotional pain the light of your accepting attention, it can lift like the morning dew is lifted by the sun.

The same is true for our physical pain. When you react to pain, your muscles literally tighten around it, bringing stress to an area that is already struggling. To go towards and soften around your pain calms the nerves that are agitated and brings in life-giving nutrients.

Now, I’m not saying you don’t need to go to doctors and physical therapists and take things to help calm your pain. But that is what I call management and management can only take you so far. What we are exploring is engagement, the willingness to actually go toward our pain rather than resisting and managing and discovering how to soften around it.

Stephen Levine lived off the grid for many years in New Mexico and had wood-burning stoves. He decided to do an experiment. At first, when he or his wife got burned loading the stove, they would send resistance and dislike into the blisters. Then for a time, when they got burned, they turned toward the pain, giving it the light of their accepting attention. Every single time, when they turned toward their pain, bathing it in the healing of care and compassion, the blisters healed faster.

If you’re interested in being educated about this new way of working with pain, the definitive book is The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain by Alan Gordon. I learned a lot from reading that book but it was when I heard Ezra Klein interview Rachel Zoffness, a pain psychologist, that it all finally made sense. And I must admit, after having been in a head-on automobile accident in my 20s, I have okad to listen to this a number of times because it is such a radically new approach to pain.

Also, Stephen Levine is a master at working with pain, having walked through the dying process with thousands of people. On his website https://levinetalks.com/Shop, you will find a number of brilliantly guided meditations on working with pain that can be purchased as a download.

Pain, on all levels, has been a fierce teacher in my life. In some ways, it has been easier to give my attention to my mental and emotional pain than it is to physical pain. But slowly and surely my fear of my pain lessened, and my heart opened more to my immediate experience and my pain calmed down a lot. I also used this approach with my plantar fasciitis, and I am now happy to report that I am back walking for a half hour every day!

If you’re interested in transforming your relationship to physical pain, Alan, Rachel, and Stephen are skillful guides in showing you a whole new way to be with your pain, which will not only calm your pain but also transform your relationship to life itself!