Befriending Pain

What I am offering here, as we talk about pain, is to turn towards ourselves when we are in pain.  Actually being present for our pain is where lasting healing happens. Yes, pain is distressing and can be disabling and irritatingly persistent so why would we want to be with it? Because science is beginning to understand that most of our chronic pain is our resistance to it. Just imagine spraining your wrist and somebody comes along and grips your wrist and doesn’t let go. It hurts. That is what we do with our pain. We tighten down around it, and that resistance amplifies our pain. We do this with not only our physical pain but our mental and emotional pain too.

But pain can become your dearest friend. It can alert you when you are resisting life again and can remind you that pain is amplified when you pull away from it. It can show you even a few moments of being present for your pain and softening around it can make a huge difference in your experience of the pain. And in discovering how to soften around the place you tighten and resist, you can begin to see the doorway out of the world of struggle that we’ve all been trained in.

This turning toward our pain is all about befriending it. If you are honest with yourself, you will see that you leave yourself when you most need yourself. Turning toward yourself when you are in pain rather than away is the art of compassionately observing what you are experiencing including your resistance to experiencing what you are experiencing.

It’s all about coming home to your heart. Your pain needs your heart. But we stay in our busy, resistant, denying, fixing minds, and all the while our pain is asking for our heart. Oh, the joy of finally learning how to experience the pains my mind was constantly trying to get away from!  But that was only half of the equation. I then learned how to enfold my pain with kindness, whether it was in my mind, my body, or my heart.

What happens when you do that? The muscles, ligaments, and nerves relax. It is just like what happens when you are going into a meeting with somebody in management who, in every previous meeting before, has judged you. But in this meeting, you are met, you are understood, and you are supported. Your whole being would relax. That is what pain needs. It needs us to relax around it. It needs us to listen to it, to say hello to it, to let it know it is okay it is here, and you want to get to know more about it.

If this intrigues you, I invite you on a journey into pain. You can feel free to save this passage and read it as many times as you need. Remember the core invitation here – to be curious about pain.

Find a quiet place to be. Close your eyes and begin to breathe long, slow breaths. Slowly allow your attention to meet yourself right here, right now. Feel the warmth or coolness of the room; see the light playing on your eyelids; feel the tingles of pressure in the places where your buttocks meet what you are sitting on.

Now scan your body, discovering a place of discomfort. If there is no definite spot of discomfort, go to one of your favorite places of holding on and begin to pay attention—a tight neck; a sore back; a pain in your head. It may be hazy and undefined but allow your attention to rest there. When the mind drifts off, bring it back again.

Begin to describe the sensations that present themselves to your awareness. A sensation could be pulsing or aching, sharp or dull. It could have specific boundaries or could be fuzzy and undefined. It could be steady like a tight fist or come and go like clouds dancing with the moon. Does it move around or stay in one place? Is it warm, or is it cool? What is the truth of this experience?

For a few moments, be willing to be present, letting life be exactly as it is. When you drift away, notice how the body tightens around the experience. As you again merge your attention with this discomfort, soften and open around this pain. Don’t push it away. If that is hard to do, enhance the contraction. Physically tighten the muscles surrounding this area, and then slowly, ever so slowly, let go.

Meet this discomfort as if it were an abandoned child asking for the mercy of your awareness. Know your discomfort wants exactly what you want when you are hurting—loving acceptance and compassionate attention. Imagine your hands radiating kindness and bring them to the discomfort. Gently and with great care cradle this experience. When you are finished, open your eyes.

It is possible to befriend pain, so rather than being at its mercy, it becomes something that clarifies and empowers you. Just imagine a life where you are not the victim of the painful parts of your life!

If you’d like to explore pain further, I invite you to listen to my radio show Listening, Pain can Transform your Life airing on Dreamvisions 7 Radio on Thursdays, May 9th at 5am and 5pm HERE. After the 9th, it will be available on demand, along with every other radio show I’ve ever done HERE. Please feel free to explore my archive and dive into topics that call to you.

Offerings:

If this exploration of pain calls to you, I invite you to join us TOMORROW for our next free live call. The topic is: Healing the Unhealed. We will look at pain as a part of this healing. I’m very much looking forward to seeing you all there! Here is the summary:

We are each a community of parts, parts we like and parts we don’t like. But the parts we try to hide from don’t go away. In fact, they influence us from underneath our everyday awareness. Join Mary in exploring how to heal your unlikable parts so you can become a whole and vibrantly alive community.

Even if you can’t make it, you can still register and receive a recording of the event after the fact! So be sure to sign up if you haven’t already!

Learn more and Register here