Chronic Pain: The Body is Speaking, Do You Know How to Listen?
Posted on February 27, 2014 by Charlie Birch, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.
After 10 years of chronic pain I have found meaning and healing go hand in hand. Stop fighting start listening. A pain free life awaits you.
Your body is speaking do you know how to listen?
I would like to tell you the story of how I learned to communicate with my body and heal my chronic pain.
When I was 14 years old, I started to suffer from low back pain. Over the next 10 years, my pain grew worse and worse. My pain began to migrate and spread through my body. It also became more constant and more debilitating. Western medicine brought me no comfort, eastern medicine helped with management, but not much with prevention. So I continued to search for a healing and prevention strategy that would help me save my life.
The big shift came when I began to think about my pain as a symptom of my emotional world. I began to consider which came first the pain or the depression, the pain or the anxiety, the bad sleep or the painful sleep. I found a couple of books that spoke to the psychosocial aspects of pain and slowly began to relate to myself and my pain in a new way. The tension began to soften and the pain began to decrease in frequency and intensity.
I have come to understand that my pain is a physical manifestation of a part of myself in pain. When I say part of myself, I don’t mean muscles and bones. I mean a part of my SELF, my inner world, my psyche. I have come to understand that I was repressing a lot of myself in order to do what I thought I was supposed to do. I was putting all these rules around how I could feel, who I could be, what I could think. I was afraid of my own emotional world. I was neglecting my relationship with myself. I spent all my time outside myself. I was manipulative. My MindBodySpirit triad was very out of balance. My life style was way out of balance. I worked to hard. I didn’t know how to rest and I never had time to play. I wasn’t present, but always reminiscing about or regretting the past, while simultaneously planning, dreaming, and worrying about the future. I was my own worst critic. I didn’t acknowledge that I had needs. I was a control freak pretending to be easy going. I was angry about a lot of things that I didn’t want to acknowledge. I was not connected to a higher power in any way shape or form and I did not feel supported and connected to the Universe. I was not integrated.
Healing my pain was the direct result of getting shit together. These days… I invite as many parts of myself to the table as I can make room for and then the next time I invite different parts. I express my feelings. I love all of my darkness and my light. I meditate and practice mindfulness. I cultivate my relationships. I divorced my shoulds and shouldn’ts. I practice work, rest, and play balance. I gave up trying to control things, because I realized that control is an illusion and will always disappoint me. I ask for what I need. I say NO and YES as clearly as I can. I connect on the deepest level I can get to with the people I love. I have the hard conversations that scare me, so that people can truly know me. AND I have been virtually pain free for 5 years. I say virtually, because I occasionally have a small relapse, but I know how to navigate through the murky waters towards healing. My pain is no longer chronic, but occasional and acute. I know the cause of my suffering is my own lapse in practicing unconditional loving kindness and being present with myself.
From the first time I experience back pain to the day I found the treatment approach that worked for me I lived 10 years of my youth in chronic pain and said goodbye to my childhood dream of becoming a professional dancer. Today I am pain free and healthier than I have ever been before in my life. I am so glad to be living a pain free life, but if I had to go back and do it again I don’t know that I would want to live it differently. Having pain has taught me so much about myself and healing has taught me even more.
Not everyone struggles with chronic physical pain, but everyone experience suffering that can be called pain. Next time you find yourself in pain, don’t fall victim to the victim mentality or look outside yourself for solutions. You are your own greatest healer, your own greatest resource, your own greatest ally!
When the pain comes to life, take a step back, take a breath, stop fighting, and start listening!
