What can pain teach You
We live in a world, in a society that is primarily focused on quick fixes, speed, and over committing. Our society rarely places emphasis on slowing down and doles out accolades to those individuals who achieve and achieve with never a misstep, never a break in stride and certainly never time for rest. Society conditions people to believe there is a pill for every ailment and discomfort and that we should want to take said pill to ease any and all pain and discomfort. We are conditioned to produce results and thus we want to see results instantly. We are encouraged to do more, be better, and push through and past pain. The last thing we are encouraged to do as a society is to sit with our pain which creates the mindset that sitting with our pain is wrong and something that must be avoided at all costs. In our fast-paced performance-based world we are presented with a million ways to avoid sitting with this pain. We can medicate, self-medicate, shop, work-out, work more hours, clean, gossip, etc. We are not taught the importance of sitting with our pain or shown how to sit with our pain. We are not told our pain is just as much a part of us as any other part of us and as such pain is worth sitting with. Our pain is a goldmine of knowledge about our bodies and how we have been living our lives. Sitting with our pain can teach us what we want to change about our lives and how we may make those changes. Pain allows us to process those experiences that were painful.
We are conditioned to not like pain, we are conditioned to avoid it at all costs, take a pill, get an ice-pack, talk to several different specialists but whatever you do, do not feel that pain. Pain is a necessary aspect of human existence. Pain’s purpose is to draw our attention to a part of the body that is in need of attention, for example resting a sprained ankle. If pain did not exist we would be in a bad way as pain provides us with valuable information about our environment, your skin lets you know when you’ve had too much sun through way of a painful sunburn. I am in no way insinuating that we should allow our sunburn to burn, a cooling aloe gel is just what we are needing in this instance; however, due to the interconnectedness of the mind and body we can learn a great deal from sitting with pain for a short time. Perhaps you got a sunburn because you were too busy running around to put sunscreen on or perhaps you have a tendency to put yourself last and ran out of time, perhaps you don’t value yourself and on a subconscious level believe you desire to suffer with a sunburn, or perhaps you didn’t realize you would be in the sun as long as you were. You will never know unless you take the time to stop, notice and sit with your pain. Maybe you are drawn to the attention you receive from others who express concern about your burn, again you will never know unless you stop and question.
Our brains are tricky, and they will cause us to act in ways that further the belief systems we hold about ourselves unconsciously. If you believe you are undeserving than may feel you don’t deserve something as mundane as sunscreen and as a result you will burn. By sitting with your shoulder pain you have been experiencing for the last few years with no reprieve you may learn something about your past that you have been holding onto that has manifested within the body. Different parts of the body are associated with different emotions, pain in the back of the knees can be attributed to a fear of moving forward, pain in the neck and throat can be associated with not speaking, living, or hearing the truth. In sitting with our pain and inviting it in we can learn about ourselves, we can learn what is working, we can learn what is not working and what we can do about those things that are not working.
My suggestion is not to forgo treatments, my suggestion is to simply take a moment to learn what we can learn from all of the sensations our body presents to us.
