Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Daily Om: The Message of Pain


Today's Daily Om is a good one, a message many of us need to be reminded of from time to time.

Valuable Information
The Message Of Pain

When we feel pain, our first impulse is often to eradicate it with medication. This is an understandable response, but sometimes in our hurry to get rid of pain, we forget that it is the body's way of letting us know that it needs our attention. A headache can inform us that we're hungry or stressed just as a sore throat might be telling us that we need to rest our voice. If we override these messages instead of respond to them, we risk worsening our condition. In addition, we create a feeling of disconnectedness between our minds and our bodies.

Physical pain is not the only kind of pain that lets us know our attention is needed. Emotional pain provides us with valuable information about the state of our psyche, letting us know that we have been affected by something and that we would do well to focus our awareness inward. Just as we tend to a cut on our arm by cleaning and bandaging it, we treat a broken heart by surrounding ourselves with love and support. In both cases, if we listen to our pain we will know what to do to heal ourselves. It's natural to want to resist pain, but once we understand that it is here to give us valuable information, we can relax a bit more, and take a moment to listen before we reach for medication. Sometimes this is enough to noticeably reduce the pain, because its message has been heard. Perhaps we seek to medicate pain because we fear that if we don't, it will never go away. It can be empowering to realize that, at least some of the time, it is just a matter of listening and responding.

The next time you feel pain, either physical or emotional, you might want to try listening to your own intuition about how to relieve your pain. Maybe taking a few deep breaths will put an end to that headache. Perhaps writing in your journal about hurt feelings will ease your heart. Ultimately, the message of pain is all about healing.

How we respond to pain is as varied as you might imagine. Some of us fear pain, some think it must be ignored, some just want to find ways to numb it, some are okay with it, and some people actually enjoy it.

This post makes some good points about the lessons of pain, however. Physical pain is often the easiest to deal with -- we usually know what caused it, how to handle it, and how to make it go away. If we simply listen to our bodies, we can avoid or eliminate physical pain.

Emotional pain is much tougher. If we have never been taught how to cope with emotional pain, it can be frightening and debilitating. And most of us have never learned how to deal with this kind of pain in an effective manner. At its worst, it can cause the psyche to shut down into a state of depression.

But what if we could think of emotional pain as a teacher? I first came across this notion in one of Pema Chodron's books many years ago. It changed my life. How strange to find that the incredible depression I once was feeling was actually covering over a deep sadness, and that if I listened to the sadness it actually was trying to tell me something useful.

Pain is the psyche's way of asking us to look within, to pay attention to our feelings rather than trying to escape them or numb them or repress them. All it wants is for us to be present and to feel. It can seem overwhelming to actually do this -- to sit with our pain and breathe through it, or to sit with our pain and cry so deeply that we think we may never stop. But it will stop.

Unless we are severely unbalanced, our psyches will seldom give us more than we can handle at any given moment -- although what it thinks we can handle and what we think we can handle may not match. If we can surrender to our pain, our psyches will only allow us to feel as much as it thinks we can bear before shutting down again. It wants us to heal, not drown.

Where we get into trouble most times is when we repress or ignore or numb our feelings. They do not go away, they go under and wait to be addressed -- and if we don't address them, they send up signals asking for attention. And if we ignore them long enough, they find other ways to get our attention -- we may find ourselves dreaming about something over and over again, or acting in ways that do not seem like us, or any number of other things, including physical symptoms.

And all this because we did not listen when our pain asked us to stop for a moment and look within, to allow the feelings to come to the surface and be released. This is often the message our pain is sending -- pay attention, feel our feelings, and let them go.


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