Pain as a Messenger
Pain is a messenger. The body speaks in feelings, and sends the sensations up to the brain to be interpreted. In fact, pain is simply a sensation that the brain interpreted to be painful. All sensations are simply sensations until the brain decides to label them.
The brain decides to label something as painful when it immediately requires your attention. The brain is a fixer, so right away, it begins to try to come up with solutions to help mediate or lessen the pain. Pain is a call to action. Pain is a call to tend to the scrape you just got on your leg, or fast for a bit while the stomach is healing from eating something bad, or to go to the dentist and get your tooth that hurts checked.
We are trained to avoid pain and seek pleasure. We are taught as kids to ‘be careful’ to avoid pain, when pain is truly just another teacher. How would you learn to not jump off cliffs if you never jumped off your bed and bumped your knee? As humans, we learn best through experience, through the feelings in our own bodies. Sometimes, we need to take a risk to understand the consequences or the reward.
Changing our relationship to pain in a way that views it as a crucial message from the body, allows us to strengthen the brain/body connection and helps to build trust within oneself.
If you are a person with chronic knee pain, what do you think the body is telling you? You can start by looking at the part of the body that hurts, in this case, it is the knees. What is the function of the body part? Think physically and energetically. Physically, the knees propel us forward, helping us to walk. They are important for balance and leg flexibility. Energetically, they do the same, meaning that they are important for energetic balance and flexibility (are you mentally flexible/able to understand new perspectives and grow out of old ones?). The knees are the forward energetic motion in life — meaning do you feel that you are growing and taking necessary steps toward your goals as a person? All pain can be examined in this way to deeper understand what your body is trying to tell you.
If you are a woman with chronic bad menstrual pain, your feminine energy is trying to speak to you — do you need more rest or more exercise? Do you need to honor your cycle and rest before the period, while scheduling busy days near the middle of your cycle? Do you need a chance to sit with yourself and let go? All pain can be understood, and thus mediated.
When we chronically avoid our pain and try to suppress it (with things like Advil/Tylenol) we are weakening our ability to listen to the body. Advil and painkillers dampen the body’s natural response to pain. This teaches the body not to respond to pain, which makes less pain more painful. Constant suppression of the pain response weakens the body’s ability to respond, creating a negative feedback cycle of more suppression and more pain. My advice? Be brave and feel the pain, listen to what it is telling you and then make the appropriate lifestyle adjustments that create lasting change. Remember, pain is a call to action, and the right action will take the pain away. Even if that action is to rest more.
The more we listen to our bodies, the more easily we will understand them, and thus be able to take better care of them.
