By Angela Dunning
None of us want to be in pain, emotionally or physically. Quite naturally we do all we can to avoid it or when we do have pain, we try to immediately medicate it away. This has become our way of relating to both our physical bodies and our emotions. We want to just feel good, happy and healthy all of the time. This is, of course, understandable as pain is unpleasant; it hurts!
It slows us down; sometimes to the point of stopping us in our normal daily life altogether.
When in chronic pain, or through a sudden accident or illness we find that our normal daily life is utterly disrupted. We might break a limb and suddenly have to take time off work, be home-bound, depending on others which we might find incredibly difficult. If we are striving for a more conscious life we might dive into this experience and explore all of our feelings and thoughts, resistances and anxieties about being suddenly out of our normal, busy routine and instead, plunged into an immediate and intimate relationship with our body, which we normally over-work and take for granted. But, it’s easy to also miss this as the opportunity it could be, seeking only to recover as soon as possible so that we may resume our usual hectic externally-driven lifestyle once more, glad to be out of pain and back to full health.
I came across this quote recently by philosopher Gerard Heard: “Pain is excess energy crying out for release.” This really struck a chord with me as I have been suffering from physical pain for much of the past two decades, primarily in my back and more recently my pelvis, and I have always had an inkling that there is an underlying psychological/psychic reason for my pain. That it was somehow trying to illuminate my core and chronic struggle in this lifetime to become and live who I really am, including all of my true potentials. I suspect this because I know I have kept myself small and safe for most of my life, only daring to grow from time to time and I have long suspected, especially since having long-term back pain, that I do not fully inhabit my true height and power. I have kept myself both physically and metaphorically smaller than I actually am capable of being.
I have been studying the relationship between the body and the mind/psyche for some time now, and I’m slowly learning how this intimate and complex relationship plays out in our lives. And, energy seems to be the central element of both as well as the dynamic between these two parts of ourselves. So, if I have been curtailing my energy, which I know I do, then it makes sense that that energy has to try to find a release somehow, and physical pain could well be the route my psyche has chosen. It has to come out somehow…
Being in pain is a strange experience and we all relate to this most intimate experience with ourselves in different ways. Many of us fall into line with how society tells us to deal with pain by taking ‘pain-killers’, or having other body-based treatments to alleviate physical pain. However, if we stick with Heard’s perspective for a moment, we can see how utterly life-destroying and cruel it is to try to ‘kill’ our pain if the pain is indeed excess energy trying to find expression and release. We’re literally removing or killing our own life-force energy!
Others, on the other hand, succumb to their pain and wallow in the attention it brings, allowing them to regress back to childhood when everyone around us took care of us and we were absolved of all responsibility. I know people like
this and indeed, at times I too have fallen into this somewhat comforting approach to dealing with pain. We can use our pain as an excuse to further keep ourselves out of life; in our comfort zone and refuse the call to grow through consciously suffering and thus, developing.
The alternative to either of these common routes is to turn towards our pain. To learn to relate to it and to ask of it what it really wants of us. To stay present with our pain, breathing into the contracted part of our body and allowing ourselves to consciously suffer so that we may understand our whole being and our life’s particularly trajectory more intimately. Instead of refusing or denying our pain, to embrace it as an integral part of our individual journey. To let our body and its expressions speak to us. And to open our eyes to the metaphorical and symbolic wisdom our body is trying to impart to us. As I shared in my own experience, we could instead, explore what our body is really trying to help us with, and what our core journey is in this life that we are resisting but is our destiny to experience.
We might discover that our pain is unexpressed grief, sadness, loss, or it might be rage turned inwards, or unknown joy and pleasure just dying to be experienced if we would only let go at last…
I’ve found that turning towards my pain and learning to meet my body in such an intimate way can lead to so much self-discovery and insight about both my own struggles and that of others. It’s also enabled me to deepen my ability to empathize with other people and animals and to extend more compassion to myself and others having gone through the fires of physical pain so often and for so much of my life. Since inhabiting my own vulnerability, limitations, and struggles through my pain more consciously, I am able to understand why others suffer too and find ways to gently support them through their own experiences.
Ultimately, I can now see that pain has its own intrinsic purpose and value, if we would only just listen, we might finally discover what this means for our own journey in terms of releasing our vital energy, so that we CAN begin to live the fullest sense of who we truly are in this lifetime.
