We have a very controversial relationship with pain: most of us want nothing more than to eradicate it at first appearance. As a massage therapist I work with pain all the time and observe the different reactions to it.
When my children were young I went to great lengths to educate them on the nature of pain to teach them how to deal with it. I think this sort of teaching would be essential for most of us as we have forgotten how to address it.
Pain is not your enemy.
Pain is not there to ruin your life; it has no agenda to stop you from living well. Pain is nothing more than a signal from your body that something is not right and it needs your attention. When something starts going wrong inside, the body decides to start up a conversation with you, and the language used is called pain. Its sole purpose is to draw your attention to a specific area.
There is a rare disease called CIP (Congenital insensitivity to pain) where a person cannot feel any physical pain. Sounds like an absolute dream, right? Not so much. It counts as an extremely dangerous condition.
Pain is vital for survival. It helps us noticing injuries and diseases. Imagine touching a hot iron and not feeling it. Or breaking a bone without ever realizing. How can you even draw a nice bath safely without being able to feel the temperature?
So pain has a vital role but it also has a bad rep for it. We get distressed and our instinctive first response to it is to reach for painkillers. Hell, even doctors’ first response is to prescribe painkillers. But this kneejerk reaction simply masks the signals the body so desperately wants to send us, leaving it no other option than to increase the signal over time.
I’m not advocating living in pain or ditching the pills; I just think there are healthier first responses to it. Stopping for a moment and observing what is happening inside of us before reaching for the painkillers is a great start.
At times pain has a tendency of getting out of hand. A lot of people live with acute pain, often where even pills cease to work. You can argue the reason behind it, I think there are many answers as to the “why” of it, ranging from emotional distress to the body’s inability to forget how NOT to produce that same pain every day (muscle memory is a nightmare at times). With the increasing number of conditions that seem rooted in just producing unexplained pain, a lot of research goes into how to deal with it. And the answer always seems to come back to mindfulness: breathing, meditation, awareness.
I have experienced stubborn pain disappearing almost instantly with energy work; I have once entered into a certain meditative state and within 10 minutes 90% of my acute lower back pain vanished for weeks. I have watched it move around on people’s bodies as I was working on them like a small frightened animal escaping capture. Pain is a strange organic thing, it goes way beyond the physical realm, which is why viewing it as a pure physical phenomena is a flawed approach that tends to fail us.
So when in pain, maybe try alternative methods first. Icing it, using essential oils, energy work, a clean diet, and of course a massage are all excellent ways of dealing with it.