Your chronic pain may be more dynamic than you realize

If you suffer from long-term chronic pain, it may seem constant, unchanging and unmoving. You may worry that it won’t ever go away, that it is unresponsive to any kind of intervention. This kind of pain feels solid and it makes us feel hopeless. What if there was a way to think about your pain differently?

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In order to find a doorway into a new experience with your pain, make some space each day to consciously sit with it. I understand that to function, you may need to compartmentalize your pain and effectively put it to the side of your experience. That’s why it’s important to carve out a few minutes to be with it, to allow it to be as it is and meet it.

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 When you sit with your pain, you might notice that rather than it being completely immovable and solid, there is some subtlety there, some dynamism. Maybe the pain lessens after a hot shower or sitting in the bright sunshine, which means there are some cracks in pain’s overarching veneer.

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Pain can be dynamic. If it were totally solid, immovable, it wouldn’t be affected by anything at all. Most pain changes, even in small ways, by things outside of you. Breathe into pain, sit with it, bring your experience of it back from of its compartmentalization into your awareness, bring it back into your energy body to try to understand it. It is part of your job of healing to get to know your pain better. What is its message?

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Can you take a few moments everyday to sit and breathe into whatever is hurting you – physical or emotional – and really feel it? Is it making you sad? Angry? Hopeless? When you bear witness to the pain your body, when you bring it to that new doorway of experience, your pain may feel just a bit less solid than it did before. It’s one way to work with chronic pain.