Pain is one of the main reasons anyone reaches out my way. In particular pain that won’t go away or just keeps coming back. Somewhere along the way I became the guy in the corner of the village that tends to helps with those sorts of things.
So if pain is one of the main reasons people work with me, what exactly do I mean when I say “Your pain isn’t a problem”?
Well, as I meet folks and get to know their story, what they are experiencing and what their goals may be in working together, one big red flag that I sometimes hear said is;
“I just want to be pain free”.
That’s a problem.
Why?
Because not only is that never going to happen until existence ends for that person, but also that truly would not serve them.
You see pain is a request from your body.
It is a request for you to make a change, and often for you to do something very specific.
It is no different than feeling hungry, or feeling tired.
Hunger is there to move you to eat.
With time you can learn to interpret what the specifics of that hunger may be, what food tends to serve you best, but by and large feeling hungry just means you gotta through something down the hatch.
Fatigue and feeling tired is there to move you to rest, to sleep, and preferably before you collapse.
If you try to resist it to any degree it will always eventually end in you passing out anyway.
So if you can’t beat it, best to partner with it.
If you get on a good meal schedule, you won’t experience raging hunger, and you will have the chance to listen to what hunger you do experience.
If you get on a good sleep schedule, you won’t experience raging fatigue, and you will have a chance to listen to what “feeling tired” is telling you.
With bodily pain, the schedule that one can use is exercise. In all its many forms, reaches and flavors. What exactly is it that exercise does for pain?
Simple; it gives the body what it wants.
Bodily pain has to be interpreted, and it pays to learn to both speak its language and how give the body what it’s asking for.
It has to become linked to an activity, movement, position, or manerism, and the pain then seen as just an alarm system built to help keep your car on the road and running well.
Every engine needs to turn off at the end of every day, but every engine also needs to at least be driven around the block each and every day as well.
The greater the capacity your exercise routine creates and maintains, the sooner the alarm system will go off to let you know when some sort of maintenance may be needed.
The more variety to the activity you take on in exercise then the greater freedom you both have and are familiar with, and the many more ways your “sensors” can listen to itself.
Often times the all the sensors will tell you is if you need to put a little air in the tires, or check to make sure a door is shut or the headlights left on. And that isn’t anything you can’t learn to do yourself.
So the question I have to ask these folks is;
“Pain free doing what?”
Once you know what you want to do with your body, then you can go about learning how to do it.
You can build a capacity that can be built around that manner of doing that thing, with the pain as the guide to keep you on the road.
So listen to what your body is asking you to do.
Be it eat, rest, or move, sit, or stand in a certain way.
I hope you are comfortable, able and well.