Body, Mind, Spirit of Pain

Does physical, mental or emotional pain disrupt your life? Do you feel as if you have tried everything, yet still live in constant pain? Do you make daily decisions around thoughts of pain and discomfort? Does your pain seem to make you short with your spouse, irritated with your children or make your usual commute to work simply unbearable? Do you find most of your thoughts based on fear, anger, frustration or sadness?

Pain is an interesting challenge for many of us, and we live with varying degrees of pain. Personally I have lived with pain in my right knee due to a sports injury decades ago and my wife, Dawn, has lived with back pain due to sports as well as an auto accident some years ago. So when we discuss pain, this is not only from our work with clients and/or our education; this is from real life situations. I can share that we are both making strides with our challenges but it is the holistic approach that leads to the significant release of this pain and discomfort.

So what do I mean by a holistic approach? What I am really talking about here is being aware of the physical, mental, emotional, vibrational and/or spirit of your pain.

Most focus solely on the physical pain and unfortunately the focus is on taking some type of drug to reduce the pain. It is important to understand that the symptom of pain is there simply to bring awareness of imbalance in your body on some level. Reducing the pain still leaves the overall imbalance affecting your body on other levels. On the physical level, this could be due to long term wear and tear, an acute injury, long term nutritional deficiencies, or imbalances in how we move. Based on what I know at this point in my life, my journey toward pain started with challenging beliefs, nutritional deficiencies when I was a teenager, followed by an acute injury, which lead to improper bodily movement to compensate for the injury. So with this in mind I learned over the years that from the physical level, I needed to improve my nutritional integrity, build the muscle tissue around my knee, I needed to balance my vertebrae, I had to balance movement within my whole body from the ground up and actually learn how to walk properly again. My gate was so imbalanced when I walked to simply compensate for my pain and discomfort, which was actually contributing to further pain and discomfort.

From the mental and emotional aspect, I can share a story of a man I worked with years ago. This gentleman in his early 30s came into my office in noticeable pain; walking very gingerly. When I ask him what was challenging, he shared that he had an accident at work and he had some disk problems with his back. He shared that at the time of the accident, there was not much pain and that the intense pain he was feeling that day did not start until many days after the accident. This was confusing to me, so I asked him some further questions to understand why the pain intensified so much. He shared that after a few days he starting talking to others with back pain; about surgeries gone bad, about the long term challenges, all of which created some strong mental/emotional unrest. The pain level was truly raised by this mental/emotional response, or the fear that he would have life long challenges. Before we worked through this mental/emotional aspect I asked him to gauge his pain from 0 to 10, 10 being the most pain. Prior to releasing the fear, his pain level was and 8 but after addressing the emotional component he shared that his pain level was only a 2 or 3. Now he was dealing with only the true physical pain but this was much more manageable and he had hope.

The vibrational or spirit of pain is a bit deeper than the emotional. Often this is tied into deep seeded beliefs or domestication that lead to the thoughts and emotions that run our lives. So the big question here is what thoughts are running your life? Do you regularly live with the thoughts of love, compassion, trust, confidence, joy, happiness, forgiveness and/or abundance or are your thoughts dominated by fear, anger, sadness, frustration, guilt, apathy and/or lack. If many of your thoughts are the latter, then this is an understanding of what your subconscious is assisting you in creating in your life. To understand, about 10 – 20% of your life is guided by your conscious thoughts but the other 80 – 90% is truly guided by the subconscious thought patterns. Think about it; how many people do you know that say they are going to lose weight or start working out and have a complete conscious conviction that they will succeed; yet they do not because their subconscious thought patterns are telling them something completely different. So the question you can ask yourself is, “what subconscious thoughts are running my life and how does this apply to the pain I am feeling?”

Please feel free to reply with a post if you have any questions regarding this article and I welcome you comments.