Pain is Your Friend

Pain is Your Friend

Someone once said to me “Pain is Your Friend.”

I thought they were bonkers.

How can something that can feel so raw, cutting, stabbing or knawing be a friend to anyone?

The fact is, that now, many years later I now know this statement to be true.

There are many amazing and positive things about pain, that we tend to overlook. Pain is in the present, it is in the now. We do not stub our toe and make it bleed and then yelp two days later. When we feel pain it is very much alive and in the now and it connects us to our body, which is a good thing.

Pain is present and it is real. It lets us know we are human and we have feelings.

It is much better to feel pain than to feel nothing at all. To be part of the race of the walking dead is not a pleasant place to be. These people have gone beyond the threshold of pain and who are numb to the world. Maybe if we start to view pain in another light it will start to unfold some answers for us.

Talking of numbness, what happens when we dull our pain with painkillers?

We are basically discrediting the messages that the pain wants to communicate to us.

Remember that every time we take painkillers, we are not only killing the pain in our afflicted parts of our body, we are numbing all of our pain receptors all over our body. We are basically ignoring our body.

We have pain because our body wants to communicate with us.

What other ways does our body have to communicate with us?

Look at where the pain is. Is it the back, shoulders or the neck. These parts of the body are all representative of different aspects of your life. Support, caretaking others or flexibility in life are all messages that we could be trying to tell ourselves. Simply look at what that part of the body does, what is its function and then relate that to your life. This is the message. Backs are support, legs carry us forward in life, arms and hands create, the head thinks. We will either being do too much or too little of that, as life is all about balance.

There are many ways we can connect to our pain and explore the deeper message it is telling us.

The pain will tell us things like we are pushing our bodies too hard, we are doing too much, we are not connecting to our needs enough, we are not getting enough rest, we are rushing around, we are not getting enough nutrients, we are doing something our body does not agree with or it brings harm to, we need to slow down or we are not following our own rules, amongst many other things. Just keep it simple and look for the signs.

If you hurt yourself, then be mindful what you were doing or thinking at that time. This is another message.

The good thing about pain is that it is full of passion and life. We are able to dialogue to the pain and to move beneath it and touch the more pleasant feelings underneath such as joy or enthusiasm. Keep asking yourself what does this mean, what does this mean?

When we suppress our pain then we move it deeper into our bodies and being. Here it will sit and fester if ignored and not listened to. Festering pain can then start to grow and evolve in disease processes and chronic diseases will start to appear. Then we have bigger and more difficult issue or issues to deal with. What starts with a cell, can move to an organ and then to a body system and so the story goes on.

Emotional pain is the same. It is a wakeup call for us to wake up and address whatever our feelings are guiding us to look at, acknowledge and express. Our emotions guide us to things that empower us and things that dis-empower us. It is either good for us or not good for us. Simple.

So start to see your pain as your friend and see what it telling you and what it needs. Your body is your temple and it will never lie to you, so start spending some time and energy honouring that. In the end you might create a good friend in your pain body and you can both work to a better good, of living life, happy, joyful and free.