Pain

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A friend of mine came down very suddenly with Rheumatoid Arthritis last year. Not surprisingly she's been finding it hard to go from being average healthy to living with chronic pain. She posed a question to myself and her other internet friends - How do you cope with ongoing pain?

I don't think there's any one right answer, but here's my own thoughts on the topic. ..

I think I've known, but fought, the answer for a long time. It's both simple and very difficult. I think you surrender.

Not give up - just surrender.

Years ago (decades actually) I read about this in a magazine, but I didn't understand then. It was an article written by a man who had been in a Russian prison/work camp. He explained that the inmates and himself found a way to manage pain (apparently the camp dealt in torture as well as hard labour and deprivation). They managed their pain by learning to love it, he said.

I thought that was just NUTS, but it was such a weird idea that it stuck in my head all this time.

My first real experience of pain was about eleven years ago after my op to have my left ovary removed. I started having terrible lower back and stomach pain if I lay down. I went for all sorts of tests = nothing = doctors sent me home with pain killers. I was so ANGRY. I wanted results and cures, not pain killers! So I did my own research, found a chiropractor who did acupuncture as well, and sorted it out.

That's what I've done my whole life, one way or another I fix things myself. I don't trust others to do it properly and I don't rely on anyone. I have a problem - I get angry - I fix it.

But in my thirties getting angry started to be too tiring. I'm a Leo, we do righteous anger beautifully. Injustice makes us ROAR and fills us with fire, but plain old garden variety anger is different. Long term anger at life just sucks the life out of you and that includes anger at pain. Plus there's another kicker that my mom knew, but I hadn't realised connected to all pain. It's the fact that tension makes pain worse.

My mom has often told the story how she never had pregnancy classes when she was pregnant with me. They were a new idea back then and expensive. My mom asked her friends and family who'd already had children for any advice and one of them told my mom, "Just relax." ...and that's exactly what my mom. In fact she relaxed so much that the nurses even commented on it to the doctor when I was being born. Instead of being a screwed up screaming ball of tension with every contraction my mom was a rag doll that let the pain wash over and through her... and away.
That''s the thing those people in that Russian camp had figured out as well - you tense up and the pain increases. Relaxing might not make it vanish, but it does ease it and it makes it more likely to wash through you and away. It's back to that word I got in my Mayan birth calculator - surrender.

The more you let go and surrender... the easier things become, even pain.

Of course the next step for the Russians was loving their pain. That idea - loving your pain - freaked me out. It still does to a degree. I "get" the logic of loving pain, I understand how surrendering to it cuts the tension that makes it worse, but when I'm in pain for long I just want it to STOP - to GO AWAY.

It's been a while, but from what I remember in that article on the Russians they worked on telling their pain how they loved it for warning their bodies that something was wrong, because pain really is nothing more than a warning system. Our body didn't invent it to make us suffer, it invented it to warn us that something was wrong so that we could fix it. Basically the brain relaying messages like, "You feel extreme pain in your hand? Maybe you should take it off the hotplate?" really fast. Chronic pain is just a smoke alarm that doesn't understand it's in a smoker's lounge. The trick is making your brain understand that the smoke is there to stay so you really don't need the alarm going off 24/7.

Getting angry at the smoke alarm doesn't help anymore than getting angry at chronic pain does. In fact it's not even fair. Pain really is our friend - it only wants to keep us safe. When we fight it we're going against the whole reason it's there in the first place... and I'm beginning to think that that's where the Russians had their breakthrough. They learnt ways to thank pain for warning them and through that they managed to find a way to turn the alarms off, even when the smoke-and-fire situation was real.

But what about the kind of pain that's more subtle and not based on literal things like illness, accidents or being tortured like the Russians.

I'm also beginning to suspect that there's a connection between people who don't like their bodies, or themselves, and auto-immune diseases and/or chronic pain conditions. People who think of their bodies/self as their enemy rather than their friend. How can your body repair itself if you're the type who "beats yourself up" about things? Look at that phrase and really think about it - it implies self-harm at the most fundamental level - our subconscious. Would it be any surprise if a brain constantly told it was the enemy might short it's wiring and set off pain alarms constantly?

I'm still not sure what the "magic key" is that opens the door to setting pain free, but I do know that the first step is to stop fighting it and stop seeing it as the enemy.

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