The Mind-Body Approach To Healing Pain
Pain can teach us so much about ourselves. It really has been one of my greatest teachers throughout my life. And most people experience some type of pain, or discomfort everyday whether it is emotional, or physical. Life Coach and inspirational speaker Mastin Kipp says, “Trauma is any experience, or threat, disconnection, isolation or immobilization that results in physical/emotional injuries that dysregulate the optimal functioning of one’s body, emotions, brain, spirit, or health.” Basically, trauma can be cause by anything that causes disconnection from your power and dissociates you from your body. Pain is always caused by a trauma we have experienced in life. Pain is also what can motivate someone to start their healing journey as they search and become curious about the “why” of their pain. For some it is quite obvious as to why we are in pain, for others not so much. I am always curious as to why my body hurts, or why someone cannot recover from chronic issues in their body and/or psyche.
Pain encompasses our entire human experience and has us believe we are too sick, not good enough, not well enough, don’t have the energy to be in the world, or to create the life we want and desire. Pain is a distraction and for a very good reason, it hurts and we don’t like to hurt because it just really doesn’t feel good. So we turn to things to numb our pain and end up in a negative feedback loop that is lodged in the brain. We become consumed by discomfort and some of us even become addicted to our psychological and emotional pain. We begin to over identify with this part of us who is the victim. If can dig into the deepest parts of who we are and begin the search into the meaning of our pain, we might find some aspects of ourselves that are in need of healing.
The emotional aspect, the mind body connection, and how dis-ease is created in the body has always been fascinating to me. I have come to learn, by way of my studies of somatic psychology, when emotions are suppressed, the physical body will simultaneously express these emotions at the same time. How emotions can show up in the body are contraction, hyperarousal, muscle tension, and pain. Emotions are also expressed as anxiety, depression, panic attacks, TMJ, digestive issues, chronic neck pain, headaches, migraines, hypervigilance, and sleep disorders. Our energy body also becomes very dense and we feel stuck in the way we relate to the world we live in and are unable to connect with our creativity and purpose.
Over a decade ago, in my early 30’s, I decided to go back to school and study psychology. I wanted to work with people who were dealing with addiction due to trauma. It was a very interesting time in my life as I was really trying to change my career from massage therapy into deeper healing work with people. My desire was to no longer be a band-aide for someone’s physical pain, but to get to the root of a person’s pain and help them truly heal. At this point, I had been studying shamanism and yoga for a few years and had no idea this was the work I was already learning, but that is a story for another time. I was suffering constantly with my own bouts of depression, anxiety, and feelings of unworthiness. I felt lost and overwhelmed with my decision to go back to school and was drinking heavily…. Again. I was stuck in a cycle, a negative feedback loop in my brain. My mind was stuck in a rut and I couldn’t pull myself out. I tend to be someone who is positive for others, but my self talk at that time was awful. So all I could see was literally that life was difficult and I really didn’t know why.
A professor of mine, who was a devout Buddhist and avid meditator, would allow us to consult with him about life and such after hours. I was emotionally hurting so bad that even therapy wasn’t helping at that point. I had blown through so much internal healing and healing at the soul level that my body was not able to integrate all that was healing at the rate I was moving through everything. This left me feeling more lost, confused, and overwhelmed than grounded and whole. So, I would visit my professor frequently and share the overwhelm, distress, and sadness I was experiencing hoping for some guidance. One day he stopped me mid sentence while I was talking and said, “I’m curious why you cause yourself so much suffering?”. I was baffled by this question and it was a question only I could answer. How could I be causing myself suffering, I wondered? I was very confused. A few months later I was accepted into the Contemplative Psychology Program at Naropa University in Boulder, CO. A program that was basically focused on Buddhism from a psychological perspective and everything began to make sense. I continued into a cycle of emotional, physical, and psychological pain as I worked through layer after layer of my traumatic past, I finally realized what my professor meant. We have a choice and when we allow our mind to continually run the show, we create suffering. According to Buddhist thought, all of life is suffering. Pretty depressing right? Except this is true because we are humans and we have this brilliant mind that overthinks and over processes EVERYTHING. It lives in the past and worries about a future that has not even happened yet. So yea, all of life is suffering…. If we want it to be!
Some pain is literally a choice. Yes, you read that right, pain is a choice, depending on the type of pain. Even physical pain and illness, trust me I know. I know very well and I have been in “chronic” pain due to “chronic” health issues most of my life. From depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts to digestive issues, lyme disease, almost debilitating neck pain, and everything else that goes along with lyme disease. And you know what I did to help ease all of this pain? I did what most people do. I drank, heavily. I drank when I wasn’t supposed to drink thinking it was helping and in fact, it was not. I only got worse and more depressed because alcohol is a depressant and very inflammatory. Some people choose pills, maryjane, sex, exercise, or anything else to numb themselves of distress and pain. My drug of choice has always been alcohol. What if we were able to with our pain without trying to fix it, even for just 5 minutes? What is I asked you to sit with your pain and listen to what it has to tell you?
I know you might not agree, but people heal from extremely complex illnesses all of the time. Anita Moorjani, author of Dying To Be Me, tells her story of how she healed from cancer and actually had a near death experience where she was shown how she needed to heal. She went into spontaneous remission and was cancer free after her near death experience. Anita now travels the world telling others about this experience and inspiring and empowering people on their healing journey. You can actually google people who have cured themselves from cancer, brain cancer, lyme disease, etc. and find tons of these stories. Reading about people who have healed helps to motivate and move us into inspired action. I am not saying the path to healing out pain is easy, but it can be worth looking into the emotional aspects of our illnesses to gain further insight into how there are layers to dis-ease and psychological distress.
Let’s dive deeper into this shall we? When we are in pain, all we are focused on is the pain because, well, it hurts. It hurts and it is all we can think about. When we are in emotional pain we are depressed, suicidal, anxious, develop sleep disorders, and really have no drive to do anything. Life seems unbearable, so we just kinda give up at life and numb ourselves. It literally feels as if there is no reason to be here, on this planet, if all we are going to be is depressed and sad. We might think, what’s the point, what’s my purpose if I am always in pain? How will I ever get better? Maybe a healthcare professional gives you a diagnosis, so then you attach to the diagnosis and maybe they even said you will have to be on pills the rest of your life, or there is no hope for someone like you. There is no cure. And this spirals you even further into your pain and feelings of hopelessness.
Pain distracts us from life, from our life force. It is depleting and drains our energy because it is all we can focus on. When I was in my professor’s office and he asked me that question, he could see just that. He could see how I was literally driving myself into the ground by overthinking and worrying. I learned later when we have a traumatized brain, or a brain wired a certain way, or a brain that is hyper-aroused due to PTSD, abuse, neglect, mirroring a parents worried nature, etc. all the brain knows are those patterns. So our brains are taught early on how to respond in a certain way to the world we live in and how we relate to this world. And it is not your fault and the good news is, you can change your brain.
So how do we change the brain and these patterns? Our brain is highly maliable and we are able to create new neural pathways and change the way we think and the way we are in the world. How? Through meditation and actually feeling in our body new and positive emotions. Positive affirmations are amazing, but we have to FEEL an affirmation in order for it to work. I can tell you right now, when you are depressed and anxious and you look at an affirmation that says “I love my life and everything works for me”, all you want to do is say fuck off! I hate my life and I am so not feeling that. So how do you do this? How do you feel that you actually do love your life when you feel so lost and down? You go back to a good memory that feels good in your body. I know…. It can be really difficult when you are in this painful place to even think of a good memory. I know! Trust me, I know! But there is one in there. Maybe a time when you were with a friend rollerskating and a cute guy/girl/person started flirting with you and you felt so warm and fuzzy and giggly. Or maybe it is a memory of your safe place out in nature you would visit as a child. Remembering the smells, the way your body felt, how everything was so bright and beautiful and actually going back to that place in your mind and recreating every bit of that memory in your body. The mind does not know the difference between imagination and reality, so it is all about re-creating a positive emotion throughout your body to create new neural pathways in your brain. Another way to start changing your brain and body and reprogramming yourself is by catching your thoughts when they go into pain mode. Notice when you begin thinking negative thoughts, or focusing on the pain in your body and find something in your environment that is beautiful. Take a walk and look at the flowers outside, listen to children laughing and playing, or stare at the blue sky.
Another route to healing from any type of trauma is to work with someone who can help you connect with the root cause of why you are in so much distress. When I was first diagnosed with lyme disease I was at another very low point in my life. I had finished college and was in my late 30’s. I had a family member who had been struggling with addiction and was always on the brink of dying, my drinking was out of control, I never felt good about myself, I lived in a place that did not feel safe and nothing ever went right, was displaced by a flash flood and had to move 5 times in one year, my dog almost died, and I could go on and on. Simply put, I was deeply depressed and never felt good. I knew when I got that diagnosis that it was all about me needing to really love and appreciate myself. I needed to get better emotionally and spiritually and I needed to truly know that I was good enough to even just be alive. Even after YEARS of healing work and learning healing modalities, I was hurting. My emotional pain was so overwhelming that friends broke up with me because I was depressed and not handling life very well and I literally was at a cross roads where it was life or death. Do I believe I manifested my illness? No, but I do believe my emotional state depleted me so much, my thoughts overwhelmed my system, and that little girl inside was really screaming at me to do something or else I was going to die. Maybe that is manifestation, but I am really hesitant to program manifesting illness into other people’s thoughts. I believe our behaviors, thoughts, and emotional states all contribute to dis-ease. Not from the disease, but from my own suffering did I create an environment for dis-ease to be created. I knew I would take my life if I didn’t heal and change my internal world. And that was the beginning of another road of learning and growing and healing.
Finding healing practitioner’s you feel safe with that are somatic-based and trauma informed is very important. Practitioner’s skilled in the art of embodiment therapies (mind-body therapy), as well as energy healing and soul mending, work with the WHOLE person. Such holistic practitioner’s, like myself, work from the inside out, from the bottom to the top. Bottom up healing, is how we describe the work of somatic therapy, is working from the body into the mind, not working with the mind first like most talk therapies. Our body carries so much wisdom and is constantly giving us feedback. I love talk therapy, but I have learned we need healing on all levels to take place in order to come home to ourselves and heal our pain. The body gives us so much information, we just have to stay curious. So back to this curiosity that I mentioned before.
When we start to become curious about our pain (emotional or physical), or illness, we start to become our own type of investigator, an investigator of our own lives. We start to ask deeper questions about ourselves, our patterns, our thoughts. Our awareness begins to shift and we start to connect the dots of our life. When we have “chronic” neck pain, we start to ask why. Why does my neck always hurt? Was it just the injuries I sustained in a car accident, or was it because I wasn’t allowed to talk and use my voice as a kid? Was I told to be quiet and never asked what I was feeling, so had to stuff it away? This is what we tap into with energy medicine and shamanic healing. We get to the root and work to clear the energy of an experience and then we work with the patterning in the brain to heal both physically and at the soul level.
With a “chronic” illness, or big diagnosis like cancer, we start to ask why? Not so much why is this happening to me, but why is my body sick? What emotions, or traumas have I not healed from entirely? Who have I not forgiven and what grief or anger have I not processed? What experiences deeply impacted me and were never fully processed? There is a beautiful documentary called Making The Breath Visible about the life of dance therapist Anna Halprin. Part of the film touches on her experience of releasing emotional pain after being diagnosed with cancer. By using her knowledge of dance and the body and giving herself space to process and release emotions by yelling and expressing repressed anger and sadness using any modality that came through her movement, she literally healed herself. The body tells all. And how we release trauma in the body is through movement and movement could be with the breath, actually moving the body, using our voice to move emotions OUT, and expressing what needs to be expressed. Some people use art and music. Some people dance and others just flat out lock themselves in a room and just let it out. The point here is that any experience we have that is detrimental to our entire body’s well being needs to be fully processed in whatever way resonates with you.
Again, this is what we are able to gain more insight into when we do deep healing work together. Somatic experiencing is an amazing modality to fully process emotions that are stuck in the body as well as reconnecting with the body. We tap into the feelings that arise, the emotions, and when a memory springs forward, we touch into it and come back out. This is called titration. We gradually allow the body to process the event, experience, and emotions at a slower pace so your entire body & mind can process and integrate.
When we are caught up in pain, we are not living our fullest potential. We are stuck in fight, flight, or freeze and for very good reason. Sometimes being stuck in these patterns are what saved us and kept us safe. It is the being stuck in that space, the trauma, when we no longer need to be that keeps us from stepping back into our original medicine and offering our gifts to the world. Our original medicine is all of our gifts we brought into the world with us when we were born that no one else carries. It is unique to us and no one else in the world is like you and carries your original medicine. When we heal our trauma and our pain, we remember who we are and all of our gifts. When you are trying to heal, be curious. Dig deeper and try not to just put a band-aide on your pain with pills and checking out. Can you be with the pain? Can you sit with the discomfort and ask it what is needing your attention. Remain curious and you will heal. Build a team of practitioner’s to support you on your healing journey. And most of all, try to enjoy the learning curve and have fun!
