"I am curious as to what you thoughts are about chronic pain. It seems to me that we all suffer it to some degree but for some it begins to limit their lives. In our work we see the physical and energetic, but I have always thought that the root cause may be in the spiritual.
If you were to coach someone with chronic pain would you have a place to start?, could you deal with serious PTSD (think war vets and war type trauma)?"
I received this question via email this morning and thought it was a great question to discuss here on my blog.
Indeed we all have pain and for some it is chronic and debilitating. I know people who are in pain every day of their lives. Many carry on as best they can but usually find themselves exhausted most of the time which I can certain understand just from getting normal headaches now and then and experiencing how tired I get when they hang around even for a few hours.
My sense is very much like the questioner's, that the root of it all is beyond the physical and in some ways even beyond what you might call the personal. You could call it spiritual but I prefer to call it Life expressing through and as creation of which we are one form of expression. In some ways we are no different than any other form of life in that you will find various 'aberrations' in anything that grows. I'm looking at the fabulous Mayday tree just outside my office window which has developed some kind of growth on some of its limbs this year. I'm sure we could find out what it is and there would be some technical reason for it but there it is, it wasn't there last year so it's something different which we generally call disease or wrong somehow. Whatever the apparent cause of the difference I strongly suspect that Life is behind it and that it's exactly as it should be. That doesn't mean we don't do anything about it, it just means that's the way it is right now and I don't have to worry about it or fight it or make it bad, I just need to do the next indicated thing, to borrow from our friends at AA, which is much easier to see if I'm not all tied up in knots about it.
So how does this apply to chronic pain or PTSD? As with the tree, the less I resist what is going on the more likely I'll see what to do about it. Unlike with the tree we have a tendency to spend a lot of time struggling with questions like 'Why is this happening to me?' or 'Who or what is to blame for this?' instead of accepting what has happened and opening to what we need to do about it now. This type of question doesn't tend to move us toward resolution but rather keeps us stuck and suffering.
For people with chronic pain or PTSD the first step I would likely take after getting some background information is to guide the client gently back toward the pain or trauma instead of away from it. This is much the same as what massage therapists do in the physical. As they focused on the area of the body where the pain or tension was experienced, I would be compassionately present to it along with them. I suspect one of the reasons that pain gets worse or doesn't go away is that we want to get rid of it instead of listening to it, giving it gentle attention (as opposed to judgmental attention) and embracing it as part of life experience. No matter how it got here it's mine now so not much point in dwelling on the idea that it shouldn't be this way; who made that up anyway? With PTSD and the more chronic symptoms I would spend a lot more time on this step than I would with less traumatic experiences. It seems to me that PTSD is more likely to develop where the person who's experienced the trauma didn't have any idea how to deal with the feelings and confusion following the traumatic event(s) so it ended up deeply buried in the body and psyche, which are really one thing, not separate in any way.
Pain, whether physical or non-physical, is always speaking to us, calling our attention to something we need to be aware of. Pain is not the bad guy, it's the messenger and our tendency is to shoot the messenger and miss out on the message so what's it going to do then? Keep working to get our attention, isn't it? So the cycle is born, more pain, more resistance, creating more pain, more resistance and round and round we go. We usually want some kind of pill or surgery to end the pain which is fine if that is what a person does as long as time is taken to get the message somewhere along the line. But I digress (I could write a book about this and still only touch the tip of the iceberg).
Once peace is made with the pain/trauma, at least to some degree, then it would be time to start gently (and I stress gently throughout this process) inquiring into what beliefs and assumptions might be wrapped up in the pain. This is an essential step in freeing ourselves from the cycle of suffering because it is what keeps bringing up the pain long after the painful events may have taken place. This is where the resistance and the struggle come from. If we didn't have beliefs that created the resistance we would simply accept what happened and move on. This is rarely the case however and so we need to take the time to uncover the beliefs and assumptions tied in with the pain so that we can see them for what they are, memories and decisions made a very long time ago in order to fill in the gap of what we didn't understand. This is true for all of us whether we are experiencing chronic pain or not. We needed to do that in order to survive at some point, the problem is we end up living out of those decisions long after they've served their purpose which usually had something to do with survival in some form. In this step we take the time to check in to the validity of the belief at this point in life and start moving toward the possibility that they've been mistaken about the meaning they've given events. This step begins the process of releasing the grip limiting or painful beliefs have had on the person so that they can entertain other possibilities.
As always in this work, there is then the invitation to open to wonder around what life would be like without those limiting or painful beliefs and assumptions.
Around chronic pain I would like to add a caveat of sorts; there is no guarantee whatsoever that the pain will simply go away if you do enough work. For whatever reason (back to Life expressing in each of us in its own unique way) some people experience pain much of their lives even when they do lots of physical/emotional/spiritual work. I don't know why and neither does anyone else for that matter. We tend to want to fill in the gap of knowledge with our opinions about what is going on but really, we don't know. So much of this work is about making peace with exactly that, not knowing. I have come to the place of trusting the Universe to express in and through me and everyone else exactly as is meant to be; so if there's something for me to know, I will; if it is not to be then so be it. The same with pain, if it is meant to move on it will and if not then so be it and all we can do is make peace with that. You will find in the lives of many great teachers some kind of chronic pain or disease. They just don't define themselves by it and neither do we need to. The Liberation Process is actually designed to bring peace to what is, to allow the not knowing and free us from identity with beliefs and meanings we've assumed were the truth. If, when and how that happens is up to Source, we can only do what we are guided to do and that is what is right for each one of us.
As long as this response has been it really is only a snapshot, a possibility of how I would coach someone with chronic pain or PTSD. There may be more questions than answers here which is ok too. I'm happy to keep the discussion going or let it go.
Thanks for asking!
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