Give Thanks for Pain? You're Kidding

A question often arises in response to my book, What a Body Knows: What if my body is wrong? It isn't doing what I want it to do--it hurts! Where is the wisdom in that?

While I have addressed the issue indirectly in other blogs (see below), it is time to address it head on. At the heart of the matter is the question of pain: what it is, how we sense it, and how we respond to it.

Pain, together with pleasure, comprise the primary feedback available to our thinking selves about how well the movements we are making in the world are making us.

My aim (or one of them) in writing What a Body Knows was to shift our experience of pain along (at least) four registers, in each case, moving from a mind over body perspective to one that affirms our sensations of pain as resources guiding us along the path of our own unique bodily becoming.

1) Part/ Whole: When we hurt, our mind over body tendency is to identify the pain with one part of ourselves, isolate that part from the rest, and work to make "it" go away. Whether our head hurts, our stomach cramps, our back aches, our hips creak, our heart pines, or our energies flag, we either try to ignore our sensations, or we become obsessed with fixing them. Pain is the problem. "I" must fix "it."

However, when we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement--the movement of creating and becoming patterns of sensation and response (as described in What a Body Knows)--we realize that any manifestation of pain in one part of ourselves always expresses a movement pattern that engages every moment of ourselves, physical to spiritual. A part is part of a whole, and that whole is what is hurting.

The implications are several. Because any pain involves a whole person, any healing must also engage the whole person. Any effective response will involve integrating the part into the whole, understanding the connections among person parts, and discerning as best we can how the movements we are making are creating this pain as a guide to move differently than we are now.

2) New/ Old: When something begins to bother us, we also tend to think of the pain or illness or injury as new--that is, as a departure from our otherwise usual or normal healthy state. Most pain feels accidental. It comes upon us as a surprise that we were not expecting. We experience it as an obstacle to our forward motion.

However, once we understand our bodily selves as movement, we realize that by the time we feel a part of ourselves as pain, the whole-body patterns that that pain is expressing have already been in play for a while and at many levels of our existence. Our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and others, the movements we make as we go about our usual activities, our hopes and fears, as well as our general outlook on the world, are all, to greater and lesser extents, bound up in the pain.

The implication here is that healing involves recreating patterns of sensation and response that have been at work for a long time, slowly creating a situation where we feel a particular point of pain. Healing takes time.

3) Read/ Felt: Further, when people acknowledge the importance of "listening" to their feelings of discomfort, they often talk about reading "the" body or listening to "the" body, as if there is an "I" that exists above and apart from the body who can see it, know it, and fix it.

However, the kind of wisdom that our bodily selves have is not a formula or a schema that "we" can read and then impose upon our bodies, so as to make them do what we want to do, and stop hurting.

The kind of wisdom our bodily selves are is an ability to sense impulses guiding us to move in ways that will coordinate our pleasure, our health, and our well being. This is who we humans are--this impulse to connect with whatever will support us in becoming who we are. We can and must connect with other people, with elements, with our own bodily selves, with ideas, activities, and cultural forms in order to unfold our skills and abilities.

In every case, as we connect in life-enabling ways, we learn something more about how to move in ways that will connect us more effectively with what nourishes our well-being. This is what pain teaches us: not how to deal with it, and not to obsess over it, but how to discern and move with whatever impulse to connect it represents.

Pain is a desire to be free from it. Yet unless we allow ourselves to welcome it as offering us vital information about our selves and situation, we will not fully grasp that desire.

Pain is not holding us back. It is calling us to be free from whatever is holding us back.

4) Responsible/ Participating: Where I am moving with this line of thought is far from the all-too-common self-help theme: you can heal yourself. People seem to think that once they acknowledge their pain and admit that their sensations have something to teach them, then any pain they feel is their fault. They are responsible for healing themselves. When the pain persists, self-judgment can weigh heavily.

Once we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement, however, we realize that pain is not our fault, that "we" are not responsible for our pain, and that "we" cannot heal ourselves. Rather, healing is who we are: it is an ever-ongoing process in which our bodily selves are ever and forever active. In this process, our pain is helping us appreciate how and where our healing energies have more potential for creating us anew. What that "we" can do is learn how to align our mental energies with the trajectories of healing already at work in our bodily selves.

The question then is this: how can we participate in our healing as consciously as possible?

What a Body Knows offers a response: if we cultivate a sensory awareness of how our movements are making us, we have what we need to begin to discern the wisdom in feelings of disease, discomfort, dissatisfaction, and depression.

It is not just a matter of allowing ourselves to feel what we are feeling, though such mindfulness is an important first step. Nor is it a matter of identifying the patterns of mental, emotional, and physical movement that are knotting us. What is most important is being able to open a space in ourselves where we can find in our sensations our core desires, our impulses to connect, and begin to move with them, in ways that do not recreate the pain that troubles us.

Every pain is a potential for pleasure that is yet to unfold.

For more blogs on this topic:
1. about the seemingly pointless pain of the flue: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/201008/what-do-you-do-the-flu
2. about the limits of "listening" to your body
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/200909/the-limits-listening-your-body