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Suppose that you work in front of a computer screen for many hours each day. You like your work, and you enjoy doing a good job and getting recognition for it. After two, or five, or ten years, you discover that you are developing chronic lower back pain. You go to the doctor or the chiropractor and the analgesics and adjustments help for a while, but the condition persists. Soon you can't concentrate on your work very well, you become grouchy with co-workers and companions, you can't do gardening which you love, you can't lift up and hug your kids which you love even more, and most days you don't feel like getting out of bed.
Most likely, you had been sitting for many years in a way that put stress on your lower back but you didn't notice since your focus was conceptual: deadlines, judgments about your own performance, expectations from others that kept you thinking even after work and into the night. You imagined yourself as a social player in a larger organization but you could not feel your body as sedentary and immobile most of the time.
Most people notice pain once it begins, the body's wake-up call to pay attention to itself and re-activate the body sense. Hopefully it is not too late to use relatively simple self-awareness remedies like adjusting posture, standing up and stretching from time to time, going to the gym to cleanse the body of toxins, getting a massage, or meditating to clear the mind of compelling thoughts.
If you continue to ignore the pain, however, you may develop tissue damage like tendonitis, or loss of cartilage, or bone compression in the vertebra, or a pinched nerve. Your body was under stress the whole time and you did not become aware of that until it had progressed into the stage of depleting your body's resources to cope with it: literally destroying cells that maintain your ability to function.
Paradoxically, even though pain is meant to be a wake-up call, it is often treated like an unwelcome guest. All we want to do is get away from it or to have that guest leave as soon as possible. It may not seem like it at the time, but pain exists in our bodies as a way of getting our attention back to ourselves. Pain is one of the pathways that our body sense uses to spontaneously and automatically remind us to notice a physical or emotional threat we may have been avoiding.
This leads to a paradox. The only way out of the suffering is to jump back into it. The only way to ease the pain and at the same time to heal the body is to attend to and feel the pain in embodied self-awareness. Analgesics and opiates, alcohol and psychoactive drugs, can only temporarily blunt the pain.
The sensations from the nociceptors (pain receptors) at the periphery of the body are not pain. Nor are the nerve impulses that travel up the spinal cord and are represented in the brain stem periaquduectal grey, amygdala, hypothalamus, thalamus, anterior cingulate cortex, prefrontal and sensorimotor cortices, and insula. Pain is the emergent state of embodied self-awareness of a complex neural network across the whole body. This means that pain is not a concrete thing located in a single place in the body, but a state of whole body self-awareness and that self-awareness can alter and possibly extinguish the sense of pain. Back at the nociceptors, there may be the same input signal coming into the brain, but how it is felt and how we relate to it emotionally (fear or acceptance) can be changed, perhaps permanently, by becoming more aware of it.
Find a quiet place to sit or lie down, inside or outside, wherever you feel completely safe and comfortable. As best you can, come to rest inside yourself. Let you body sink into gravity as much as you are able.
Locate the painful area (your head, neck, back, leg, or wherever). If you can, feel the boundaries of the pain: is it the whole leg, just in the thigh, or localized to just above the knee on the inside of your leg, etc. Your headache may be just behind your right eye, or just over your left ear. Shift your awareness between painful areas and adjacent non-painful areas. Notice the differences. Let the non-painful parts "talk to" the painful parts. This is often enough to start the pain "moving," or "softening."
Forget the pain for a moment and focus on your breathing, your sense of your body connecting with the surface on which you are sitting or lying, or on some other constant and reliable presence in your body or your surroundings that feels safe, stable, and supportive: These are your resources. Other resources could be the non-painful parts of your body, the trees over your head, a clock ticking, someone's hand that you are holding for support or a bodywork practitioner who is touching you, a stuffed animal, a mental image of a person you love, or even your sense of God's presence. Make sure you can locate these resources reliably because you'll need to come back to them anytime that the pain becomes "too much."
Now, localize the pain again. Find your resource again. Practice going back and forth between them. Finally, with your resources in mind, come back to the pain and this time "go into" it. Really try to feel it. You may not be able to do this at first. Your pulse may quicken, your breathing may become short and gaspy. This is your sympathetic (arousal) nervous system's response to feeling threatened. Come back to your resources. See if you can let your parasympathetic (relaxation) nervous system help you to settle down. Try again. This is the process. It may take multiple tries and multiple sessions. If your resource stops working for you, try a different one. You can have a whole collection of resources - no limit -- if that helps.
In this process, you are working through the threat of the pain, rather than the pain itself. You first have to convince your body that it is safe to go in there and feel it. Having accomplished that, you can begin to deepen your body sense of that pain. You may be surprised that the pain morphs from physical to emotional (sadness, anger, fear, love) and back again. It may even change locations or be felt at multiple locations in your body.
When you really know the pain and all its forms and faces, because you have fully felt it and followed its movements in your body sense, it may eventually lessen in intensity and perhaps even disappear completely. Some pain, however, may not be soothed in this way. Even if you need to take pain medications and other medical treatments to alleviate your pain, your body sense can play an important role in your recovery.
Body sense is itself a kind of medicine because the neural network that supports the body sense is directly linked to neural, hormonal, and immune system functions that relax, soothe, and restore. Body sense medicine relies on your own body's natural resources for self-repair and the dosage is automatically tailored to your needs. Doing this practice will help to make the pain your friend. It can now objectively inform you of when you need to pay attention to yourself, just like any good friend who will tell you the truth about yourself.
