Here is my blog on cracking the code to chronic pain.
We can get hooked in our pain. Eckhart Tolle calls it the pain body – our accumulation of unresolved traumas and hurts that remain locked in our cells. It’s even more than that, I think. We give our power away to the pain. We get in relationship with our pain. We get all tangled up in it, as if we are caught up in a spider’s web. We fight the pain. We try to make it go away. We try to hide from it. We do not want to accept it for what it is. So long as we remain wrapped up in dealing with our pain, it sits on our throne and we are its servant.
The value of a meditation practice to a chronic pain sufferer is that it provides a powerful and effective technique for unhooking us from the pain. We learn to observe the pain rather than being captured and enveloped by it. When we get a taste, if only for a moment, of the experience of watching the pain, of watching ourselves in the pain, we realize we are NOT our pain – this is a critical tipping point that begins to change the momentum away from suffering. It permanently tears through and penetrates the great mass built up in the pain body. We are finally able to realize that we can release ourselves from this prison.
In meditation we learn to become the watcher. We learn we no longer must do anything – no longer fight the pain, no longer try and make the pain do this or that. We learn that we can sit and watch ourselves. Once we become separated like this, as the watcher, the fierce grip pain has on us begins to loosen and fall away. We need only continue to practice our meditation in earnest for the grip to finally release us. In the end, we are the ones who release the grip by our choice to no longer give our power away to it.
