We can heal chronic pain by truly accepting our body.
Do you feel divorced from your body? Do you feel that you spend more time trying to disassociate from your body than feeling what’s happening inside it? These are just a few ways we can experience life when we live with chronic pain.
We feel pain. We don’t want to be in the body, and we can get in a fight with how the body is feeling. All this struggle around our body add fuel to the fires of sensation that comes with chronic pain. When we learn to stop struggling, we turn to the path of healing and recovery from chronic pain.
What is your body image?
Positive or negative? Do you feel broken? Perhaps you blame someone else or yourself. Maybe you feel good enough. Or do you struggle with this? What is your inner observer saying to you? Can you use it to discern patterns of behavior around the negativity you experience?
We tend to identify ourselves as the trait or the behavior or the feeling. When we forget who we truly are, we allow these patterns to hook us. We need to be fair and honest when we are observing our patterns.
Healing chronic pain is not about transcending the body.
It’s about transcending the mind and the judgments we make about what and how the body feels. When we rest quietly, releasing the story the mind spins about our current experience – “I remember when I felt like this before” or “I don’t like this” or “this is bad” or “will I feel this way in the future?” – we become one with the body, mind, and spirit.
Whatever the body’s experience is witnessed as pure energy, transcending “pain” into pure sensation. We’ve taken the judgment of “pain”, meaning “it hurts and therefore I don’t like it and I want to get rid of it”, off our senses. We can accept how and what we feel unequivocally. We surrender, at last, to what we feel, no longer questing to “get rid of” what we are feeling. When we surrender, we free ourselves from the self-fulfilling prophecy, because so long as our goal is “to get rid of” the pain, we are resisting it and locking it in deeper into our nervous system.
Become an impartial witness to what you are feeling.
Witness all the sensations you feel in the body. Love yourself through it. Your presence is healing. When you feel your body, you help heal it.
Now, take the next step and make amends to the body.
Forgive yourself for focusing on the negative, on perpetuating self-judgment as you try and cope with chronic pain. Let the ghosts of the past go. When you can see them, you can make peace with them and release them. Our judgments about the body in chronic pain are often a historical pattern from our ancestral lineage. Once we realize this and bring awareness to our negative behavior, we can understand where it is coming from, forgive, and let it go. Ancestral Clearing is a perfect modality to help us release old patterns. We find liberation from it. This is how we heal.
Finally, embrace the yumminess of you!
Remember the good aspects of you. Yes, there are aspects of us we need to work on, but center on what you have done well. Increase your positive attitude. Write out all the things you do well. This will help retrain that tendency we have as chronic pain sufferers to look at what we’re doing wrong. Focus on what you’ve done right. Give yourself a pat on the back. You’re doing the best you can. Celebrate that and YOU!
You can take a step towards loving yourself and appreciating your body. Become the witness. Forgive and release. Continue and move forward from here.
Please comment below and let me know how these tools worked for you.
