Elizabeth Kipp discusses reframing the negative mind in order to help heal chronic pain in Episode 203 of Life Mastery TV with David McLeod.
A negative mind can make pain worse than it needs to be. Learn to reframe the negative mind so that you can heal and transcend your chronic pain.
One way or another, everyone experiences pain in different ways. It might be something physical, varying in intensity from a mild bruise to a flesh wound to a broken bone—or worse. It might be psychic or emotional pain, which is harder to recognize and diagnose but can be just as unpleasant to deal with.
For many of us, the pains we endure are generally short-lived, usually lasting for only days or a few weeks at most. However, for some of us, the pain we experience can be quite long-lasting and may create severe discomfort for months or even years on end. In the latter case, the quality of life may be severely impaired—sometimes leading to depression or even suicide. Indeed, the negative mind is probably the most challenging aspect of dealing with long-term or chronic pain.
Believe it or not, if you suffer from any form of chronic pain, there is hope. Elizabeth Kipp has had her own struggles with chronic pain and has learned many techniques and tools for dealing with it. In this episode of Life Mastery TV, she shares some of the wisdom she has learned over the years and provides some tips and suggestions for reframing the negative mind in order to make it easier to manage chronic pain. Here is a sampling of what we discussed:
What is Chronic Pain?
Chronic pain is any pain—physical, emotional, spiritual—that is present 15 days out of 30 for 3 months or more. It all sends the same signal to the brain, “It hurts.” The brain cannot tell the difference between a broken bone and a broken heart.
How Does Chronic Pain Affect the Brain?
Living with chronic pain is exhausting. It requires a lot of energy to cope with constantly high levels of stress in the body. The precious energy we need to handle the sensations of chronic pain is usually accompanied by such an onslaught of negative thinking that we can often feel as if we are bucking a current, trying to swim upstream, and slowly getting pushed backward. We can feel as if we are drowning in negativity and self- condemnation. It is no wonder that we feel unhealthy when we are in chronic pain: it is because we are in an unhealthy state.
Awareness, Attention, Focus
Since where you focus your attention is an important part of the chronic pain process, allowing your thoughts to stay centered on the pain you feel feeds the pain cycle. Also, as part of the cycle, negative thinking strengthens pain and draws you more deeply into it. Careful and conscious work helps you find balance in your thinking.
Healing From Chronic Pain
It is possible to heal from chronic pain! We now know that the brain is able to adapt and change (called neuroplasticity), including healing from the changes chronic pain brings to the brain. How do we do this? By bringing in modalities that heal the changes chronic pain brings to the brain. A few examples of such modalities are ancestral clearing, meditation, conscious breathwork, and eating a nutritious diet.
