PAIN

“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place.  If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”

~  Lance Armstrong

Q & A

Who taught you how to reduce and/or manage your pain?

This is an interesting inquiry.  Most of us have never been taught how to work with our own pain.  Not one lesson!  It’s challenging to succeed at anything in life without some quality teaching and some practice.  This definitely applies to pain!!

What is available to you that you don’t know about or haven’t tried?  Why are our options for pain control so limited in this culture?

While there are a few exceptions, as a general rule, our cultural default for dealing with pain is Western medicine.  The primary tool of most mainstream doctors is to medicate pain.  This approach masks the pain and can be very effective in the short term; however, in the long term, medicating pain has significant side effects and reduced effectiveness.  Because the cultural focus is on relieving the symptoms of pain, many approaches, which address the causes of pain, are not widely known.

What options exist other than medication?  What techniques and skills can help you manage your own pain?

There is actually a big range of options for reducing or resolving pain.  Some are relatively well known such as physical therapy (strengthening and stretching), manipulation (osteopathic or chiropractic mobilization of joints), and massage therapy.  Others are from older cultures and are not in mainstream awareness.  A few examples are breathing exercises, visualizations, and shifting of our body’s energetic system.  While not well known, they can often be remarkably effective.

What is your relationship with your pain?

The most common relationship that we have with our own pain is to push it away and wish that it would cease to exist.  However, that relationship strategy usually has no positive impact on our pain; if anything, it can make the pain worse.  There are a number of other types of relationships that work much better for the management and resolution of pain.