Pain, Your Mind and How it Works
By Chessie Roberts
Many of you have aches and pains and a lot of people live with chronic, sometimes crippling pain. What is pain? The dictionary defines it as physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury. As you grow from a child to an adult you learned that if you arm hurts, you treated your arm, you stomach or whatever body part that you felt was the problem. Please understand that yes, pain is real and there to let you know that something is wrong but that is not the pain I am referring to. This article is discussing chronic pains like the ones you have with any chronic issue, like arthritis, crohn’s, fibromyalgia …that sort.
The truth is that, even though you are injured or ill, your pain signal is just that, a signal. It is sent to your mind and that is what gets your attention. This is not a new idea. It has been used for centuries and it works quite nicely. If you have tried pills and potions and found them unsatisfactory, finding what you need right inside your brain just may be quite helpful for you.
You have several levels of pain response; mental, emotional and physical. OK, you have an injury. It sends signals up your sensory path that will give you a physical sensation. You may tense up against that and “push against’ the pain. The second path takes the information to the areas of your brain that process emotion. (amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex) So you feel upset and may cry, shake or have other emotional reactions. So there you have it, you are having two reactions to your injury, one emotional and one physical. If you can calm both of these reactions your pain will diminish.
The first technique to learn is to relax into the pain. As you consciously relax the area that is troubling you, the pain decreases. Take having an injection for example. If you tense the muscle the needle is to pierce, the added resistance will create a denser wall to penetrate. If, however, you relax the area, there is less resistance. Same with any other pain. When you tense the affected area you create resistance and, like the Law of Attraction says, “what you resist persists” the same is true for pain.
The next thought to wrap your head around is that the pain is not where you think it is. It is being processed in your brain. If you can realize this, you will find that the pain diminishes rapidly. As you consider that you can choose to let go of the thought of pain, it will go down more or disappear completely.
All of you have your very own pharmacy that knows just what your body requires and what doses are perfect for you. A lot of the synthetic medicines on the market have a disruptive effect on you inner pharmacy so you will have to retrain it to work properly if you have been on one of these regimens. IF YOU ARE ON A MEDICATION UNDER A DOCTORS CARE, DO NOT STOP IN FAVOR OF THIS INFORMATION. You can use this information to get better results from your medication. As you take your medication just keep in mind how it works (research it if you don’t already know and then you can make an informed choice about your own health care) and allow your body and mind to work with the medication to it’s best affect.
Meditation is the best way (with these new thoughts to guide you) to calm and train your mind and get it to let go of the idea of pain. Research (at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center) has been done on this topic and has found from scans of brains while people meditated, at the end of their meditations, the pain centers were calmer and the persons pain had been reduced by 11 to 93%. Meditation showed a higher pain relief than some of the more powerful pain relieving medications.
Relax into the pain and remember that it is your mind creating sensations and you may be surprised how much better you handle it all.
“May the entire Universe be filled with Peace and Joy, Love and Light. May the light of Truth overcome all darkness! Victory to that Light! Jai!
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Chessie Roberts is the creator of Evolution of Self; A Journey into Body, Mind, Spirit Balance. To learn more about Chessie, visit http://chessiesEOS.blogspot.com or connect with her on Facebook www.facebook.com/eos4u.
