You Are Larger Than Your Pain

About two weeks ago, I injured myself while lifting a weight I shouldn't have been lifting. Shortly after, I felt that familiar feeling of pain in my lower back and hips. There was a moderate level of discomfort punctuated by sharp lightning bolts that registered about a 7 out of 10 on the pain scale whenever I found myself in the wrong position. I should know better by now because I've been through this before.

The pain always goes away, eventually. But this time, the pain was interfering with my ability to sleep, which was especially challenging given that my 4 month old son had been keeping us awake during the nights. I needed a way to handle the pain quickly so I could get some rest, so I tried something new.

Rather than ignore the pain, I decided to do what I often suggest to my clients: get curious, accept the feeling, and lean into it. I started to pay attention to where I was feeling the most pain and the least... the crests and troughs... the "shape" of the pain's movement. At first, this didn't seem to change much. The discomfort only increased and when I listened, all I heard was a blaring "be more careful next time!"

But eventually, something surprising happened. The more I paid attention to the pain, the less intense it became. And as the intensity decreased, the qualities of the pain started to become clearer. It was as if I had turned down the volume knob on an amplifier so that I could finally make out the notes that were being played rather than be slammed by a wall of sound.

And then another thing happened. As my attention grew sharper, it grew beyond the pain. My attention started to notice the different temperatures in my body, my breathing rate, and various pressures in my limbs. I became aware of many different sensations occurring in my body other than the pain. The pain started out greater than my awareness until the latter grew large enough for the relationship to invert. Now, the pain became just one part of my overall experience. Once I reached this point, I was able to fall back asleep.

There is a lesson here in how to relate to pain in other areas of life. After we experience the initial onset of pain, we can either resist it or accept it. Usually our reflexes kick in and we go into resistance mode. But our unconscious reactions tend to worsen and prolong our suffering. If, instead, we choose to accept the pain, we can eventually grow larger than it. Our awareness can literally expand so that it can properly contain our experiences. From that place comes a sense of resourcefulness, resilience, and agency. We can then choose to move forward consciously. The pain may not go away, but it no longer dominates us.