Pain is Only an Experience
written by: Marija Eljuga
@kounselling
Walking in the woods the other day, I scratched my fingers on something. The pain, for it was also a cold day felt rather bad and I started fighting against it. Oouch … aw… why won’t it go away, already?! … Then I thought to observe it, instead as an experience made of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. The pain evaporated in a couple of seconds… if so. Almost instantly. While baking a few days later, I tried the same approach after slightly burning my hand. The same occurred, yet not as quickly, for a sense of self-blame and grieving lingered, for allowing the burn and the discomfort to occur in the first place. Once I acknowledged these two experiences linking in; the self-blame and the grieving, the pain evaporated, too; My attention to it, ‘the magic trick’ that made it ease out.
The same as with emotional pain whether in regards to something that happened recently, or long ago. Only an experience, made of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, requiring our conscious attention, our willing presence to it, in our own good time, at our own gentle pace. One full, unreserved, conscious moment: This is my experience and I give it my attention. I focus on its storyline (thought), body sensation(s), and the feeling.
Now the burn above, why did it take longer, if it is only a pain like the other pain? Because it triggers other events that occurred in the ‘long forgotten’ past. It is not forgotten until we consciously choose to give it our attention. Self-blame, for when I got burned as a baby, a terrible experience, my abusers blamed me. I never sit still and that was the reason that the burning occurred. Listening to this over and over, I took the blaming myself in. Of course, I have already dealt with this huge, huge experience taking lots of time and effort… and pause and back to it…, but I forgot, this ‘minor’ detail, and this detail too needed my attention, for just this one little angle and then I felt an ease of pain. I satisfied its need for my attention, we could say.
When we address our emotional experiences other items might arise. What we have in our landscape of self and if it is now ready to show its connection, its relation to the present discomfort, may take this opportunity to show up. Each part of it is also an experience made of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. If we give each arising part our attention, gently for when we can, optimally and kindly to ourselves, we meet its needs for our attention and it subsides into building us up, for tackling further unseen pain in the landscape of self. Until we are fully healed, whole, strong, and able to start winning, again.
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