Favorite Blog Posts Jan 2013

I always love reading things that are consciously connected thoughts on pain.  In this blog post from Tricycle.com, an interview was conducted with Jon Kabat-Zinn.  I became aware of Jon through a video at a Google meeting in their corporate office where he talked about mindfulness.  You can see more on the post I wrote, Mindfulness With Jon Kabat-Zinn.

In this blog post, he talks about using the Buddhist practice of meditation to help treat chronic pain and illness in our life.  While I am not here to promote one practice over another or specify the specific procedure one should use, what I found interesting was how he viewed pain.  In fact, what I have learned in my own life is very similar when it comes to pain and illness.  I arrived at the same point in a different way which doesn't really matter, but the insight he gives is what is important.

In the following statement, he puts pain in perspective that we so often don't do in our own lives.  "Physical pain is the response of the body and the nervous system to a huge range of stimuli that are perceived as noxious, damaging, or dangerous."


Another statement in this interview is where he said, "You change your relationship to the pain by opening up to it and paying attention to it. You "put out the welcome mat." Not because you're masochistic, but because the pain is there."  While most healers and pain sufferers would cringe at this thought and try to avoid pain, what he is saying is what gets you out of pain.  The more we fight it or avoid it, the more we energize it and feed the pain.  It is when we change our relationship to it, that we become empowered to heal from it.

Throughout this blog post, At Home In Our Bodies, the interview sheds light on how Jon Kabat-Zinn deals with pain.  There is a lot of good information to be gleaned from this interview and I do hope you will check it out as well as my previous post I mentioned at the beginning.

You can also read Peter Levine's new book, Freedom From Pain, to learn more about similar thought processes on getting rid of chronic pain in our life.  While it is easy to perceive these things as new age mumble jumble, they are anything but that.  They do work and they work well.  Pain is not something to avoid, but something to embrace and learn from.  There is always a greater message in pain than we may want to see, but it is only when we open up to the pain, that we find the healing through the message it offers us.
 

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Blog Post And Images (c) 1/10/13 by Don Shetterly

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