What is Pain?
February 21st 2007 22:16
What is pain? According to Traditional Chinese pain is blockage. That is: normally our life flows along pretty well and then we get blocked by something inside our outside us. This is experienced as painful and the therapy is to get us flowing again.
This can be at any level of our health: physical, emotional, mental or spiritual (all of which have individual and social dimensions as well!). Physically it can mean giving ourselves a break so we can fight off a flu bug, emotionally it could finding a way of finishing with a past trauma or a way to negotiate a relationship, mentally it could mean thinking through a problem or finding a way to move toward a goal, spiritually it could be finding a way to feel re-connected again.
This is a slightly different view of pain to the Western Medical Model. This view of pain works at the level of what we feel – not at the level of synapses firing in our nerves. This means that it we can use it without needing to be up with the latest research on the pain sensors, how they function in our brain and so forth.
So this gives us something we can do ourselves when we are in pain. We can look at where we are stuck; at what is stopping us from living in our flow. When we feel pain we can stop and examine our lives. We can ask things like: What is blocking me? or, What happened just before this pain started?, or, Where do I want to be – and what is stopping me getting there? And then finding what is the first step to getting our flow back. Often just taking the first step will lead to pain diminishing. Sometimes, not always, just realising the problem can lead to less pain.
This can be at any level of our health: physical, emotional, mental or spiritual (all of which have individual and social dimensions as well!). Physically it can mean giving ourselves a break so we can fight off a flu bug, emotionally it could finding a way of finishing with a past trauma or a way to negotiate a relationship, mentally it could mean thinking through a problem or finding a way to move toward a goal, spiritually it could be finding a way to feel re-connected again.
This is a slightly different view of pain to the Western Medical Model. This view of pain works at the level of what we feel – not at the level of synapses firing in our nerves. This means that it we can use it without needing to be up with the latest research on the pain sensors, how they function in our brain and so forth.
So this gives us something we can do ourselves when we are in pain. We can look at where we are stuck; at what is stopping us from living in our flow. When we feel pain we can stop and examine our lives. We can ask things like: What is blocking me? or, What happened just before this pain started?, or, Where do I want to be – and what is stopping me getting there? And then finding what is the first step to getting our flow back. Often just taking the first step will lead to pain diminishing. Sometimes, not always, just realising the problem can lead to less pain.
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