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Feel The Emotion, Deflate The Pain...


In the previous video blog we started a conversation about pain. We talked about how pain is connected to the way we’re interacting with ourselves and our World and that if the pain is going to change, our lives are going to have to change too. The old way of feeling and thinking and doing has inertia and so if we’re going to overcome that inertia we’ve got to either add energy to the system or liberate energy that’s no longer needed elsewhere. A great source of that energy, and thus the solution to the pain, can be found in the pain itself.

When I say pain, that includes a couple of different things. There’s physical pain, like a back ache or pain from some sort of injury. Then there’s emotional pain, the kind you might experience after a relationship breakup, for example. Research shows that, while the brain does seem to process these different kinds of pain differently, in the structure of the brain, the pain from say, a broken leg, and the anguish of a broken heart, share much of the same circuitry (Szalavitz).

You might know this yourself if you’ve ever experienced a tough breakup or lost someone who was close to you. You know that emotional anguish has a physical component, too. That’s where the term heartache comes from. It actually hurts in a physical way. Likewise, if you’re experiencing physical pain, if you really check in with that, you might become aware that there’s also an emotional component to that pain.

If you happen to notice that there’s an emotional component to physical pain, you’ve taken a huge step toward finding the solution. Remember the old way of feeling and thinking and doing has inertia and it takes energy to overcome inertia. We’ve got to either add energy to the system from the outside or liberate energy from the inside. When we really check out physical pain and find that there’s an emotional component to it, that emotion is energy being liberated from the pain.

If you’re having trouble noticing this, it really has to do with your ability and willingness to bring your attention to the pain. Our attention is a muscle that gets stronger when we work it out. So it can take a little practice.

If you'd like some help, I do a meditation workshop every so often to help build these attention muscles. Click here to see when the next meditation workshop might be. Click here to see video of a workshop that I did a while back, specifically on working with pain.

Works Cited:

Szalavitz, Maia, and Maia Szalavitz. "New Test Distinguishes Physical From Emotional Pain in Brain for First Time | TIME.com." Time. 6 May 2013. Time. 03 Dec. 2013 <http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/06/a-pain-detector-for-the-brain/>.

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