Here’s a big question for you: if you have pain in your big toe, is your pain in your big toe? Or is your pain inside of you?
We used to always think that the pain was in the big toe. That the issue was in the tissues.
And that’s useful to some extent – of course the tissues are important. If they get stretched, or damaged, bruised, torn, strained or broken, they cause noisy alarm signals.
However, when those noisy alarm signals meet your brain and your immune system, they are in a queue to be processed, and they have to be processed in relationship to all the other feelings and stories and meanings that are going on inside of you.
We know this from stories of soldiers who had terrible injuries on the battlefield, but they were able to survive. Some people even report losing parts of limbs, but they didn’t report a pain experience, because the priority of the brain was to say – you’ve survived, you’re out of the battlefield situation
Stories like this really help us to understand that pain is much much more than issues in the tissues.
When the signals meet the central nervous system, they meet you, and all the stories that you hold. All the stories, all the stresses, all the priorities become relevant.
We now know that the heart of pain is a protective feeling. It’s a measure of danger. if your brain feels something is dangerous, it will create a noisy alarm signal that we call pain.
That very noisy alarm signal, can be poorly correlated with the tissues, is not a linear relationship, the amount of damage, doesn’t equal the noisiness and strength of the pain signal.
I want you to think about pain as like a smoke detector gone wrong. Sometimes, if we burn the toast in our kitchen, the smoke detector will make a loud noisy, horrible signal, however if we’re burning down the house, it makes exactly the same, loud, noisy signal.
So, pain is a protective feeling, it’s an alarm system gone wrong.
On my upcoming, online course, ‘Transform your pain’, We’re going to learn how to retrain that alarm system, how to go underneath the noisy pain signals, and how to become pain-free, by reconstructing pain as a protective feeling that’s about meaning, emotion, and our sense of danger, and that’s often habitual, unconscious, and outside of our awareness.
Transform your pain with mindful, somatic movement
A seven week online, video course to help you (or your clients) rewire your mind-body response to your persistent pain, using a diverse toolkit of mindfulness techniques, gentle movement exercises, and stress-reduction strategies.
When: July 18th – August 29th
How to join: You can find out more about the course here >>
