Self Esteem & Positive Thinking Support Group

Tips to help you deal with pain

The tips that follow are aimed at helping you to accept your primary suffering and reduce your secondary suffering.

•See if you can stay in the present moment as much as you can. Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered off into the future or the past, gently bring it back. This doesn’t mean you can’t think about the past or future, but try not to get too caught up with these thoughts.

•Investigate the process you call ‘pain’. You will notice it is in fact a mass of sensations, not a thing. Get to know it as actual, felt experience, rather than getting too caught up with thoughts about it. Notice how it is always changing from one sensation to another, no matter how dense and solid it may feel.

•Move towards the pain. See if you can soften around any resistance you may feel towards it. This is counter-intuitive but if you try to ignore it or push it away, it will just scream louder. Use the breath to help with this (see meditation that follows).

•Kindness and gentleness are crucial. Treat pain as you’d treat an injured loved one. See if you can find a tender attitude of heart.

•Once you have gently acknowledged the pain you can then broaden out your field of awareness to look for any pleasure that is also going on in the moment. Notice experiences such as sun on the skin, being with a loved one, noticing flowers by the bed etc. There will always be something pleasurable in your experience, no matter how subtle. Let the pain be just one of several things you are aware of in the moment.

•With this honest, tender attitude to all the shades of physical, emotional and mental experiences in the present moment you can then choose how you respond to things. This is the point of creativity – how we respond/act in this moment sets up conditions for the next moment. You can always insert a moment of choice no matter how far down the line you’ve gone into distress and anguish.

•Any moment can be an opportunity for learning if we come back to the actual sensations of the present moment rather than getting lost in thoughts and reactions. See if you can let both pain and pleasure be held within this broad perspective: neither contracting tightly against pain nor clinging tightly to pleasure. Allow all sensations to come into being and pass away moment by moment.

Above tips written by Vidymala

Vidyamala is a co-founder and director of Breathworks, a company offering ‘mindfulness-based strategies for living well’.

She runs courses in Manchester UK for people suffering from chronic pain and illness, teaching them how to optimize quality of life using meditation and other mindfulness-based strategies. She also is involved in running a training program for those wishing to deliver the Breathworks programme in other localities.

She suffered a spinal injury in 1976 and has used meditation and mindfulness to manage her own chronic pain for many years.

xoxox

Hope the tips will be beneficial to many here- found this website today serendipitously.

Warmest wishes to you all, love Clarita

It is not easy, I know that I have tried and have to continually retry.

Mindfullness also means that we accept ourselves as we are at any given moment. This means we dont kick ourselves when we fail at something. We just try again.

It means we look in gentleness at how we treat ourselves and how we treat others. We must be as gentle with others as we would be ourselves. Mindfullness takes practice, it is something we learn how to do. and one of the principle tenets is to not chastise ourselves when we fail. Just acknowledge it and start again.

This kind of Buddhism is not a religion but it is a philosophy. It is a way of living. Some might say a Philosophy on Living. It is a recipe for how to live a life full of meaning.

And a life full of meaning is a life well lived. And no matter what happens in between times, and in the end we dont think about the pain suffered, we think about the love we shared. I promise you.

love

Natty