Over the last month I have had a real life experience of having to practice this method with my own pain. About a month ago I woke up, sat up in bed, and suddenly was in severe back pain. It built over the day, until the evening when it was around level 8-9 pain. It was quite a shock as I hadn’t been in that level of pain for a few years and was basically in the normal reaction to pain. I did all the usual things that people do when they are suddenly in pain. The first response is to try and get immediate relief. Which is sort of normal and natural. My natural bodies response is I just want it to go away because its darn painful!

My initial response was to just wait it out and see what happens. I initially thought that the pain was result of my spina-bifida condition deteriorating. I have a tethered spinal cord and the cord itself is supposedly decaying. I was told in 2005 after unsuccessful surgery tountether the cord that I may only have 6 months left walking then the cord would basically decay and I would lose the function of my bladder, bowels and walking. Well this sudden onset of pain brought me face to face with the fact of this happening now. Only worse, I wasn’t just not able to walk or having trouble passing urine, or having a bowel motion, but I was in really bad pain.

I waited for a few days and my partner and I went through a very difficult process of wondering how we would cope with situation. Ideas of ramps being put in the house, and just how I would function on a day to day basis were discussed. All my partners fears andanxieties arose about how she would cope with the situation. Yet as we worked through them some sense of grace seemed to be continually present, that somehow things would just be OK, and everything would work out.

The sense I had was that I had to deal with this myself and find my own solution to the pain. Well at this time the solution seemed to be drugs. I started taking morphine, and got some other drugs that my GP recommended I try. I took these and basically entered into a drugged up state, yet still finding not much relief from the hot knife like stabbing pain which wouldrecur whenever I moved position or sat in one position too long. I also had the intuitive sense to try some marijuana as I had heard that this can make a real difference to acute pain. I did and then was basically in state of stoned and drugged suppression of the pain for quite some days. After the 7th day or so of finding little relief from the pain and getting a little tired of being drugged, I gradually woke up to my own pain process of welcoming the pain in.