Freedom With Pain

The way out of pain is into it

Pain Coach — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:48:18 +0000

Our mind does not want to believe this….the way out of pain is into it.  Resistance is futile and only makes pain worse.  Dive in to it.  Dive deeper than it.  Know that always,  Always, there is something mysterious, sublime, and beautiful that is deeper than the pain.  It only reveals itself when we have the courage to completely surrender and let go.  This substantial, holding, supportive, loving presence is the ground from which we can rest and bear our pain. Any pain. All pain.

The way into this presence is through jumping, and not knowing if there is ground beneath us or not.

We must jump, let go, and trust.

Over time and with practice we eventually get familiar with letting go and stepping into our fear of more or worse pain. We learn to trust that when we do lean into our pain, with gentleness and kindness, we find true support. Exactly the opposite of what our mind tells us, that we will find more pain and frightening emptiness.

Through true surrender we expose the fears of pain within our mind to be like phantoms. We find that true emptiness is neither empty nor frightening, yet full of sublime peace and profound power.

One moment we are standing teetering on the edge of a 1000 foot cliff and the next we realize the ground is only 1 foot below us. And it always is. Right here, right now.

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Cooperating with life, pain, and what shows up today

Pain Coach — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 21:52:06 +0000

It seems to me in our journey living with pain, that one of the central ingredients that is really useful is to cooperate with pain. To allow what is showing up here and now today in my life the space to be here. Just this attitude has a transformative effect and impact. When we agree with what life has brought this very day, this very moment, our relationship to it changes, transforms. It sounds basic, to allow things to be as they are, to go with the flow.

Many people use this “go with the flow” in a cliched way. For most people who live with chronic pain telling them to go with the flow will often illicit a response like, well, to put it mildly, f *(*&*&()) off, you have no idea what the f $#%#%%….its like living with this pain. If you were in my shoes I don’t think you would be “advising” me to go with the flow!

Those of you who live with serious chronic pain will know exactly what I mean….when other well meaning people advise about how to deal with pain, yet obviously have ZERO personal experience of it, it just doesn’t work. They just actually don’t understand what it’s like. For some time now I’ve just learned and accepted that their well intentioned advice is just that. Well intentioned advice.

Yet the fact remains there is a way to go with the flow of pain. To allow what shows up today to be here, to have the space in my life, to have a place in my life. When pain shows up, life has brought this, life is showing up as pain. It seems pretty obvious that pain often shows up as a warning that something is wrong and that something needs to be attended to and fixed, nobody likes being in physical pain, and everyone has the right to live a pain free life. Yet what happens to those of us who cannot be fixed, that no matter what medicine, alternative therapies, or whatever healing modalities we try just don’t work?

What then?

In my experience this is where we need to turn to to a dimension of life beyond our normal day to day experience. This dimension is often accessed by prayer, meditation, surrender, and just simply giving up and giving over to a presence, energy, God, Being, Christ, Tao, Allah, whatever name you put to it, that is deeper, vaster , stronger, more intelligent, and loving, than the very pain that I experience now in my body.

Turning towards the pain, accepting it, allowing it, even welcoming it, WITH an orientation of surrender to this deeper dimension of ourselves, of God, of Being is the only way that consistently works, that I have discovered to live in freedom WITH pain. Its like some sort of miracle happens. The presence meets the pain and transforms it. NOT taking it away, but giving me the strength and love to bear it. This is a fact of my experience repetitively, not just with mild pain, but with the most severe levels of pain that I have ever experienced.

Time and time again, Grace came and showed me this way, that through acceptance, surrender and allowing severe physical pain to simply be here, something more comes, that something more is a mystery, a vast and great presence that can and does hold the pain. It holds it with care, with love, and with complete and utter compassion. That is the balm we need to live well with pain.

We need to do our part though, our part in living well with pain is to practice cooperating with the pain as life brings it. We do all we can to alleviate it, we take our medications, we follow our programme of things that we know helps ourselves, but the most important thing we can do, when we can do no more, is surrender, to allow and cooperate with life, showing up as pain.

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Smiling with pain when we don’t feel like smiling!

Pain Coach — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 01:39:52 +0000

At the beginning of learning to smile with pain, we will find that there are often times where we just don’t feel like smiling! We feel much more like screaming, or yelling, or collapsing, or fighting, or hating, or just simply blanking out the pain.

In the process of learning to live well with pain, we do the smiling practice anyway. Regardless of how we are feeling we just smile. Even if we don’t feel like it .

When I climb with pain, or when I do my fitness work, and my body is in pain or real discomfort, or when I experience severe pain, I certainly don’t feel like smiling. If I took how I feel to be my guide I would not be living in freedom with pain.

There is a dimension of ourselves that is deeper than our feelings, this dimension we use as our guide. We follow that. An inner smile connects us to that part of ourself that is deeper than our pain. It connects us to God at the center of our Being, it connects us to Essence, to our depth, to ourselves as a presence of mystery.

Try simply smiling anyways. Regardless of how we feeling. By smile, I don’t mean in some pseudo smile way, but in simple recognition. Acknowledge the fact of your experience in the process of smiling. Accepting that fact that we don’t feel like smiling. Include that in the smile. Or even scream, shout, let the steam off a little, then smile.

Inner smiling is like leaning forward into the pain. Leaning with a smile into the actual experience as it is. In real pain, accepting the pain by gently smiling into it, the pain changes, it shifts, it takes a new form, when a smile is added to it. Its like a door opens to another room. This room just has more space than the room we where in before. This room is a room where a smile is here, and pain is here.

As Rumi says pain can takes my to the Beyond, and it is from the beyond that we live in freedom with pain. The beyond is here and I am here too.

Smiling with pain is a powerful practice to learn to live in freedom with pain.

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Cultivating presence to live with pain

Pain Coach — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 23:44:31 +0000

One of the things that has really worked for me in learning to live well with pain is cultivating presence. Presence can be in any form, stillness, inner peace, silence, a sense of joy, courage, compassion, loving kindness, it manifests according to what is needed in the moment.

The reality of living with pain is that it is really really difficult to be in presence when I am in in pain. I need to practice my presence cultivation when I’m NOT in pain. This presence cultivation, for me anyways, has always taken the form of mindfulness meditation, my practice has been about cultivating stillness and silence. I need to do this every single day at some point in the day when I am not in pain……even for a few minutes. The fact is in doing this presence practice it all adds up. Presence builds up into a sort of reserviour of presence which is available for me to draw on when things get tough.

If I don’t practice presence, practice taking time out to rest and be with silence, stillness and the depth of life, when the pain hits, then I have way less capacity to be with presence . I just get stuck in pain being the center of me, rather than presence. There is nothing to hold the pain, and its real, real tough in this place.

This morning as I sat in silence a chainsaw was going next door. That chainsaw is a bit like pain….its so darn noisy, and consumes awareness. Yet when I truly just let it be there, and moment by moment reorient my attention and awareness to the silence beneath that chainsaw, I can actually still rest in silence. Stillness can hold the chainsaw noise. I am not consumed by it, distracted by it, and swept up in it.

Same with pain. But the fact is it requires practice. Little by little, presence grows, like a muscle building from exercise. When we practice being present to presence as stillness, peace and silence, like a vast ocean of peace, this ocean becomes more and more familiar to us. It becomes more real, more substancial.

There is no other way to cultivate presence. It doesn’t happen on its own, but through our own training and practice.

Each day we are free from pain, take some time to practice presence.

Ocean Meditation

Sit down in silence and simply breath. With each in and out breath Imagine a deep and beautiful calm blue, green ocean. Imagine that you are held in this ocean, let this ocean bathe you with its goodness, its silence, its stillness. Let it run through you. Let yourself feel yourself as this ocean. As your attention wanders, just bring yourself back to this sense of being the ocean, of being calmed and soothed by its vast and huge presence. As you breath, keep returning your attention to this ocean. Rest in it, deepen in it, let the ocean become you, and you become the ocean.

Each time your attention wanders, return like a gentle wave to the sense of calm, deep, still, peaceful ocean.

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Get over yourself !

Pain Coach — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 07:34:33 +0000

I notice that we are often so self obsessed that we miss the very thing that we are. We miss the qualities of beauty, divinity and presence. We miss the fact of our own goldeness, brightness, and brilliance.

We stay focused in our limited small painful existence. When we are in physical pain most of the time, it’s really very very difficult to find contact with a dimension of existence that is beyond this pain. Our very identity, who we think we actually are, is constantly reinforced by our pain. We think we are our bodies, we think we are this physical person that walks around on two legs and is separate from every other physical person and thing. We are so completely sure that is what we are that we rarely get insight into any other view of reality.

What does pain do to reinforce this view, this perspective that we are a body having a purely physical experience?

Pain reinforces it. Each contraction of pain reminds us of the very physical nature of ourselves. Because we are so identified with ourselves as separate phsycial bodies, our attention, awareness and actual energy goes directly to our experience of ourselves as a body.

Simply put, pain happens in our body! We might have emotional pain, which then impacts our body, and heart, we might have mental anguish and disturbing thoughts, that then make us disturbed and knocked off center, which then impact our bodies. But the bottom line is that pain reminds us of our physical existence.

In this pain community most if us are experts at focusing on, and knowing about every minute detail about our condition. We know all about the condition, it’s symptoms, it’s research, it’s public perception. We become so obsessed with all the latest findings and everyone else’s experiences and details about their condition that we magnify the negative.. We focus on the facts of the disease rather than the fact of presence, of stillness, goodness, intelligence and that life giving flow that underlies our existence.

We stay in a suffering oriented perspective. Our bandwidth of experience is limited or stretched by those who we hang about with. If we are not stretched, pushed, pulled beyond our normal range of thinking, feeling, and willing we remain trapped in a small orbit orienting around our own small life of pain.

We miss the very fact of our divine make up as beings made up of intelligent light. We miss the very fact that we are part of a great cosmic rhythm that is connected to a vast, huge intelligence, unfolding and exploding with dynamic action, moment by moment.

It’s necessary to know about our physical condition, but I wonder how much we actually need to know. What has been very useful for me is to maintain a connection with freedom while I live my life as a spina bifida. This is the freedom with pain philosophy. I live in Freedom with whatever I have, spina-bifida or pain.

I have never looked up on the net about the spina-bifida condition. I don’t even know at what part of L2 L3 or whatever on my spine the actual site of the condition is. I know my pain, and my life and I just do what I can to attend to it, and get on with things. I don’t obsess over my condition. I take actions to be kind and gently with myself, and I take actions that require me to stretch myself……I have never seen myself, or felt like a victim of the spina-bifida condition. This view and attitude has been a significant and important gift to help me not be focused and oriented around a label of spina-bifida. I have not been defined by my condition and never will be. I am way more than this spina bifida condition.

What I notice is useful is to find out what we need to know about our condition and then just keep that in the background, as useful knowledge for practical things we can do to help ourselves.

Any more and it just feeds our self obsession and then we lose contact with the bigger picture of positive goodness.

Think a bit about this.

I do think it’s really, really useful to have the support of others in these pain communities, only people who suffer ongoing pain that cannot be fixed, know what its like. Getting support from them is common sense and we need plenty of it to live a life in freedom with pain……

but what is real and I reckon most important is to anchor ourselves to goodness, to the great presence that underlies all of life. That goodness gives us contact with Freedom while we live with our pain.

Every day spend some time, energy, and focus on seeing the goodness that is deeper than your condition and your pain…..and see what happens next.

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Be like water with your pain

Pain Coach — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:06:34 +0000

Our attitude towards our pain is everything. HOW we are with our pain is the key to living well with it…….

Thats my take on it anyways. Having lived with various degrees, intensities, types, stages and cycles of pain since I was a small child, one thing I have learnt that doesn’t work is fighting it.

An attitude of fighting pain, beating pain, winning against pain only makes pain it worse. This does not mean we don’t work hard with pain, this does not mean we let pain beat us into submission and become a victim to it.

It does mean that the WAY we work with our pain depends totally on what is needed in each moment. NOT on what we think our attitude should be towards pain.

If we think that we should always be fighting our pain, should never give up, can never let our guard down, must work harder and harder and keep trying more and more, eventually we just exhaust ourselves. We are literally fighting a losing battle.

We need to bring both a gentle kindness and a fierce courage and strength to our pain. We discern what is needed in each moment. We apply what is needed to the situation we are in. We don’t use a preconcieved attitude someone else has told us about, or what we think is right and good for the situation. We look at things as they are and apply what is needed.

Deep inside each and everyone one us we know what is needed in each situation. We know when we are indulging ourselves and lying down and rolling over, or when what is actually needed is to get up, get off our bum and do the very thing that will help ourselves. We don’t lie there like a vicitim, wanting mummy to feed us, we get up and help ourselves……in those moments we take responsibility for ourselves. We do what we can for ourselves, we care well for ourselves. That might mean doing little things like, pausing and breathing, stretching and moving a little, eating some good food, saying no to that extra indulgence, bringing discipline to not indulging in things that weaken my energy and I know make my pain worse….

and

on the flip side …

We allow ourselves to be right where we are. In each moment. If i must rest, and do nothing I must rest and do nothing. I need to be able to allow myself times to just blob out, let go completely and say, feel and experience I have had enough. This is just too much, too hard. I’m too tired. I cant do this anymore. I am really shattered. We need to be able to allow ourselves times where we give up and surrender it all, all that pain, all that suffering. We need to allow ourselves to feel small, and helpless. Simply because when we suffer from so much pain that it becomes too much, that is how we often feel.

Yet don’t stop there.

Magic happens when we let ourselves be true to where we are in any given moment. Where we don’t have a preconceived idea of what we “should” or “shouldn’t be doing. Where we take action from what is arising now, what is right here in front of me, where we listen and are open to what is the required response now….

Living with pain is not only tough, often it feels unbearable and overwhelming. Having the attitude of fighting off the pain only creates more resistance. In the fighting we harden. Yet if we are more like water, softer, malleable, flowing, with our pain. The effect of that softer malleable, flowing, attitude towards our pain is cooling rather than making our pain hotter, more intense, more fiery. We have enough of that heat already.

Don’t add more heat to your pain by fighting, beating, trying to “win” against it. Be like cool water with your pain. Try it and see what happens next…..

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Crushed, overwhelmed…. or held and uplifted by pain?

Pain Coach — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:44:30 +0000

When I really breathe in my own pain, and when I connect intimately with every other person in this very moment who is in this very same pain as I am, what happens?

When I really do this sincerely, the opposite can happen to what my mind fears….mind says how can I bear that much pain! I’ll be crushed, overwhelmed.

Yet what actually happens is different.

My personal pain is shared, NOT magnified. It can be sudden and miraculous how inner support arises from connecting with others in the same pain as I am. Right here. Right now.

It takes the focus off little ol me, and places it on the great, potent, powerful life that I am intimately made up of. Call that what you like.

Try these 4 steps.

1. For a moment, Imagine a scene that brings you into contact with deep peace, stillness and presence.

2. Breath in t every pore in your body hot black, burning smoky soot, breathe out of every pore of your body, light, cooling, soothing calmness.

3. Breath in your own physical, emotional, pain….. breath out, send out, relaxed open, peace and calmness.

4. Connect sincerely and intimately with every other person in the world in this very same moment, right NOW, who is also experiencing the same pain as you are….breathe in their pain, breath out/ send out to them all, pain free relaxed open-ness.

Do this whenever you can for a few minutes, finding your own natural breathing rhythm…….then see what happens next.

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Meeting the edge of struggle and pain….

Pain Coach — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:45:34 +0000

10 minutes on the eliptical machine this morning feels like a massive challenge. my own personal mini marathon, at the last two minutes Im just using pure will power to keep going. My legs just say no, we cant do this, stop, get off, you are killing us with pain! Yet something in me says OK, I’m sorry guys, but I’ve gotta keep going. If we don’t exercise these legs, we don’t get to keep walking. Simple as that. So I keep going.

Its a fine edge, how hard to push, and how much to rest and let things be. I know right now I have been letting things be too long. My legs tell me, they just stop working, I can’t walk from the car to the house without a struggle. I can’t stand for more than 30 seconds in one place without them feeling like they are going to collapse. Other things are going haywire too, I can’t control my bowels, sometimes the shit just falls out, anytime anywhere. Same with my bladder….

One voice in me says keep going, come on, keep moving…..get up and go again. Get on that eliptical, keep walking, keep moving. You must do it.

The other voice, just wants to lie down in green pastures and give up. Rest deeply and dissolve into the dark depths of comfort and mystery….and let this funny old body go. Enough struggle it says, enough pain, enough, enough.

I listen to something deeper than both. Both voices have their place. Yet something living in the moment is what I long to be guided by. The presence that can and does include both voices, and wisely knows the way to push and relax. This presence wisely knows that what is needed in each moment changes according to the moment. This is how I work with my edge of needing to workout hard, needing to work my legs with intensity so they don’t wast away.

This presence I follow, and in following it I gradually, step by step, live a life led by presence, as an intelligent, loving substance that knows that the way forward with this pain and struggle, needs both strength and kind compassion, firmly grounded in each moment.

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Baking, Smiling and Eating pain

Pain Coach — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:33:46 +0000

Living well with pain is a bit like baking a cake, or cooking a really great meal. Whatever ingredients we use and how well we prepare them and work with them determines the quality of the cake or the meal, and even more importantly whether or not its delicious or not!

Same with working with pain. If the ingredients of our living a great life with pain recipe are say, loving compassion, strength and courage, peace and power, will and perseverence, joy and pleasure, then whatever pain comes we bring those qualities to cook with our pain. If we are contracting in pain, bringing stillness and a deep out breath again and again will change it. What happens to your pain cooking process depends on you. What you bring to it determines the quality of the meal, (or pain) you get to eat.

Its the same as cooking a good meal, we can cook our pain.

No matter what you might think about, this it’s simply true. If you bring a smile to pain, and cook all along the through the cycle of your pain with a smile, it will change it. The smile produces something good to eat. You get to smile with pain. Sound’s weird. It is compared to the normal way we deal with pain, with a grimace, and ouch, and crying out. That’s real too. I know it, yet try both. Little by little, gradually bring a gentle smile to your pain, and see what happens next….

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Freedom with Emotional pain

Pain Coach — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:13:55 +0000

Freedom with Pain principles apply to emotional pain too….

A dear family member dies, or a marriage or relationship break up happens, or a friend gets injured in a terrible accident, or you just have a fight with someone you love and care about…

Emotional suffering comes in so many guises. Yet knowing this one deeper truth can reduce our emotional suffering, pain and anguish tremendously.

Turn and face your emotional pain with friendship kindness and strength knowing the deeper truth that you and the other are not actually seperate. It just appears this way. Don’t believe this appearance.

We are one living being. We are intimately connected. Every single thing we do impacts every thing else. We’ve just forgotten it.

Remember when I hate another, from this deeper level of Oneness, I am actually hating myself , hurting myself. Beginning here grounded in the truth of our shared humanity, our shared oneness how could we ever harm another. It’s just plain foolish.

We are One – live this today, treat others others like you would like to be treated and see what happens next…..:-)

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Empowering Attitude towards Pain

Pain Coach — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:58:41 +0000

My attitude towards pain and suffering determines whether I grow and mature and become empowered through pain or stay stuck as a victim to pain. When I can eat, gently, slowly and mindfully, and sort of chew my suffering and pain the freedom of the potential of who I am is revealed.

This freedom can be as strength, as courage, peace, love stillness or any quality or virtue. It seems that the depth of the suffering, the intensity of the pain has a direct and intimate relationship to the intensity, the vibrancy and the vitality of the quality that arises. Whether it be love, sweetness, openness, the more I am gentle, courageous, fearless and loving in the face of the pain,the more the qualities of presence seem to intensify. The pain drops away when there is less resistance to it. It sounds obvious and it is is true but when I can deeply breathe in the pain, allow some space around it. It lessens. When my body relaxes, when pain is causing it to contract, the pain itself is freed.

In allowing pain to be, not wishing or wanting it do go away, there is a natural acceptance and flow. A support arises. That support is intimately connected to breath. It is not easy, to breath in pain. The natural and instinctive reaction is to contract. So we need to learn how to train and retrain ourselves again and again to open, breath and relax in the midst of pain. We need to retrain our mind to stay present in the moment, to not push away the present pain. Accepting what is here now is a key, towards the easing of the contraction, the tightness and the instinct to push away. The more we push away the harder the worse it gets. The more we want the pain to go, to stop, to disappear the more intense the contraction.

It’s a double blind. I certainly don’t advocate bring it on.or I can handle it, give me more philosophy. But if you are dealing with any type of pain, physical, emotional, mental or spiritual, there is a subtle difference between not pushing the pain away and not inviting it either.

What works is to stay calm, to breathe, to bring all my courage, all my gentle sweetness, all my softness and kindness and loving compassion into the present moment to bear the pain.

This is the way in which I can eat pain. With gentleness, I masticate the present moment. I chew it with whatever quality and virtue I can muster in the moment.

It is not easy, it is a difficult and rocky road, especially dealing with any intense, searing pain. The primary orientation is softening, allowing the pain to be. Gently repeating the softening again and again moment by moment. Breath by breath. The repetition then become like a dance or a mantra, and eventually a pathway a doorway a journey towards a deep and boundless peace.

I learn to rest, can rest, deeply rest in the midst of this war, this conflict, this gripping all consuming pain.

posted by Daniel Feenstra at 2:30 PM

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Drugs, a clear mind, and pain relief

Pain Coach — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:40:37 +0000

Recently during a bad period of serious acute pain I made the decision to stop taking all the narcotics ( morphine etc ) and just do the marijuanafor pain relief. I did that, i started to just accept the fact that pain was probably not going to go anywhere fast and the sooner I could make friends with it the sooner I would be more at ease with this type of pain in my life. The dope was basically putting a barrier of cotton woolaround the stabs of pain, it didn’t make it go away but it did certainly make it easier to be with. Yet at the same time I was having a real struggle with being stoned 24/7. Basically my routine was to take the dope when I woke up in the morning and again as soon as the pain was present. As the pain was mostly 24/7 I was basically smoking quite a lot of dope to just try and alleviate the pain.

Yet through all this I was not enjoying the cloudy, foggy, stoned state that was mostly what my waking state would be. I decided I would really try and go to the next level of weaning myself off the dope and welcoming the pain just as it is. Regardless of how bad it was. This was the second phase of the process. It took some trust and gradual practice as I was basically afraid that I wouldn’t be able to sleep and would just get exhausted all the time. My intuitive sense was that things would work out OK. I just needed to trust the process. The process of welcoming pain. I did gradually just stopping the dope altogether. Each day I found I could gradually be with the pain with more openness, and less resistance. I still would find myself getting completely exhausted, just going from my bed to the toilet and back again was a big deal. Lying on the bed was also painful and difficult. Over the next few days and weeks things just gradually seemed to get easier and easier. The pain lessened and seemed to find its own way through me.

Yet what I am really very curious about and interested in, is that as soon as I started to allow the pain to be here, another intelligence seemed to get activated. This intelligence seems to have a life of its own, and when I respond to it and follow it, it does its thing. In this case its thing was to guide me back to the pain practice that I have shared with many people over many years. That when we welcome in our pain, when we allow it to be, when we make friends with and accept that if may just be here to stay, it too can be a path, a portal and a transition point to a whole new way of living with pain.

Then my life becomes a journey of how to live in Freedom with Pain rather than how to get free from pain. This simple shift in orientation and the practice to breath it in when it is here, is completely trans formative, and can and actually does have a direct impact and effect on not only my own pain, but also can bring me into contact with a deeper wise intelligence that can help me make sense of the pain, even when it doesn’t make sense!

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Finding what’s deeper than my Pain

Pain Coach — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:28:47 +0000

I know this might seem like a massive and difficult step and far away from where we are when we are caught in the midst of our pain. Yet it is true and possible to move into a relationship with pain that is liberating and freeing, when we accept where we are, when we allow where we are to be here, another dimension can open and reveal the inherent beauty, freshness, bliss that is this present

moment unfolding now.

Including pain, rather than eliminating pain can become the doorway to the region of living in freedom with pain. Living in freedom with pain, we gradually move to a presence centric way of life rather than a pain centric way of life. The presence of this moment becomes the center of life, rather than the pain of life being the center of my life. Presence centric means spaciousness becomes a place where I can rest and be, rather than some limitation in my own contracted sense and view of pain.

Remembering to deeply breath in the midst of pain, is a portal, a doorway to living in freedom with pain. Our breath can bring us directly into an intimate and delicate sense of life, that is always right here, right now, that is always available right here, right now. I don’t have to change anything, go anywhere or solve anything. I can just open up to my own breath as the way into the dimension of freedom with pain. I can allow and trust that this breath will inform me as to what needs to happen next. Breath and breathing becomes a guide to a spacious freedom to be with pain. Breath and relaxation with whatever type of pain is here becomes the friends that I need to keep near, to allow to be with me, all the time, 24 / 7 when I am in pain.

When I am in touch with my breathing in a deep and rhythmical way I am in touch with the depth and rhythm of a deeper dimension of life than my personal physical pain. I am in touch with the depth and rhythm of a much deeper rhythm of life that I am a part. Of which I am an intimate part, of which I am supported, held and loved, as a part of this great rhythm of life. I learn to breath and connect with the great rhythm, I learn to trust that this can and will and does support my life, support all life, not matter what comes my way. Be it pain, be it pleasure. I am intimately connected to the depth of life through my very own breath in this moment now.

Try it, enter deeply into your own breath, enter into spaciousness the next time you are in pain.

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Don’t Tough Out Pain

Pain Coach — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:21:32 +0000

Why tough out pain?

We need to discern clearly what is what in each situation that we find ourselves when confronted with pain. In acute trauma I’m all for pain relief. Modern medicine has done wonders for this type of situation. Why put up with pain when we don’t need to. It’s masochistic. I regularly find myself in situations dealing with very severe pain, about 8-9 out of 10 on the pain scale. In those situations I use morphine to deal with the pain, and I use the power of my own pain practice to be with the pain, relax, breath and stay open to the pain.

The most recent was a urinary tract infection earlier this year. I was staying on an island, about an hour ferry trip and car journey out of Auckland. The pain started, and I know this pain well, it just gradually increases in intensity until I can hardly walk, over about a 1-2 hour period. Well the pain began, and I headed straight down to the emergency doctor on the Island. The surgery was busy so I had to wait for about 30 minutes before getting any relief. In that situation I used my pain breathing practice while I waited for the doctor. I saw the doctor explained my history and situation and received an immediate intra-muscular injection of morphine. Within 15 minutes I was relaxed and in relief. I then had oral antibiotics for the tract infection and was back on the mend within a few days.

What I didn’t do was try to tough out the pain. This just doesn’t work. We need to really deeply check that we dont do this with our pain. We need to be kind to ourselves. Pain is bad enough in small doses, for those of us who have a lot of it, we need to learn to be really kind to ourselves and do what we can to alleviate it where we can.

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Common sense and pain relief

Pain Coach — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:49:29 +0000

Last night I had some friends for dinner, they brought there 7 week old granddaughter with them because the baby’s mum was in real pain. She had mastitis, which is when the ducts block when breastfeeding. It can be excruciatingly painful, and was so for my friends daughter. Anyways we obviously got to talking about pain.

One of the difficulties in this type of situation is getting relief. The young woman concerned was having panadol for relief. Now for any real serious type of pain panadol is just not going to cut it. It won’t work for real pain. The sense I have in this type of situation is this. When we are in pain, we do whatever we can to relieve the pain. We don’t just grit our teeth and bear it. We get help. We get the relief we need. This is often missed when dealing with pain. People often just put up with it and put themselves and often others through unnecessary suffering by not doing what needs to be done.

In this situation what needed to be done was getting some stronger pain relief. That was my advice to my friend, to get her daughter some strong pain relief fast. The facts were the young mum in pain was already on antibiotics and had stopped breast feeding, so there was no risk that the pain relief was going to impact the baby. Common sense would then say, deal with the pain. Get relief.

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Spaciousness, breathing and pain

Pain Coach — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:38:04 +0000

Noticing that inside this very breath is the opportunity to find a spacious freedom. Often it seems so much life is contained inside a small space. There just isn’t that much space to move or breath. Yet the fact is that this very breath can become a doorway to a spacious, vibrant and beautiful life! No matter what. Whether I am experiencing pain, or pleasure, the fact is that every moment I am breathing, is the very opportunity to open to the alive presence of life.

When we view pain as an opportunity to connect with our inherent aliveness we find the doorway into a place beyond our pain which is free from it, yet is still able to include it.

This seems like some sort of magical entry into a spacious realm where pain can co-exist with freedom, while we are still in pain.

One way of entering into this realm of freedom with pain is through our breath. Recently I received a little card from dear dad. He is suffering quite a lot as he goes through the final stages of his life. He is incontinent, often treated badly by the staff in the rest home where he lives, yet he still has such a deep and profound awareness of the freshness and aliveness in his own breath. He is a able to maintain contact with this life force in his own breath as he goes through the process of his life dropping away. As he goes through the process of his life ending and the suffering of his body, of his pain, of his having to wait long periods of time for nurses to come and attend to his needs. Whether its changing his continence pads, or attending to his pain, or to turn him over, or to pass him something he cant reach in his bedridden state…..through all this Grace comes and gives him the taste of the beauty of his very own breath.

In his pain “full” state he is able to maintain contact with the freedom and beauty that he is as a Soul. This freedom and beauty of his very own nature is the freedom, freshness and beauty of life that he is living in the midst of his own deep physical suffering.

Not only does he suffer from his body function difficulties but he is also suffering from the fact that he can’t be in his home. He so deeply wants to be living with the wife he adores and loves in the home he loves and knows is his home, yet he can’t. In accepting the place, the room, the home he lives in where he is in his rest home, he is finding is own freedom with pain. Not being able to live in the home he loves with his wife whom he adores. Yet somehow there is magic and intelligence in this life that he is living now. In this life where he is now. There is something beautiful and rich right in the heart of this very life. He is recognising this. That in the midst of the very pain and suffering of where he is there is something more. Something more is recognising what is already here that is beyond my pain. What is already here with my pain. What is already here can be a spacious, fresh, aliveness, an awareness that becomes richer, more substantial and real than the very pain itself.

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Welcoming Pain

Pain Coach — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:27:37 +0000

One of the most useful things we can do in our relationship with our own personal pain is to welcome it in.

It sort of sounds bizarre and is obviously a really difficult thing to do. Yet in practice it simply works.

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!

One of the major challenges that I had with this pain, and I know it can be a common one for many people, is that I didn’t know what was causing the pain. This makes it even more difficult to deal with the pain because i simply don’t know when it will stop or go away. Not knowing this brings me really in touch with my own fear of pain. Fear and not knowing make it really hard to just be with the pain.

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.

What wasn’t working was that the pain was continually getting worse and I was basically living in agony. I was completely in the mode of I do not want this. I just want it to go away. It is overwhelming and just too much. Not only could I not get out of bed without being inexcruciating pain, with what seemed like a white hot stabbing knife shooting up my spine, but I couldn’t pass urine without the same thing happening. It was literally like being in a nightmare. I had morphine tablets handy and took some of those to help alleviate the pain, yet it didn’t actually make that much difference. I called my doctor and he suggested getting in an ambulance and going up to the hospital. Knowing the system and having my own sense of the situation I couldn’t see the point. I knew they would only provide pain relief and could probably not operate to solve the tethered spinal cord problem as I had been told in 2005 that there was nothing further that could be done.

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.

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Listening for the Quiet Guidance Behind Pain

Pain Coach — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:05:40 +0000

Its sort of known. We hear about it. And wonder about it and hear the stories of other who have suffered greatly and in their suffering found great joy, or a depth of peace that transforms their life.

That is the all this message is. To point to that. To gently and delicately suggest that inside the depths of suffering there is some extraordinary key. That key opens the door to a world that is free of suffering, while being in the midst of it. Where there is a palpable sense of support, of softness, of open alive freedom. Of simple relaxation, of the field in Psalm 91 where I may lay down and rest.

This is my story,my life, my journey through pain to stillness. Through the exploration and experience of my relationship to pain is where I have found freedom. Like many keys to the mystery of life on the surface it just doesn’t make sense. On the surface the statement that pain and suffering can be a path, a way, a master key to joy, happiness and liberation seems bizarre.

This process has not been consciously designed, but seems like some intelligence beyond my understanding has placed me in this body to have these experiences. I didn’t consciously look for freedom inside the pain, or looking for relaxation or the alleviation of pain.

Through my life, through the situations, the experiences, the events that just unfolded I was fortunate time and time again to be placed in the heat of the kitchen, in the frying pan. Not through choice, I hated it, I hated the heat of the kitchen with a fury. I hated the suffering, I hated the surgery, the pain, the cutting, the needles, the torture. Again and again as a small child, and teenager I learnt to accept it. I learnt to find a way through it where I could relax. Where I could open, where there was trust, even in the midst of it. This has been my path and my journey, and continues now. I was given the opportunity time and time again to either crumble and dissolve or enter through the ground of the experience into the ground of love.

I did both. I crumbled and dissolved. I screamed. I fought. I smashed things. I hated. I vocalize hatred to those I loved. Ultimately I was directing my hatred towards the source of all this pain, not just the physical pain, but the ultimate betrayal of being left alone. The complete and utter injustice of that. Of what felt like repetitive torture with no end, with no reason, with no cause. Why was the call from within my soul.

Why me? What have I done?

Alone again and again throughout my childhood. Tortured by strange people, those situations and events repeated themselves and I resisted with all my might. Each time the news came, or the illness, or the advice that something had to be done, that I had to go to hospital, to have yet another operation. I fought like hell, I hated with a vengeance, I crumbled. I dissolved into a puddle, I gave up.

Somehow through that fact, that surrender, that giving up, the murmur spoke to me.

Relax. Trust. Rest in this black, dark night…

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