Karen was in the other day for her regular visit and she noted that after a year and a half of care, when she feels pain now, she feels it much more than she used to. She said this with a tone that implied a question: Why am I feeling pain more now? Shouldn’t it be the opposite?
I went on to explain that with NeuroStructural care one of the benefits is that your nervous system becomes more stable and resourceful so it drops its conditioned defences. This makes you more sensitive to your environment. By that I mean that you can better perceive the actual world around you and you don’t need to spend energy on insulating yourself from everything that’s out there.
We are so conditioned in our society to eliminate pain at all cost, sometimes even before we feel it. And yet this approach is at the basis of our health care crisis. By trying to avoid or eliminate the experience of pain, we create our own suffering.
There is a disorder called “Congenital Insensitivity to Pain and Anhydrosis” or CIPA where children are born with the inability to feel pain. Before you go thinking that this is a super power, consider that these children have a decreased life expectancy. They must constantly be checked for cuts, bruises, and other unfelt injuries.
Pain (and other bodily signals) serve us by telling us what’s going on and whether we need to change what we’re doing. It’s then our decision to make. And this is where we can get hung up. We end up blaming the pain for us not wanting to take a closer look at what we’re doing.
Maybe the pain is an enormous stress we feel when we’re faced with deciding whether or not to go visit family when you know that’s what’s expected of you. Maybe the pain is the negative self-talk after seeing the number on the scale climb because you can’t seem to get a handle on your eating habits. Maybe the pain is feeling so frustrated from finding yourself in the same place again, after you promised yourself things would be different. Pain comes to us in all sorts of ways.
Deciding to move forward means you won’t focus on the pain. What you want to focus on is the outcome that you desire, having courage, tapping into your inner strength, learning to trust your intuition and remembering that you are way more than you think you are.
If all of this makes sense to you, then I’ll ask you, why would you ever want to take the pain away? It is through pain that we grow.