Illness as a Gift: My Experience With Chronic Pain

This article was written by a student and now college of mine regarding her experience with chronic pain. Worth reading if you have chronic pain.

When I was studying to be a Somatic Movement Therapist, one of the key learnings was that healing happens in the present moment. This is really difficult for chronic pain sufferers because we are usually trying to get rid of our sensations and not embrace them. Ultimately, you have to really understand and surrender to your present reality in order to gather the support to make an informed decision about where you would like to go and how you are going to get there.

This sounds really dumb in a way, but I remember my own experience with pain. I had to stop fighting with it. I needed to learn how to be with it. And in a sense, this relates to the work I learned from Neil Pearson (Explain Pain) where once you settle into what is happening, once you stop fighting it, you can ask yourself, "is this dangerous?" Often it is not the tissues that need to be healed in chronic pain, but the nervous system itself. I remember thinking after a year of pain, that I needed to figure out how to "make friends" with it or I was going to go crazy. Funny enough, as I surrendered my whole being to this idea, I started to get better.

Go figure!