When we experience pain, whether physical or emotional, it can be like being shot with two arrows. The first is the real pain, the causal factor. We may not know what it is, but there is usually a stimulus. 
When we experience pain, whether physical or emotional, it can be like being shot with two arrows. The first is the real pain, the causal factor. We may not know what it is, but there is usually a stimulus. 
When something happens that causes pain, such as a twinge in your knee, the body sends a message via the central nervous system to the brain, where the thalamus receives this information, relays it around the brain to get inputs, then reactively sends out a pain message. A lot of factors are considered, including previous experience of such an event. The severity of pain experienced can be impacted by mood, stress, and anxiety - and just generally the way we feel. 
 
Therefore, although you might feel that the pain is not in your mind – it kind of is! Although pain is real, the response to it is created in the head. Pain is a vital alert system to tell us that something is not right in the body, and we need to take action. This is extremely useful of course if we have a broken leg. The pain message is a warning to take the weight off it. This kind of pain is acute. But when we have chronic pain - that is, the type of pain which lingers even after tissues have healed - is where the mindfulness approach can really turn the volume down on the suffering. It is this type of pain where the mind and body play tricks on each other, and we can get stuck in habitual pain signals which should have long gone. 
 
In the case of back pain for example, where there may be no physical diagnosis or root cause, the level of stress and anxiety we have causes a mental issue and a physical one. We go into protection mode - stop moving the body part becasue we are afraid of damage, the resulting stress cand worry causes muscles to tighten, worsening the problem. 
 
This is interesting to note, since your level of pain can therefore be dictated by your general stress levels, and further pain is caused by them too! Hence, yes you guessed it, learning to calm your mind through mindfulness is a fabulous tool to manage your pain. 
Back to the knee twinge. Remember the two arrows? The second one didn’t go astray. It came to hit you right after the first one. When we experience an event, be it pain or some other unpleasant sensation, we tend to give it a narrative. 
 
For me, having a history of knee trouble due to a footballing injury, any pain in my knee comes with a lot of baggage, and my mind will go through its habitual machinations, “Oh, it’s back / will this go on FOREVER? / Will I be able to go for that walk today? / Will I have arthritis when I am older? Have I got it ALREADY???”. 
 
The thoughts come thick and fast, as do the projections and false conclusions. My mind gets taken away on the journey. This means suffering unnecessarily most of the time since, if I truly pay attention, the pain ebbs and flows. Most of the time it isn’t even there. It gets magnified in my head, yet it is relatively unimportant and doesn’t bother me much in the full context of my life. 
This is what we do; exaggerate and catastrophise, which then leads to more stress and anxiety, which in a vicious circle kind of a way, means more pain experience. 
 
Using mindfulness can calm down the anxiety, effectively shooing away the second arrow, and even dampens the effect of the first. The body naturally heals given the right circumstances. Learning to invoke the relaxation response, rather than stress out about pain, is the vital platform for that. 
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Tagged as: Mindfulness, Pain
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