How I Found Freedom in the Space of Chronic Pain
When I first came across the Three Principles a little over a year ago I had been struggling with quite severe chronic pain for about 5 years.
Over the years I’ve tried everything — from traditional medicine to all kinds of alternative healing approaches, different therapies and meditations, mindfulness, countless supplements, etc. About one and a half years ago I came across the term TMS (Tension Mindbody Syndrome) and learned about all the brain science on chronic pain, which was very interesting and helpful, but still kept me in the loop of trying (very hard) to get better.
What all these approaches have in common is the notion, that being in pain is not okay (which of course seems very understandable) and so they offer you all kinds of techniques to get rid of it.
Luckily I was introduced to the Three Principles and that’s when I started seeing something new. Now I’m experiencing moments, or even days, when I couldn’t care less about the pain. I’m experiencing this deep sense of freedom, that’s not dependent on how freely I can move or what I can do in the outer world.
I’m starting to see that when I’m in a low mood I tend to get very annoyed and frustrated with the pain. But you know what? If I wouldn’t be in pain, I would get frustrated with something else. I can watch myself picking some kind of content to blame my frustration, anger, or desperation on.
And I’m questioning the truth of that more and more. A lot of times I can’t really take it seriously. I can see the fluid nature of my thoughts. I can see my moods rise and fall. I’m becoming more aware that I believe one thing about my life on one day and another one on another day (or even in the next minute). It all doesn’t seem so solid and so real anymore.
I’m beginning to see that the more ‚urgent‘ something feels, the more convinced I am that something has to be done about this RIGHT NOW, the more likely it is that I’m just caught up in a thought storm.
And there are moments when I feel that this newfound freedom, this new way of living my life is so amazing!
In fact, it is so amazing and sweet and rich, if I could exchange this for ‘just’ being free of physical pain, I wouldn’t do it.
So, I don’t know if or when my pain will go away. A lot of other symptoms have disappeared over the last year and I guess the pain is very likely to do that too, at some point. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and even though it comes with a lot of weird symptoms and changes in hormones/neurotransmitters etc., in the end all it is is a dysbalanced nervous system.
The good thing is: I don’t need to know anymore.
I’ve had some really cool ‚fresh thoughts‘ or ‘insights’ about pain. I have moments when I can see that the pain itself is just thought and it doesn’t feel like a problem at all.
And I can see that every time I’m falling into the illusion that it shouldn’t be there, that the fact that it’s still there must mean that I’m doing something wrong, I’m starting to suffer.
What I know now is that there is total freedom, happiness, and peace of mind available regardless of the pain.
I’m starting to suspect it’s regardless of any circumstance really.
And that is all that pain is: nothing more or less than any one of an infinite number of things we can experience and live through in this life.
Life is not only made of rainbows and pink fluffy stuff. Sorry to break this to you… :)
It encompasses all kinds of experiences and circumstances. It is infinite.
I can’t control it and I can’t protect myself from it.
And it’s not my job to try and do that. This is such a relief for me. It’s not my job to fix it. Whatever ‘it’ is.
I can try and try and get very stressed out and frustrated … And sometimes I’m still doing that. But again and again, there are these blissful times when I fall out of it. When I regain this sense of connectedness to something far bigger than me.
And I just know that I’m being taken care of.
And in the end, there really is nothing to fear.
So what I hope to share with you, is that this feeling of security and peace and love we are all looking for is always available, right in the middle of it all. In the middle of all the chaos and messiness and imperfection.
It’s really always just one new thought away.
