Practice makes ……
Did you see the amazing show Queen’s Gambit on Netflix? ( loved the costumes!! ) Well, the main character is a chess player and she practices at night in bed by imagining the pieces moving on her ceiling. She practices over and over and, spoiler alert becomes a championship player. Repeated practice is how we get good at anything from tying our shoelaces to curing diseases.
But this is also what happens with Chronic Pain! When we repeatedly listen to scary thoughts we are sending danger messages to our brain which sometimes limits our movements by creating pain. One of my research case studies was a client who had terrible knee pain and as we started to discuss how the mind works she started seeing that before she stood up, she would always anticipate how bad the pain was going to be. She started to see that she was rehearsing the pain which was actually training her brain to produce it!
Natan Sharansky, a Russian dissident was jailed and tortured by being put in solitary confinement for months on end so to keep himself sane he practiced chess in his head. When he was finally released he emigrated to Israel where he became a member of parliament (resilience in action! ). Later, world chess champion Gary Kasparov visited Israel, and Sharansky beat him!! The brain is so powerful it can even create incredible chess players without a chessboard!! The mind is so incredible, concert pianists, actors, and Olympic gymnasts often practice and perfect their art this same way in their minds.
So, with the insight that we are always feeling our thinking and the fact that your pain comes and goes when you think about a particular movement or a situation even a season then clearly the pain is coming from the mind, not the body. This is great news because as you get a deeper understanding of how the mind really works, that you don’t have to be afraid of your thoughts, you are no longer a victim of that old idea. This insight has liberated many chronic pain sufferers as well as produced some beautifully dressed, fictional championship chess players! As Sydney Banks, spiritual teacher and philosopher said; “we are all just one thought away from good mental health.”
Chana Studley is an author and coach. Her latest book, Painless — a novel about Chronic pain and the MindBody Connection is available on Amazon.com
You can read an excerpt from her book here:
