I woke up last week with a pain in my neck.
Both metaphorical and physical.
This was one of those pains that was so intense that it cramped my stomach, throbbed in my head and made me feel nauseous.
I’m no stranger to pains – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, psychic and the other bodies we have – but this was something else. Also, I don’t live with pain or aches of discomfort, so it had been a while.
After massaging my neck and shoulder a little, I decided to lay on the ground and let the pain show me whatever I needed to see.
Because the Universe is a massive jokester, for the first while, all I saw was the Rumi meme:
‘These pains are messengers, listen to them’
Like a gif flashing across my consciousness, this meme kept showing up. But all that I heard when I listened, was “Owwwww, make it stop”.
Resistance. That was the message.
You see, we are taught, wrongly that pain is this awful thing that we should avoid at all costs. And when we have it, we should do everything in our power to numb or dull it, and try to heal it quickly. We are so uncomfortable with pain that most of us don’t really even live in life moments in the present.
Being Rumi, I’m sure he meant a hundred things with his words: These pains are messages, listen to them.
For me in that moment, listening to them, required that I don’t fight or fix the pain. That I actually listen to the pain, let it show me the way, allow it and myself to just be. This is horribly hard. Not to mention, I had other things to do that day and no-one wants to be in pain. But this is, as it turns out, exactly the belief that had to evolve.
Pain sucks. It sounds like crying and wailing, whether you do it silently or loudly.
But, in truth, it’s also something else. I’ve had pain before, lots of it, in many different ways and of great intensity. My growth, as an individual, always came when I stopped fighting or denying it. Yet, that remained my first reaction when any pain arose.
It is quite one thing to read in a book, or hear someone say: surrender is a spiral.
To actually be on your living room floor in intense pain, and roll begrudgingly down said spiral, is quite another thing.
This is what surrender to pain felt like that day and in the days that followed. It was messy, not at all graceful and required every ounce of courage to stay with myself in the pain, and not abandon my body as I had done so many times before.
The thing is, pain is great teacher. Anyone who has truly stayed with their pain in a loving way and moved through it will tell you that.
But this experience showed me something else. It showed me that pain isn’t this horrible demon that we are trained to fight and avoid at all costs. Maybe pain is the light that we follow, because it shows us our truths.
I’ll pause here to clarify what I mean by ‘staying with pain’. This doesn’t mean not seeking medical or professional help when needed. Rather, I mean acknowledging that there is something big that wants to be communicated, an invitation for us to listen to our body and soul communicating with us, a place long-locked within us that we now have the keys to.
For me, ‘staying with the pain’ involved lying on the floor and reminding my body that it is safe and that I would be okay. It also involved pressing the points of pain and seeing / feeling what arose – faces of people, past experiences and memories, thoughts and beliefs, things I was angry about from 20 years ago, something I should have said but didn’t and the likes.
Like a trailer to a movie I watched all this while breathing slowing and deeply until patterns started to emerge. First the pattern of resistance so prevalent in many aspects of my life. Followed closely by judgemental aspects of myself that arise when I feel unsafe or threatened.
That’s the funny thing with pain, when I finally surrendered to it, the messages came flooding in and pain subsided without the use of pain meds (this time).
This experience lasted the better part of 4 days, and every-time I managed to allow myself to dissolve into surrender, I felt more release, more love and more acceptance. And yet, resistance kept rising, less and less every time through.
It’s like we forget how amazing our bodies are, and that every cell in our body wants to vibrate back to harmony and has the ability to if we let it. Sometimes, we need help – maybe a medicine, a supplement, a doctor or a therapist – and that is wonderful and absolutely needed. These things are mutually exclusive though, they can work really well together so that we can sit in wonderment of how our body can have so much pain, and then release it all so quickly as well!
By the 3rd day, the pain had lessened, but the cycle still continued, so I asked a friend who was a masseuse for help. It was here, where the final piece of this I was holding onto with such dear life, finally became clear, and when it released, it was as if I had been given a neck and shoulder transplant.
I imagined the relief Atlas would have felt after handing the mountains he held to Hercules for a few moments.
Given how small our necks are, it’s truly amazing to witness the volume of crap we shove down there and what our shoulders truly have to carry. And we wonder why so many of us have sore necks, backs, shoulders and aches in our hips and head.
In a new way, this experience with pain taught me about the great intimacy that is offered when we actually sit with the parts of us that are in pain.
I had the image of an inconsolable 2-year old screaming and crying, with a parent-figure who wasn’t trying to make it better, but was just there holding space, a face or a hand, until child soothed the Self, folding back into the arms of great love that has always been there.
These are not easy moments. They take a lot of effort and energy. But if you can manage it, even for a little while, know that they bring with them a hundred times what they take.
For me it brought answer to old questions I had forgotten I had, along with clarity and peace.
It broke off the walls I swear I didn’t have around my heart, and allowed me to greater compassion to the parts of me still encaged in cold fear-based judgements.
More joyfully, it brought me some peace, context and a new path forward to bridge my head and heart for the times ahead.
And best of all, I was filled with simple wonder and amazement at these great things we have called bodies!
I hope you can take a moment to give your body a little extra love and gratitude today. Regardless of how you feel in it or how it looks or what hurts, this is where it’s all at!