Come to think of it, many of us have been in this place and it is NOT always "easy" to "BE AT EASE" all the time! You have 'internal' dilemmas, relationship conflicts, pressures from 'society', and so on!
So, here is some help. There is an online "The Pain Relief Center", which is not-for-profit and invites everyone to "Use the power of the mind to eliminate pain regardless of the cause, heal the body, and improve your quality of life".
They use an integrated psycho-spiritual-physical approach to help you free yourself from pain.
Apart from other products, they offer free pain lessons. An excerpt from "Using Meditation for Pain Relief / Variations":
- At the first sign of pain, say a migraine attack or back spasm, try to relax and bring yourself back to a meditative state. The more you practice relaxation and meditation training, the easier it is to do this. Pain naturally causes us to fight and struggle, or try to escape. This is itself unpleasant, and it also causes physiological effects that make pain worse, particularly headache and backache. Our fight or flight defensive reaction creates changes in hormones, blood flow, and muscle tension that make headache and backache much worse.
- If we can relax and stop struggling, fighting, or trying to escape, we can break this "spiral of agony" and defuse the pain. You must experience for yourself that trying to fight the pain or to escape from it makes the pain worse. You can also experience that the pain changes when you stop fighting or trying to escape.
- One of the best ways to stop fighting or trying to escape is to turn your attention TOWARD the feeling of pain in your body, and to stay with it. This works particularly well with headache, backache, gastrointestinal pain, and other types of pain that are especially made worse by the emotional component.
- When you learn to turn your attention toward the pain, to examine the sensation of the pain, and to examine the emotion associated with the sensation, you will experience a most extraordinary thing. The pain will change in quality, move around, or abate entirely. Most people continue the fight -- they never stop struggling with the pain, so they never see what happens when they stop fighting.
- A variation of the above technique is to try to locate the pain precisely, and to determine its size, shape, and quality. For example, when your back hurts, try to describe exactly where the pain is in your back. Imagine a picture of your back and try to localize it exactly on the picture. How spread out is it? What kind of pain is it? Is it burning, crushing, dull, or prickly? Pay attention and make sure you are right, particularly about location and extent. This forces you to bring your awareness to the pain.
- A related technique is to use imagery. For example, if you have a headache, you might imagine a window opening in your head and the pain leaving through the window. Or you might imagine cool water flowing over the pain. This also forces you to bring your attention to the pain.
- If you do any of these exercises while remaining relaxed it will counteract the emotional component of pain -- the tendency to fight or escape. In many cases the results are dramatic. Some people find they cannot localize the pain at all, because when they pay attention to it, the pain moves away. They find themselves chasing the pain around, and it eventually dissolves.
Say "YES" to freedom from pain.
Posts
