Attachments.

We all have attachments to things. They vary from time to time, depending on what we believe our needs to be. Try and identify what they are. Write them down and be honest with yourself. It could be that you’re attached to a certain thought, belief system, your mobile phone or particular food types, i.e. cravings for sugar. Work back from the primary thought to understand where it comes from and what its trigger may be. Don’t judge yourself for it. Don’t try and go “cold turkey” on the attachment. Just work towards, each and every day, relinquishing your attachments, perhaps starting with one, and take baby steps in letting go of certain thoughts and feelings surrounding them. It will take time and so don’t be impatient with self. Honor your journey here, take your time and process each thought with love, forgiveness for self and patience. Keep a journal - put pen to paper to get certain thoughts and feelings out of your mind. Healing takes time. Embrace the “time” - for however long that may be and go forth into each and every day with the mission of feeling that little bit more free. 

Understanding Pain - Pt. 2

Now back to this pressure applied to my hand. If I increase the pressure, eventually I invoke a sensation that I would describe as pain, here a threshold of input from tissues to brain has been reached where the brain now interprets a problem. The pain experience has begun, a message to my conscious self to say, please pay attention here, something is not right. 

This is an example of mechanically driven pain. Now in the case of an infection, the pain is chemically driven, where nerve endings in infected tissues are responding to chemical changes and pointing out the problem area.

We feel chemically driven pain during and after a big training session, where so much lactic acid has been produced in tissues that nerve endings become chemically irritated and send these messages to the brain.

Some pains are relatively easy to understand, they are ones we expect, like when I have rolled my ankle, torn a ligament, the ankle swells, it hurts, I rest it, get some treatment on the local tissues to help healing, I get moving again and the pain goes away.

If however the injury causes me to have a large fear response, say I injure my back at work, and the injury has an impact on my ability to provide for my family and say my dad has suffered form low back pain for the last 20 years and I have watched it cripple his life I am going to be very afraid of what is going on, and when I am very afraid I am going to get over protective, create adaptive movements to avoid further hurting anything and I’m likely to become more sedentary. Further more, my nervous system is going to heed these fear messages and sensitise itself, so that I will in time feel more and more pain as part of my brain’s attempt to protect me.

Fear increases tension as it seeks to protect and in doing so can facilitate and perpetuate pain. It must always be considered when working with pain.

Education, creating understanding and empowerment has a huge impact on reducing fear and pain.

There are many things that can contribute to the creation of pain. You can get tummy pain from infected food; you can also get it from stress, and chronic anxiety. You can get a headache because you’re dehydrated, or because you’ve got a viral infection but also because you’re  holding onto a build up of frustration or anger.

Chemically driven pain can be created by poor nutrition. If we don’t eat well, we’ll hurt more. Other lifestyle factors too contribute. We are more sedentary now than ever before in history, and when we do exercise, our exercise is often uni-dimensional, jammed into a short time frame, and often ineffective in relaxing the tensions and moving the stagnancies in the body that drive pain. 

As kids we explore and express so much more physical freedom, we run and jump and hop and wrestle and roll around and dive and climb trees and as we get older, things become more serious, less fun, less play, more work, more responsibility, more burdens and so our bodies follow our minds into the contraction.

One of the biggest generators of pain both chemically and mechanically is stress. Under stressful situations stress responses involve suppression of the immune system, increase in heart rate, suppression of digestion, increases in biochemical’s like adrenalin and cortisol, which are involved in inflammatory pathways and the creation of tension.

Stressful emotions like frustration and anxiety are contracting of the body.

Anxiety for example is a fear, based emotion. It is generated within the body following a perception within the mind of threat or danger. The emotion drives an action. All emotions want to become actions. Anxiety wants to move, it wants to run away or race around and fix stuff or control stuff. If we wake ever day with challenges that strike worry and fear in us then we are constantly generating anxious tension.

Likewise the emotions of frustration and anger generate tension in the body for fighting. These are emotions of fighting. We have them not just in conflict with people but also in conflict with situations; at times when we feel powerless or out of control, which for many is often. Sometimes we might feel really angry and feel that we cannot express it. The body has been told to fight and then told to block the action of fighting and so a tension is created in the body. This is another pathway to pain.

We also commonly suppress the expression of the emotion of sadness. The emotional body lives within the physical body. When we suppress emotion we create conflict, tension and stagnancy in the body – all lead to pain.

So, when you have pain, pause before you hate it or become afraid of it, and instead, seek to understand it. Can you see its message and respond accordingly? In your search to understand the messages you may be confronted by things you’d rather avoid. Things like the origins of your stress. This is not pains fault, but rather, your challenge.

Get more connected to your body so that you can pay more attention to the messages it conveys, maybe you’ll pick them up before they have to speak so loud as to become pain. Be mindful of the way you move, how you live, what you eat, and what stresses you, and importantly learn about how to meet stress, release stress and reduce stress. This will be the greatest thing you can do to reduce your pain and help your health.

Written by Adam Cootes of Arising Self

Follow Arising Self here

Understanding Pain - Pt. 1

Pain is not something we learn a lot about when we’re growing up, except that we don’t like it, we see others curse it, wish it away, see it as a problem, often an enemy, as an affliction, something being forced upon them from some external place. We learn to be afraid of it, rather than taught to understand it.

I remember as a child, the pain of sore throats and ear infections, cuts, scrapes, the loss of skin on knees and knuckles in hockey matches; the pain of a broken nose in cricket – all of these physical injuries or illnesses, infections and the like.

I was riding in a taxi recently whilst interstate teaching and said to the driver who had asked the reason for my visit that I was running a workshop on “pain”. After a pause, she said, now there’s something I hate. This said a lot for me. It’s our relationship with pain that is so important in being able to change it.

If you hate it, you reject it and then it’s hard to understand it and heed the message it is offering.

I appreciate now that there are many contributions to pain and that pain has a purpose. It is not the enemy, and although it is unpleasant, it is very unpleasant for a reason, because it is a message about a problem. It is essentially a message from myself to myself, and if I listen to the message and understand it I may be able to grow, heal, prevent recurrence of the pain and often times prevent further illness and even death.

Pain is part of our survival armory; it is like an alarm system, a response to perceived, actual or potential danger.

Pain is unpleasant – and is so for a good reason. We’re meant to pay attention to it. If it weren’t so uncomfortable, we wouldn’t pay attention to it.

I have come to learn also that pain does not exist in the tissues of the body. Although I feel that pain is in my thumb when I hit it with a hammer, it is not. It is in my brain. It is created there by centres of the brain that have interpreted messages coming via the nervous system, from the squashed tissues in my thumb.

Pain exists in the brain and is part of a much broader response to the perception of danger to the tissues of my body. These include:

·       Tension, which might be splint to protect an area of the body that has been damaged

·       The sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which drives the fight and flight responses through the body including chemical responses that kick start inflammation and healing pathways.

It is these neural and chemical interconnecting message systems between mind and body that mean that I can no longer allow myself to perceive that the mind and body are separate

Pain is an experience; it involves sensation, memory, and emotion and is unique and subjective to each individual.

Say I apply a light pressure to my thumb, a message is sent by a mechanically compressed nerve ending (well many lightly compressed nerve endings to be honest), to my spinal cord and then on up into my brain where it travels to many centres including the somato-sensory cortex, at the top of the brain. This is where the map of the body exists in the brain. This is how I know that it is a pressure applied to my thumb and not my big toe.

If I were a soldier, and had gone to war, and were involved in a skirmish and got shrapnel in my hand which got infected and had to be amputated I could years later still feel pain in my hand that no longer existed because the messages were still moving between these centres of the brain. This phenomenon is known as phantom limb syndrome, and proves again that pain is not in the tissues.

To be continued in “Understanding Pain – Pt. 2”

Written by Adam Cootes of Arising Self

Follow Arising Self here

The Beauty in Natural Disasters.

We cannot control or decide when nature inflicts damages upon our towns and cities. We’re not in a position to bargain, decide or control when mother earth chooses to make her mark to varying degrees. Think Sendai, Japan. New Orleans hurricane and most recently, the Oklahoma tornado. Because we have to relinquish control, all we can do is ultimately look to the positives out of these situations that arise. I love seeing fellow neighbours, colleagues and towns come together to lend a hand. I love seeing various not for profit’s campaigning to save lives and providing resources. I love seeing every day people become heroes: Rescuers and life savers. In many ways, people and land have the opportunity to re-paint their lives. Lessons of all kinds are learned. Gratitude, love, hope and humility deepens. A sense of community widens. It’s mother earths way of cleansing and flushing the earth, demanding and commanding change amongst us. Whilst the pain of loss is unbearable for many throughout these challenging times, there also comes an opportunity for change, growth and new perspective. Life is not supposed to be easy. We will never have control over mother earth and we’re not supposed to. All we can deal with are the cards that have been dealt for us all, and be grateful and thankful for the life we do have. We can only control so much. At the end of the day, we all have to learn to let go, no matter the situation or circumstance, and grieving is a part of that and that's okay. There is beauty in absolutely everything, including loss and pain.