Pain

How the body signals for us to pay attention

Recently I’ve been exploring the words people come to me with in clinic. Words like stress, burnout, trauma, and pain. Each one seems to explain something clear, yet beneath them often lies the same deeper territory - expressed differently in every person.

When we experience pain at the most sensory level, what is actually there? Even extreme pain from physical trauma is hard to pin down as a single, isolated experience. It is many things, but first and foremost it is sensation.

We often try to block it, mask it, disable its effect. Pills, lotions, potions, physical therapy, injections. All attempts to remove the signal from our sensory experience. Sometimes with very good reason. We can be overwhelmed and consumed by it. But more often the response is habitual. We feel something, label it, take a pill, distract ourselves from having a body.

Pain, whether acute or chronic, is the body ringing a well-oiled alarm bell. One it wants us to pay attention to.

In its purest essence, pain is the body talking to us. It breaks through the noise of our everyday cognitive looping and the constant entertainment and distraction that we provide ourselves with, and that our culture propagates so well.

What would happen if we listened instead? Not with an agenda or interpretation, not for an outcome or for something particular to happen, but simply so the body can feel us paying attention. Connecting with the signal that has been finely tuned for us, in the life we are living, with all the nuance of everything we have seen and done.

The nervous system is the vehicle through which these signals travel. What if, in noticing, the system could feel that we are here, and therefore no longer has to keep ringing the alarm bell. Pay attention. Pay attention.

What if we did? What would happen? What would the nervous system do?

In situations of chronic pain, what are we not paying attention to in our lives? Why does it keep returning? What are we ignoring? How can we listen to ourselves so that the signal is no longer necessary? What might help us do that?

Yes, there is wear and tear in the body. Yes, things break down, need repair and support. But even then, those experiences can benefit from us making kinder choices in relation to being human and being alive.