Don’t Ignore the Pain

I was speaking to my therapist one day about the intensity of my anxiety. Anyone who suffers from chronic, acute anxiety will tell you how god awful painful it is. The conversation drifted from coping skills (count ten blue things in the room) :-) to medication and meditation, from which I have received a lot of relief. While I had practiced a type of meditation that asks that you focus your energy on the pain you are feeling, I never thought about the concept outside the practice of meditation.

My therapist suggested that I did not need to be sitting in the lotus position chanting OM in order to practice this type of coping skill. Over the years I have gotten quite good at ignoring pain. This includes my experience with IBS. We develop all kinds of mental and physical tricks to help us to avoid feelings of pain. This is like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. As time passes, the pain, resentment, and anger that you are experiencing will come back. You don’t know where, when or in what form, but it will come back to get you if you continually find ways to ignore it. That’s why I’d like to talk a little about my experience and success with focusing on my pain as it arises.

Practicing meditation for anxiety and IBS pain

This practice is not limited to physical pain, it can work with any type of pain you can imagine. Grief, loss, jealousy, anger, and IBS. The caveat is that this practice is not EASY. It takes a lot of practice and dedication. Why? Because we are almost hard-wired to avoid pain in a desperate effort to feel better quickly. My first attempt at waking pain meditation was when I was driving to work one day not long after the therapy session I mentioned earlier. I have terrible anxiety in the morning, my guts were killing me because of the IBS, I was running late and just generally freaking out.

I tried. I focused my attention first on my belly, then my chest and my shaking hands. I tried breathing exercises while I attempted all this. Then I started to cry. Well, I guess that didn’t work. But it was the beginning. I realized that had I tried to avoid thinking about how awful I felt, I would have probably thought about it MORE. With the ‘failed’ attempt I realized that during those few moments when I acknowledged that I didn’t feel well, I did not ruminate about all the reasons, rationales and shame I was feeling because of the pain. It did quiet my mind for a little while. And that was just the beginning.

Try to stop ignoring pain, and begin accepting it

Like starting an exercise or diet regimen following a period of little activity and poor diet, the beginning of this new practice is very difficult, inconvenient (ignoring it is way easier) and hard to continue for the long term. But as with anything new that is good for you, learning to acknowledge and accept your pain without analysis or judgment can really do wonders for any pain management program. Give it a shot. What have you got to lose?