Chronic Pain – The Fullfilment Project

The Lessons of Chronic Pain

Being in pain most of each and every day has its drawbacks, clearly. It limits ones capacity to live and move in the world, but it has some unexpected benefits. I know this from the personal experience of living with Fibromyalgia. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Carry On Regardless

Being in pain, as I often am, with pain in my muscles and joints, doing the everyday tasks becomes challenging. Let alone going to work and looking after my family, but I must carry on regardless. Necessity becomes the motivation to keep going, and this becomes a skill, the skill to keep going when all you want to do is stop.

Choosing Your State Of Mind

Being in chronic pain can send you into dark places in the mind. Depression is a slippery slope of despair that feels like the only way to think about the circumstances you are in. This is essentially helplessness, but helplessness is a learned mental state, which can be changed to an optimistic state, you can choose your state of mind. You can be in pain and be joyful. This is a skill and one that is very difficult to master, but with practice you can be in good states of mind no matter your circumstances.

Your Health Is Your Responsibility

Often we assume that our bodies will keep on going until we get old. This is why we drink heavily and spend the weekend partying. This is also why we think we can work long hours and not get enough sleep and keep going. Your body is an amazing machine that functions well when it is well maintained and well looked after, but less so when it is not.

We can’t live life at full throttle and when we get sick expect others to fix us. We can’t go to the GP and say fix me. They will often just give us some pills to take which will mask the problem and cause other problems.

The way to ensure we are healthy is in what we eat and drink, what physical activity we do, how good our relationships are and how we think. This is a lesson hard learned when you are in chronic pain, because you just want someone to come along and make it all go away. You have to be your own saviour.

Self Mastery

We have been blessed with amazing faculties of mind and body, but they do not come with an instruction manual, though much can be understood if you know where to get the correct guidance. Your mind and body are connected in a sort of synergy where each effects the other. Self mastery requires mastery of both, but mastery of the mind is the key. Being in chronic pain, you are brought face to face with the necessity of this kind of self mastery. What begins as survival can become thriving. What seems to be coping strategies can become techniques of self mastery.

It comes down to a choice of how you want to live your life.

Transforming Suffering

Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

We all suffer, to some degree or another. For most it is to feel hungry or thirsty a few times a day, but we have the means to access food and drink. For some it is not having the ideal life that we want, but we have a lot of things that we do like. For some it is physical suffering like chronic pain. For some it is the mental anguish of anxiety or depression. We all fit on this spectrum at different places at various times in our lives.

When we are in the harsher end of the spectrum there is a trap that we often fall into where we think of ourselves as a victim and we ask ‘why me?’ This way of thinking makes us feel helpless. Having been there, I can tell you thinking that you are a victim makes what you are going through more intense and it lasts longer. There is a better option. We can think of the suffering in life as the curriculum we are given in order to live a fulfilling life.

I have Fibromyalgia and I am in pain every day and I often feel exhausted. I went through feeling like a victim and it did not help. I have realised that if I am to live a happier life I need to make changes to my thoughts and to my daily habits. I need to change my diet and to practice Chi Kung (Qigong) and to meditate every day, because this will reduce the pain in my body, increase my energy levels and put me in touch with the enormity of that which is outside of me.

When we suffer we can either think of ourselves as victims or we can take ownership of our journey through life. Taking ownership transforms your suffering into a curriculum and provides wise lessons, but you have to put the work in.

What Can You Tolerate?

Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Having Fibromyalgia, as I do, my threshold for pain and patience have changed. Over time my skin has become extremely sensitive to cold, so much so that cold water feels like hot oil when it touches my skin. On the flip side, having chronic pain means that pain becomes an everyday experience, therefore it becomes kind of normal, so the amount pain that I can tolerate and carry on with my daily activities has increased. But when I am fatigued and in pain my level of patience can drop drastically.

This got me thinking about the experiences we have and the level of tolerance we have for different things. Experiences that cause anxiety will greatly reduce what we can tolerate, but experiences that cause self-confidence or contentment will increase what we can tolerate.

Being someone who regularly meditates will certainly help increase our tolerance levels. It is worth having a look at what your day to day experience is and where your tolerance is with different things. Then look at how you can improve these through self-reflection, meditation or something like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This is on the path to self mastery.

Suffering Is A Choice

Happiness, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

As someone who suffers from chronic pain, I can tell you that our mood and the way we see the pain, makes it worse or better. The pain is still the same, but it feels less intense or more intense depending on our level of focus on it.

I have Fibromyalgia and it causes nerve pain in my joints and muscle across my whole body. Some days are better than others. I’m beginning to master the art of pushing the pain into the background and getting on with my day. It is possible, through practice, for you to do the same.

There is another type of suffering, the psychological kind. We often get attached to things, experiences and people and when we lose them we suffer. It is right to become attached to the people in our lives, but being attached to things like our mobile phone, our car, or our designer wardrobe, means that when they get a tiny amount of damage we suffer.

The none attachment that many eastern religions talk about does not mean that we must get rid of everything we own and live in a monastery, it means we have the things we need, but we avoid becoming too attached to them. It means we own these things and they don’t own us.

We can become attached to pain too, both the physical and the mental kinds. We avoid change and cling on to that which is predictable. Often this is the pain of a broken heart or the judgement of others or simply chronic pain. However, if we freed ourselves and stepped into the future without clinging to such things, then life will be brighter and better than ever before.