The Essential Shift to Reduce Chronic Pain

What would it be like to experience pain but to not react to it?

What if instead you could learn how to inhabit your body with curiosity, trust your intuition, and know how to listen to the inherent wisdom of your body, even when it’s hurting?

One of the keys to healing is learning how to change our relationship to chronic pain, and to understand that ultimately the brain attempting to keep us safe by giving us the experience of pain.

​Pain begins when neural circuits from the brain are fired.

This could occur during an initial injury, or it could occur seemingly out of the blue. Over time, these circuits become wired and become an easy default for the brain and nervous system when under stress.

One example of this is phantom limb pain. There is clearly no tissue damage currently taking place, yet the brain and nervous system use a familiar pain response that is already wired.

There are also non-pain circuits that are ready to be used. In other words, there is possibility for you to feel ease. You just have to fire, wire, and exercise these neural pathways of ease.

This requires intention and practice.

​Let's dig into a little bit of pain science so you understand what I'm talking about.

Pain is a protection.

Without it, we would not survive. It alerts us to something potentially dangerous, and evokes a behavioral change to keep us safe.

If you put your hand on a hot stove, your brain sends a pain signal to evoke a behavior change – taking your hand off the stove. This is how the pain response system in your brain, nervous system and body should work. For acute moments of danger.

However, in most cases when pain has become chronic, the brain is misinterpreting safe sensations as dangerous, simply because that neural circuit has become wired and familiar.

Your brain’s main concern is simple: Are you are safe or in danger?

If your brain perceives that you are in danger, it will easily evoke a familiar experience of pain to put you on high alert.

There are many terms used to describe this process including neuroplastic pain, neural circuit disorder, TMS (tension myositis syndrome coined by John Sarno), and mind/body syndrome to name a few. The term you will hear me use most for this is neuroplastic pain.

Safety and danger signals become generalized in the brain based from your past experiences and current life stressors. This process works similar to anxiety.

For example, if shoulder pain is a neural circuit that has become wired, and you get emotionally triggered, your brain perceives general threat, and can easily use the neural circuit pain pathway in your shoulder as a way to get your attention.

The problem here is that we humans tend to do everything we can to avoid uncomfortable emotions. When we cannot process our internal, emotional world because of unconscious emotional repression and/or chronic stress, that's when the boil-over can occur with physical symptoms.

Once you understand this, you can begin to shift your relationship to your chronic musculoskeletal pain, IBS, migraines, chronic fatigue, or other related conditions.

When you recognize that pain is so much more than just a simple cause and effect process between the physical body and the pain experience, and that your nervous system and brain are highly involved, you can start to cultivate a more conscious and collaborative relationship by reducing the fear, worry, and frustration around your symptoms, and begin to gain insight into what is rooted underneath them.