“Pain affects more Americans than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined.” The monetary cost to society is in the hundreds of billions. Physical pain was the major impetus for me becoming a healer. I was thrown out of a car when I was seventeen and that threw everything in my body out of whack, and produced plenty of pain for many years to come. My response to the pain, which is pretty typical for many of us, was to brace against it. For example, I tensed up the arm with the shoulder pain in a misguided attempt to help it and brace against the pain. This pattern, I believe, set me up for fibromyalgia, which is a chronic pain syndrome where the body reacts to even the tiniest things with an exaggerated pain response. Through the years, I tried everything I could find to relieve the pain. Nothing worked long term. I’m grateful for that now because I never would have found energetic healing without that incentive to keep finding help for myself personally. Energy healing helped tremendously. Not only could I use modalities like Reiki to deal with each flare up, but energy work also took me out of being in almost constant pain. Life is full of challenges and my body still reacts to them with hypersensitivity, so I still have instances of pain. It was through dealing with one of those times that I became a witness to the pain in a way that I never had before. I sat quietly, attempting to be fully present with the pain. I found myself both inside my body experiencing the pain as I normally do and outside my body witnessing it as separate. It was not an out-of-body experience, more like a spontaneous shift in perspective. I found myself laughing with the pain as each new twinge came: “Wow that was a good one. Ooo, look what you’re doing now.” The pain felt walled off from the rest of my body and it felt very manageable in this state. It also felt very temporary, like, this, too, will pass. I was able to witness the pain from a more detached state. It was simply something the body was experiencing, without any fears, worries or other thoughts attached to it. The pain was there, but the suffering was gone. This first experience of the witness to my pain changed the way I viewed and dealt with my pain going forward. The state of witness is a common concept among people who meditate or participate in other spiritual practices. People find they can become a witness to daily events without getting caught up in the drama of them, allowing them to solve problems in an objective, non-reactive way. They also can witness an emotion and follow it to see what is really causing it, not just how it appears on the surface. With that knowledge, they can deal with the issue directly. I had experienced these other aspects of the witness, but I had never before felt it with respect to pain—at least not to this extent. I had used the quiet state to explore pain, to go inside it, to find out what it needed, but I had never felt the state of detached witness before. It was liberating.

Meditation

Meditation is one of the best ways to become the witness. In cultivating a meditation practice, you will likely find that your pain decreases, whether you achieve that state of witness or not, because you will be reducing stress and inducing relaxation, which will reduce pain. Set the intention of the meditation to better understand the pain and its causes. Ask to know what it looks like. Give words to what it feels like. Ask what it needs. It may need heat, cold, forgiveness, love, joy or any number of things. Listen to the messages. They may come in words, visions, knowings or feelings. Then use this knowledge to give the body what it needs. For example, on one occasion, a long-standing shoulder pain presented to me as tightly knotted tree roots. Each day that I sat to meditate, I relaxed and saw those roots getting looser. I watched with great compassion. I saw spaces of daylight begin to show themselves within the tangle. I gently breathed into those spaces, sending energy, healing and love. Over the course of days, this long-standing pain subsided as I learned to give the body what it needed. Meditation is about adopting a position of watcher. Watch the pain’s rhythms. Feel it ebb and flow—without judgment and, if possible, without physically tensing against it. Allow it to just be. Relax into it, then relax even more, then more. You will be surprised how many layers of tension surround it. Breathe into it, sending energy deep inside. Becoming the witness, or even simply taking the steps above, will bring you more fully into your body’s experience, without avoiding it or ignoring it. There’s an honoring taking place. The state of witness, when it is achieved, will add another level of objectivity and compassion. It helps you to experience the pain as separate from yourself—separate from the soul part of you. It is simply something the body is experiencing. You know that it will pass. Don’t try too hard. There is no “trying” in the state of witness. It is simply being. All of this allows for going through the pain with a better emotional state. Most people who have chronic pain will tell you that the pain is easier to deal with when they are happy, and that the pain feels more intense when they are sad, worrying or angry. Meditation and being the witness help the pain to just be, without depression, hopelessness or emotional attachment. It simply is. You may also find that you have more instances without pain, that the pain lessens and you may even find yourself with no more pain. Views:]]>