Sanctuary for Heart Magic :Unwinding Spines & Unleashing Hearts utilizing Network Spinal Chiropractic in Boulder, Colorado: discomfort

POSTPONING & PROLONGING PAIN

Trying to get rid of experiences that you don’t like

There is no better way to postpone and prolong pain then attempting to get rid of experiences that you don’t like. What do I mean? Simply that we will do just about anything we can to not feel pain or discomfort of any kind even when its blatantly inside of our experience. Whether the pain be physical, emotional, mental or spiritual in nature there is often an inherent aversion to all forms it. Our aversion to, along with our attempts to get rid of, deny and prevent pain, are exhausting, depleting and prolong the pain that we ultimately feel.

Why do we dislike feeling pain so much? Well the most obvious answer is that it does not feel good, but it runs much deeper than that. We have a tendency to create stories about what pain means and this is the real pain. Most all of the stories we create are along the lines of what it is we feel we will lose if we feel the pain and acknowledge its presence rather than move away by trying to get rid of it or change it. Common examples are that we are afraid that the pain means something is really wrong with us, that we won’t be able to do the things we want to do, that it will get worse, that we will always feel it and it will never go away, that it will interfere with our life, that we won’t be supported, that we are bad or wrong, that we are not important or valuable, that we felt hurt, that we might die, etc. These stories keep us pushing away the uncomfortable sensations and feelings at all costs and propel us to try to get rid of or prevent pain whenever it comes into our experience.

To state the obvious you can’t actually get rid of your experience. You can attempt. You can physically manipulate or alter the stuff of your body, and the stuff you put into your body, which may provide some relief of sorts, but more often than not the experience returns or remains, that is until you shift yourself. Your experience of what is occurs in direct response to you. Experience cannot occur without the experiencer, and you are the experiencer not the experience itself. This is quite tricky to dissect out as we tend to identify ourselves as the experience itself, which is why we feel powerless or helpless when faced with challenging or painful situations. Until you really get this you will seek relief (separation of parts of your experience) more than healing (inclusion of all of your experience). You will attempt to get rid of, move away from or try to prevent certain experiences (which is simply another type of avoidance) because your only way to feel in some level of control is to try to manipulate your experiences. As long as you don’t recognize yourself as the experiencer you will be victim to experience and your only hope in feeling better is if your experience changes.

LENSES OF VIEWING PAIN

Widening perspectives

There are many perspectives with which we can view pain. The most typical, collective perspective that is chosen is that of “problem”, meaning the perspective that pain means that there is something wrong and thus we search to get rid of that which is wrong. Even though this is the most culturally approved perspective it is not the only one. More and more people are courageously challenging this perspective and choosing novel lenses with which to view pain when it arises in their experience. One point of clarification that I’d like to make is that at times it is necessary to seek direct support for your physical vehicle and what I am about to share is simply in addition too (a yes and and approach) rather than a replacement for. You can have novel perspectives on pain that don’t view it as a problem and still seek support at the physical level. The distinction being that the seeking of direct physical support is in alignment with your new perspective and not as a way to get rid of your experience.

One novel view is that of seeing pain as a message from Self to self to assist in remembering or realignment with our true nature. Part of being human is the forgetting of what/who we are. Due to this forgetting we make agreements with ourselves prior to incarnation to help us remember. Pain is one way we do this as it speaks loudly and gets our attention typically more than anything else will. So if we perhaps are either in a deep state of forgetting ourselves or life wants to help us remember ourselves at an even larger level, we might experience pain as a messenger to realign our lives, mainly our perspectives, with what feels good. If we can pause our story of wrongness long enough then we can begin to see where we might have a belief that is out of alignment with our true nature or some way we are engaging with life that is outdated and in need of an upgrade.

Another perspective on pain takes into account the emotional-physical body connection indicating that pain means something needs to be felt. When there are feelings that we are not willing to feel or experiences which evoke deep emotions that we bury rather than feel, often our body will feel the build up of tension that this creates. What isn’t felt binds energy and therefore we feel pain in the physical body. It isn’t always obvious what we are avoiding feeling and often times subconsciously we don’t want to feel because feeling invokes movement and change that we may not be ready to make in our lives. However as soon as we give ourselves the space to dive into ourselves we can access the emotions thus allowing them to run their course and keep moving through us. This can propel us into taking much needed action in our lives and we begin to see the pain as the catalyst for necessary change rather than a problem. In this way pain is a tremendous gift.

Thirdly pain can be seen as an indication of reorganization. When we are actively creating change and becoming anew in ourselves old structures need to destabilize and that can at times be experienced right down through the physical form. The destabilization process can bring with it sensations or pain or discomfort as we become anew.

In summary I invite the seeing of pain as simply another part of experience. The more you can dismantle your charge around pain the easier it will be for your physicality to repair itself. That dismantling comes from changing and widening your perspective. We must learn to work with ourselves in this way rather than against ourselves in fighting what is as that simply postpones and prolongs the experience of pain. It is sometimes the hardest to get ourselves to surrender and allow the experience of pain, yet the reward is great when we do and the freedom that we feel despite whatever is occurring is revealed on the other side of it.

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

True healing

Learning how to un-control your experience

healing and transformation Often when we experience some type of dysfunction in our body our first response is panic or fear as we feel the threat of how things have been functioning being compromised. We may feel the fear of loss of a certain way of living or being in this world, which is currently not acceptable to us. Our ideas about ourselves and who we are get shaken up as this force of instability that we call disease, pain and dysfunction arises in our experiencing.

In response to this potential loss of ourselves as we’ve known ourselves to be we often go into management mode in order to make sure that we can keep the sense of self that we’ve learned ourselves to be. In this phase we look for the modalities, treatments and people that will fix us so that we can return to the life and who we knew ourselves to be before this situation arose. Sadly many people stay in this phase of trying to control and manage their experience of themselves for the duration of their lives and never truly find acceptance for themselves as they are now. Instead they stay stuck in an outdated version of themselves that has come and gone.

Due to the fact that many people stay here trying to live as this past version of self, controlling and managing every aspect of their life, they don’t transform and come to know the new self that has emerged. Their focus is in the rearview mirror so to speak and they keep looking backwards rather than seeing where they are at right now. With this they will often feel sad, like they aren’t making progress, and like it takes so much effort to maintain everything. They may frequently feel low energy, be resentful of all the compromises and the degree of vigilance that they have to have in order to maintain their previous sense of self which they are still holding onto as who they are. They simultaneously continue to fear the unknown, fear who they would be if they accepted what and who is here now. This is often too destabilizing for our sense of self and so we will fight tooth and nail to keep who and what we’ve known ourselves to be.

Beyond controlling

Mastering healing & transformation

chain disconnected What does is take to get beyond controlling your experience? The first step is full acceptance of what is here now. Zero transformation can occur if you don’t do this first fundamental step. You will always feel like you are fighting something and “transformation or healing” will feel effortful because you are literally in a state of resistance to what is. Acceptance is often the hardest because it will feel like defeat to your mind. Like you are losing and something else is winning. Again this is only because you have been holding onto a previous version of yourself that is no longer really here or relevant for you anymore. You may still have attachment and desire for that previous version of yourself, not ready to let it go, even though its already gone. It only stays “alive” through your mental clinging to it.

Once you accept what is, healing and transformation can now effortlessly occur. This does not mean that there is lack of activity or doing, its simply that it becomes very clear to you exactly what you need to do, what methods will support you as you embrace this new version of yourself that is here now, and what changes you need to make in your life. It becomes crystal clear because you are no longer in resistance/control mode. There is no longer this aimless searching where you keep hoping that the next thing you try will fix you and you will feel like your previous self again. The resentment and effort is gone and you are simply doing what you must do.

What I’ve discovered through all my years of healing and transformative type of work is that when disease, pain and dysfunction arises it is always a source of destabilization to help us wake up to more of ourselves. We live in these limited bubbles of knowing ourselves and when we come to edge of a bubble that we’ve been living in that bubble needs to somehow burst. If we are really comfortable in our bubble it is harder for us to want to deliberately pop it and so life gives us situations (disease, pain, accidents, etc.) to make us a little less comfortable so that we will pop that limited bubble that we were previously living in. In this way we go beyond, stretch into more of ourselves, and into a range of ourselves that we previously weren’t experiencing.

This process is typically never comfortable. I believe that is done purposely. One of the gifts of having this human incarnation is that there is often a massive amount of discomfort that comes along with it. This discomfort gives us the opportunity to accelerate our soul’s journey at exponential rates, but this requires that we walk towards the discomfort rather than palliate or try to get rid of it. The more willing we are to let go of what is gone and accept the new, the more versions and flavors of ourselves we will get to experience and play with in this single lifetime. Healing and transformation will be a game that we master. We will become adepts of listening, moving with life, learning what we came here to learn and embodying the range of who and what we are.

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado