Three days ago I woke up from a restless nights sleep with a crick in my neck. For those of you who have not had one, lucky you. The pain is so bad, that it forces you to keep your head straight, so that the pain doesn’t shoot through your neck, around your head, down through your body, and out through your feet. 

While experiencing this pain, a friend came over a gave me an exercise for the pain. Instead of avoiding the pain and trying to run away from it, go into it. By this I mean, if you are having pain, shut your eyes and breathe into the pain until it goes away. I would keep turning my head until I felt the pain, then I would breathe until it would dissapate. I then would turn it some more and breath into it again. I did this with the pain for about 45 minutes. I was shocked. First of all I realized that I will do anything to avoid pain…

Why, because it’s painful! My mind would start to say things like “if you keep turning your head, you won’t be able to move it back, and it will be sooooo painful when you do” or “your going to hurt yourself, stop doing it” or “if you keep doing that your head is going to fall of”.  It was saying anything to get me to not feel the pain. Now, I’m not suggesting that if you have a sprained leg to keep moving it to feel the pain, that wouldn’t be a good idea for a strain. But what if you just shut your eyes and breathe into it. Just be with the pain, see what it really feels like, and your feelings around it, instead of trying to avoid it by maybe watching TV, calling a friend, doing anything to get away from it. 

What I realized is the pain is just a sensation, just like cold, hot or tingling, etc.. For me, I had fear around the pain, and by going into it, it allowed me to be with it, realizing that I had nothing to be afraid of, and realize that my mind was the only reason I was avoiding it. Because my mind was saying “This is Scary…STOP feeling this”. When I allowed myself to feel it, it didn’t seem so scary, although some emotions did come up around it, and when they did I just looked at the emotions and didn’t judge them. 

So the next time you are in pain try to breathe into it and see what you are feeling around it. I am going to keep doing it every time I feel the sensation of pain. My body is feeling pain for a reason, it wants me to pay attention to it, instead of leave it. I would love to know what you experience with this exercise, keep me posted.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under Self Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.