When Pain is Your Secret Friend Insights November 2004

When you have ongoing pain, it becomes the strange ally of your subconscious mind.  It is familiar, dependable, and always with you.  It defines how you live, what you can do, and the choices you make.  Therefore, it defines you.  Sometimes, for your subconscious mind, that is exactly the goal. 

The subconscious mind is a funny thing.  When you consider the subconscious, it's vital to remember that the agendas and motivations of that part of your brain are very  different than your thought processes.  You probably 'think' you want to be pain-free - that thinking goes on in your cognitive brain.  Your subconscious, on the other hand, may be reacting to primitive programming, to genetic messages gone awry, and it may see your pain as a useful tool to protect you from the big, bad world. 

What could possibly motivate that primitive part of your brain to see pain as an ally?  Remember, it has different motivations than the thinking part of your brain.  It may see your life as populated by threats, such as bad air, bad traffic, angry people, job stresses, and more - those threats are real and exist, but they are not immediately deadly, and sometimes it takes some conscious work to remove the typical circumstances of daily life from the threat list accumulated by the subconscious mind. 

What would cause the subconscious to put normal things on a threat list?  Partly it's because of how humans learn.  Here's an example:  if you have a job that creates stress, that means your body generates chemicals like adrenaline in reaction to your job.  The creation of adrenaline is a natural stress reaction, but it's also a part of the reaction to threat - the same chemical would be released in your blood if you were faced with a mugger.   Is it any wonder that at the subconscious level, where there is no access to the intellect and intelligence of the cognitive brain, the primitive brain might be confused and consider your job a threat?  What if, having your best interests at heart, your primitive brain tried to find a way to save you from your job?  What if it's only way to do that was to make your body resist your ability to go to work? 

Take a moment and recognize how that effect can be generalized, and aggravated.  What if family events, such as Thanksgiving dinner, are sometimes stressful?  Many people with chronic pain experience aggravation of that pain during times such as family events, or shopping, or social events - times that the primitive brain may have confused with threat because of stress reactions.  

There are many tools for reprogramming the subconscious brain.  You can learn to remove the elements of daily life from the threat list, and you can teach your subconscious to heal your body.  It's an extremely powerful healer when it is working with your agenda, instead of a primitive agenda. 

One method for engaging the subconscious is to teach your body to feel safe when you're out there in the big bad world.  Any of the shielding methods I've mentioned before would apply to helping your body feel safe - remember, it isn't about whether you think you're safe, it's about your actual blood chemistry and whether or not stress chemicals are present.  The campfire method I've described in a previous column is also useful for reprogramming your subconscious healer.  Since it's very difficult to concentrate on method when you're in pain, the technique I'll describe this time is very simple. 

It's called singing your chakra bowl.  To find your sacral or belly chakra, put your thumb in your belly button, then let your hand fall flat below your belly button.  Your hand is now over your sacral chakra.  That's the chakra that's about sense of self, identity, the 'I am me' chakra.  Imagine that in the cradle of your hips, that chakra forms a bowl.  In the bowl is liquid light.  Let the light overflow the bowl just a little, continuously, as if a tap was left running a little.  Then, play the bowl the same way you'd run your finger around a half-full wine glass to make it sing.  When you make this chakra sing, you're tuning your entire body to your personal frequency, and thereby telling your body at the physical level that you are safe.  You are also protecting your body from the negative energies around you.  You can add this method to the shielding methods I have described previously.

If you can make a regular habit of singing your chakra, you'll teach your body - and therefore your primitive mind - to feel safe in situations previously considered stressful.  That will reduce your subconscious' agenda to provide pain to protect you from that big bad world.  This is a great method to use until you can learn to reprogram that primitive mind to support your quality of life.

People are often fascinated by the concept of using their mind to heal their body - what they have to realize is that it's the subconscious mind that has the power to heal.  Engage your subconscious healer by changing the messages you are giving to your mind.

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