Today’s reflections on facing pain and self soothing

I think there is an epidemic of pain in our society today if you listen to recent programmes on the prevalent and at times excessive use of pain killers.  It’s not hard to see many of us are trying anyway at all to blot out pain and if you have ever suffered from chronic debilitating pain it is enough to make you want to kill yourself a lot of the time.  It may not be a very popular idea to find a way to turn towards the source of our pain and try to make a kind of friendship or less adversarial relationship with it, but it seems to me from recent experience that when I react against pain I can end up sowing even more seeds of pain for myself than I do if I just turn towards it and try to soothe it from within.

There are times I have to walk away from the painful situation or even the person in pain because as an empath I struggle not to take it on board.  The other day I lost my keys for a while on a walk with Jasper.  I ran into someone I knew and they had absolutely no reaction “good luck” they said.  Part of me was full of admiration, if that was me I would be struggling for an idea of how to help the person find them again but in a way as distressed as I was I thought their reaction was fair enough.  I wasn’t even irritated, after all it just wasn’t really their problem.

Lately I have taken on someone else’s problem and every way I have tried to help to solve it has failed.  Last night I was informed I had failed again and what was I going to do about it.  That is when the shutter came down and I drew a line or full stop underneath.  This just is no longer my problem, I am sorry you are distressed but it is truly costing me too much to take it on board any more.   Phew!  I even managed to sleep through for 5 hours after settling myself by being very disciplined with the thoughts I engaged with.  I have been practicing lately holding the terrified part of myself and soothing it. I say the words, “you are safe, you are loved, you are protected, you don’t have to try so hard”.  I say them over and over again and then I say the serenity prayer, at least the part of asking for serenity to accept the things I cannot change and to accept the fact is isn’t my responsibility to fix said problem.  Well it worked last night and today I felt calmer.

But one thing I noticed was when I started talking about it with my cousin on a walk today my distress/stress/pain level started to go up.  I thought to myself this is not what I want for today so I asked my cousin to stop asking me questions about it and put the focus on something else.  I then felt calmer.

Some of us believe we are not in control of our feelings, I do believe feelings can be affected though by the way and degree to which we think about how we are feeling.  I bought a copy of Joko Beck’s book Nothing Special : Living Zen at the book fair last Friday and in it she gives techniques for being with the actual felt sense of a feeling without amplifying it with thinking.   You simply notice the body reaction : for example a racing heart in fear or a flooding of heat in fear or anger and instead of thinking about it you connect through feeling and just allow it to rise, experience it and then dissipate.  Reading the accompanying text on this process has made me realise how I can magnify my own body symptoms by thinking too much about feelings.

The other practice she suggests is that when we are doing something we notice when we split off from pure experiencing to thinking about experiencing or doing.  Its here we can get lost in thoughts as they spiral around or link up thought to thought in an endless chain or even tying us in knots.    There is a beautiful sense of openness and spaciousness that opens up when we are just present and not tied up in thought.  At such times as many writers know inspiration with come, it will flow in from spirit and we may catch word which we can write but not think about at all.   So that state of Zen or beingness is actually a highly creative state and one we can tap when we empty ourselves of thoughts and just allow ourselves to open up and fully feel this existence without filters.

When you think about it (!!) so many people these days are not present in this way. I see so many people out eating lunch while on their mobile phones reading text or texting even while eating.   I wonder if they notice at times how much food they have actually eaten and how full or empty they really are.   I probably shouldn’t judge as everyone is entitled to spend their time as they like but for me I prefer to be fully engaged in eating when I am eating or cooking when I am cooking or walking when I am walking.   I am noticing more and more when I am not present lately and taking steps to bring myself back.  I am also noticing more and more when stressful thoughts tend to overpower me and my thinking turns towards the negative spiral.  Lately I am trying to nip this in the bud a bit or at least just notice it, touching it lightly and making a choice to divert my thinking or attention onto something relaxing, soothing or peaceful.

Self soothing is for me very much a necessary practice of recovery with the past I came out of which taught me to stress and dramatize a lot.   All I can say is I am noticing this more and more and with awareness maybe comes change, a growing chance to make another choice with how I react and a choice of how much I tie myself up in knots with thinking about things too much and so avoiding fully feeling/experiencing them.