What is Chronic Pain, Really?

*I posted the following to a Mindbody Healing facebook group on June 20th, 2018. None of this is intended to be medical information. I am not treating or diagnosing anyone in any way, I am simply sharing my own experience with healing.

Hey everyone, I figure it's time to share what I have learned in the past 1.5 years. I would love to hear your responses. I ask you to forget about HLA-B27 or Klebsiella or Inflammation of Joints or whatever other stuff you believe about AS, just for the duration of the post, so that you truly listen to what I have to say.

What is chronic pain?

Let me first say that in this post, the words "self-hate" and "pain" are essentially the same thing and can almost be used interchangably. Self-hate is shame in active form.

I have been on this journey for about a year and a half now, and I can say I have a pretty good understanding of this insanely WEIRD phenomenon of persistent chronic pain (ankylosing spondylitis). The messed up thing is, there are multiple reasons for it. All these reasons have lead up to what you may be experiencing now, which is pain in your basal spine and hips (Root), sacral spine (Sacral), Belly button spinal region (Solar Plexus), and maybe even the spinal region behind your heart (Heart). I have categorized it into these 4 regions because these parts of the body are where different emotions are expressed and flow. For example, if you feel nervous, you may feel it in the "pit of your stomach".

I have listed potential reasons for the existence of pain in your spine. It is likely a combination of some of these. Even though I used the word "you" here, these are all merely observed in myself throughout my journey.

Reasons the Chronic Pain may exist: 1. Checking in and thinking about pain gives you something to fix about yourself. Trying to fix it gives you HOPE while you are in a mental state of feeling DEFECTIVE. 2. Working on living extra-healthy allows you to pursue being perfect at all times without damaging your body. It is advantageous to turn your perfectionism against yourself because it keeps your energy focused on your body, as opposed to destructively abusing your body in the pursuit of some worldly perfection. 3. Pain is highly stimulating and distracts you from unpleasant thoughts and feelings very well. 4. Historically, you have endangered your body because of shame and self hatred. The pain prevents you from further endangering your body by immobilizing you and focing you to live a healthier lifestyle. 5. The pain is muscle tension around a release point of specific emotion(s) to literally SQUEEZE the emotion out and prevent it from coming into your awareness. The body does this when subconsciously you know you hate yourself enough to lose touch with reality upon experiencing said emotion(s). It is similar to how you would clench your muscles if someone was cutting into your skin - you are "clenching out" the feeling. 6. The pain makes you special - you can get sympathy and attention if you are limping around. 7. The pain gives you a perfect excuse - who is going to expect a limping person to... etc. 8. The pain substantiates the belief that the world is out to get you and life is unfair to you. It lets you be angry at the world when you feel you need a "valid" reason to be angry. 9. You are in a place in your life where subconsciously you have decided it is time to become AWARE of all this and "pay the piper" so to speak. This is a particularly important one which is explained shortly. 10. It grounds us, brings us back to reality, preventing mental illness and/or suicide.

Of the reasons above, becoming aware of #1 and #9 have had the biggest impact on my life.

Let me explain #9 a little further. I belive we have carried this inner self-hatred for a long, long time - since the phase of childhood trauma ended. The self-hatred is an adaptation.

Why is self-hatred an adaptation? Imagine a young dog that is starving, scared, parent-less, and hiding under a car. One day a kind girl sees the dog hiding and takes him home with her. She scrubs him clean, wraps him in a blanket, and feeds and waters him. His gratefulness cannot be described with words.

When he gains more strength, his dog-like tendency to bark comes out. When he starts barking, the girl scolds him. When he bites the hand that feeds him, he gets scolded as well. One day the girl is playing with the dog and she gets too excited - his anger is triggered and he nips her hand. Again, she scolds him.

These natural doggie reactions are normal and represent a healthy, functioning dog. BUT this dog never wants to go back to hiding under that car, starving and cold and about to die. This new life, with his kind female caretaker, is 1000x better. So to keep himself in good graces with her, he supresses his tendencies. He doesn't bark. He lets her handle and play with him, and if he gets angry, he'll push it down because he's afraid that if he doesn't, he'll end up back on the streets. Eventually, this becomes entirely unconscious and turns to repression - automatically and subconsciously preventing emotions from surfacing.

Now you can see - repression is a way to adapt to a situation when we are RELIANT on an caretaker who we are scared of, or who we FEAR we cannot be entirely ourselves with. Every human in existence was reliant on caretaker(s) for many, many years. Repression is self-hate which is shame which is physical pain.

So why am I feeling pain now? This is the tough part, as I am still understanding it myself. I believe that the advent of chronic pain represents an enormous transition in the mode of living that a human experiences.

Repression was very useful to all of us as children. The tension in our spine to block those emotions has existed since the trauma took place. AND we got better and better at repression as we aged. However, at some point in our lives we stopped needing to be taken care of. We stopped needing to feel dependent. Almost like a scaled-down version of a king who have a beloved slave, finally being released. The slave had to act a certain way for so long, and now that he's free, he can take back his power and independence.

So we begin to feel pain.

It starts with just a little awareness. But as time goes on, and our subconscious sees the potential for greater and greater growth, the repression becomes a bigger and bigger "pain in the butt".

Until we let ourselves see the darkest of the dark in ourselves - the dark part that we were taught was BAD - and let ourselves feel the worthlessness so we can digest it - we will be trapped. Trapped like a tree with a rope tied around it. The tree is ready to grow and get thicker but the rope is creating a bottle neck and stagnating its growth.

How do I heal? Just by reading this, you are healing.

The most frustrating thing for an AS person to hear is, "You don't have to do anything to heal. You are already healed." But it's true! In fact, it's your DESIRE to fix yourself and "heal" that is literally keeping the pain around. If you can see that in yourself, 24/7, you will heal. And yes, its a paradox. You'll see that too.

But you can also speed up the process with a number of things.

1. Work with someone/a group. Mindbody Healing is great, but you need to actually be interacting real time with people who can accept you for you. Whether that be a non-shaming therapist (hard to find these days, it seems. Be careful and come to one of the coaches here if you need advice), a life coach within this community, or healthy people in your own life who you can trust, grow and be honest with.

2. Learn boundaries. I mean REALLY REALLY learn them - "No." "I don't want to." "Let's talk about something else." "That makes me feel ___." "Fuck off." "I don't care." Learn to speak Assertively, there are countless resources for this.

3. Take time in solitude. My biggest growth happened on a totally silent 10 day meditation retreat in thailand. You need to go somewhere safe, and somewhere where you have not a care in the world. Then in that place, you'll notice you're still thinking like mad, trying to fix yourself. See this whenever it comes up. Observe your thoughts at all times, and gently come back to the breath. 24/7. If you can see what you're thinking about, and see the paradox of self-hatred, you will get to experience what happens next. Trust me, you'll know when it happens. Just let what comes up be.

4. Meditation. I do breath meditation, focusing on either the nostrils sensation, the chest rising, or the belly rising. I've tried lots of stuff, most bullshit. When I started I had meditated for probably 3 months without REALLY knowing what meditation truly WAS. Granted, that time meditating wasn't worthless because it lead me to the truth. The truth is, the SIMPLEST explanations of meditation are the best, but I had never really LISTENED to the masters! This monk explains it in the most short, stupid, easy way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOJTbWC-ULc. During a 10-day retreat I realized I had never really heard the masters when they said: "Don't force it. Just notice the breath. When you realize you got distracted, BECOME AWARE of WHAT was distracting you, and then GENTLY come back to the breath." Those steps are very, very important, every word of it needs to be examined. Especially the word gently. Gently like a feather coming back down to earth. When you notice you have become distracted, REJOICE! That IS the meditation. You have remembered reality. It's not about being perfect. Its just about patiently remembering when you become distracted, over and over, over and over.

5. Yoga. Do it and keep going through the pain, it won't hurt you. Years of tensions of muscles in the spine have likely created some sort of imbalance of strength within your body so you do need yoga to smooth that out. It also brings you back to Earth and grounds you really effectively so its vital to start this as an intro for how to really work out in a positive way.

6. Stop self destructive vices. Don't use shame to stop them though. See if you can get away from them naturally. Get away from the computer. Get away from your drug doing or alcoholic friends. Get out of an abusive relationship. Stop having sex so much. Stop watching porn so much. Stop gambling so much. Stop shopping so much. Whatever you think you are dependent on, you need to get some space from it, in a healthy way. This is a tricky process and is hard to do without hating on yourself, so get some advice from Ralph or the group.

7. I'm going to be very careful about how I word this one. I am only talking about me here. Ready? If I had taken medications or treatments, I wouldn't have been pushed towards the growth I have made as a result of the pain. That is all I will say on the matter. I am not a doctor and I am not recommending anything to you, just sharing my experience.

It is a journey of self-love. But you don't have to try to love. Love is an action, and self-love is simply the act of awareness. When you're willing to see all parts of yourself that is the greatest love of all. There is no faking or forcing. You are just seeing the truth. The buddhists call it The Dhamma. Others call it "what is". Eckhart Tolle calls it "being" or "the present".

It is just what is, no matter how hard to admit.

Thanks for reading! I have listed the following materials in order of importance and readability (be careful with the last one). I suggest you read the first 2 at the very least.

Notable Media:

SHORT BOOK Mindfulness, the Path to the Deathless - found online free here: http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/deathless.pdf

BOOK "A New Earth" or "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle

VIDEO How to Heal Your Shame https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j67O34fMlHQ

LONG VIDEO Assertiveness and Boundaries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zbt_9R8GrM

MOVIE "The Razor's Edge", a movie with Bill Murray

COMMUNITY reddit.com/r/streamentry

COMMUNITY Thai Forest Tradition. Where I began: https://forestmonastery.org/overnight-stays

BOOK "Healing The Shame that Binds You" by John Bradshaw