PAIN, YOUR MIND AND HOW IT WORKS

     PAIN, YOUR MIND AND HOW IT WORKS 

                                                       © Chessie Roberts, 2012 all rights reserved

Many of you have aches and pains and a lot of people live with chronic, sometimes crippling pain. What is pain? The dictionary defines it as physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury. As you grow from a child to an adult you learned that if your arm hurts, you treated your arm, your stomach or whatever body part that you felt was the problem. Please understand that yes, pain is real and there to let you know that something is wrong but that is not the pain I am referring to. This article is discussing chronic pains like the ones you have with any chronic issue, like arthritis, Crohn's, fibromyalgia ...that sort.

The truth is that, even though you are injured or ill, your pain signal is just that, a signal. It is sent to your mind and that is what gets your attention. This is not a new idea. It has been used for centuries and it works quite nicely. If you have tried pills and potions and found them unsatisfactory, finding what you need right inside your brain just may be quite helpful for you.

You have several levels of pain response; mental, emotional and physical. OK, you have an injury. It sends signals up your sensory path that will give you a physical sensation. You may tense up against that and “push against' the pain. The second path takes the information to the areas of your brain that process emotion. (amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex) You feel upset and may cry, shake or have other emotional reactions. There you have it, you are having two reactions to your injury, one emotional and one physical. If you can calm both of these reactions your pain will diminish. Note I did NOT say go away completely. Just diminish.

The first technique to learn is to relax into the pain. As you consciously relax the area that is troubling you, the pain decreases. Take having an injection for example. If you tense the muscle the needle is to pierce, the added resistance will  create a denser wall to penetrate. If, however, you relax the area, there is less resistance. Same with any other pain. When you tense the affected area you create resistance and, like the Law of Attraction says, “what you resist persists” the same is true for pain.

The next thought to wrap your head around is that the pain is not where you think it is. It is being processed in your brain. If you can realize this, you will find that the pain diminishes rapidly. As you consider that you can choose to let go of the thought of pain, it will go down more or disappear completely.

All of you have your very own pharmacy that knows just what your body requires and what doses are perfect for you. A lot of the synthetic medicines on the market have a disruptive effect on you inner pharmacy so you will have to retrain it to work properly if you have been on one of these regimens. IF YOU ARE ON A MEDICATION UNDER A DOCTORS CARE, DO NOT STOP IN FAVOR OF THIS INFORMATION. You can use this information to get better results from your medication. As you take your medication just keep in mind how it works (research it if you don't already know and then you can make an informed choice about your own health care) and allow your body and mind to work with the medication to it's best affect.

Meditation is the best way (with these new thoughts to guide you) to calm and train your mind and get it to let go of the idea of pain. Research (at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center) has been done on this topic and has found from scans of brains while people meditated, at the end of their meditations, the pain centers were calmer and the persons pain had been reduced by 11 to 93%. Meditation showed a higher pain relief than some of the more powerful pain relieving medications.

Relax into the pain and remember that it is your mind creating sensations and you may be surprised how much better you handle it all. Bright Blessings, Chessie

“May the entire Universe be filled with Peace and Joy, Love and Light. May the light of Truth overcome all darkness! Victory to that Light! Jai!”


 

FEAR; IT IS NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF PART ONE

    

       FEAR; IT IS NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF

                      © Chessie Roberts 2010 All rights reserved

Fear is a learned emotion. We are taught to fear falling, eating poison, walking out into traffic, getting into cars with strangers… things like that. And those fears are OK to have. They serve a purpose and have their place in our lives. For most of us these ‘fears’ become common sense as we mature and learn who to cope with the world around us. Still, there are those stubborn, irrational fears that make no sense to us or anyone else and we don’t understand why we have them or where they came from, and they are OK too. That is as long as they don’t cripple you or stop your forward growth.

Here is a flash for you; as long as you grow, you will face fears. Yep, you heard me, but most of the time it isn’t the even, action or circumstance that has you nibbling at your nails, it is the anticipation of doing something that is out of your comfort zone and guess what? Everyone has to face this at one time or another, not just you.

In her book, “Feel The Fear and Do it Anyway” Susan Jefferies, PH.D. tells us that there are 5 truths about fear:
1) The fear will never go away as long as I continue to grow (where have you read that before? This is me asking you)
2) The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go do it.
3) The only way to feel better about myself is to go out and do it. (Are you starting to see a pattern here? That is me asking again.)
4) Not only am I going to experience fear whenever I’m on unfamiliar territory, (pay attention here this is life changing) SO IS EVERYONE ELSE. (Didn’t see that one coming did you?)
5) Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness.

So to follow that thinking, if it happens to everyone anytime they encounter something new and they do whatever it is anyway then we need to admit to ourselves that fear is not the real problem.

 Just for now I ask you to consider, where does your power lie? Is it held by the fear of what you don’t know, or by what you think you know? Maybe it is held by what you feel might happen if you do this or that, or maybe if you don’t do whatever it is. Think about it, leave your thoughts if you would like and we will talk more about this fascinating subject next week.

Bright Blessings, Chessie

Bridging Mind/Body Consciousness

                 Bridging Mind/Body Consciousness

                        (c) C. S. Roberts 2025 all rights reserved

Because the intelligence that controls the Universe is the very same one that controls everyone and everything, we are not alone. We are ultimately connected to all life from the ultra, infinitesimal, subatomic particle all the way out to the entire cosmos.

This is the bridging concept that connects body/mind; consciousness/physiology; individual environment/universal intelligence. This is the natural order that helps people live longer, healthier lives that are in harmony with our environment, which is the birthright of every individual.

Maharishi Ayur-Veda says that the primary source of human suffering as a lack of connection with our body’s inner intelligence. {The ancient word for this is paragyaparadh, meaning ‘the mistake of the intellect’.} This ‘mistake of the intellect’ is the idea that what we experience through our senses, touch, sight, taste, sound, smell is all there is of life. Kind of like looking at the waves on the ocean and deciding that they are what there is to know of the ocean and not looking below the surface.

Wholeness is actually a state of awareness, of perfect balance. This balance is the point at which we are inwardly aware and in tune with Nature’s silent rhythms that are our source of our inner intelligence. That stability and groundedness is what keeps us healthy in all three areas of our humanity, body, mind and spirit.

Western medicine teaches us to listen to another person [the Dr.] rather to our physicality, our inner awareness which knows that something is wrong long before we ‘see’ any symptoms rather than us becoming aware enough of something within being ‘off’. When we are responsive to our body’s internal rhythms, we can look inside to see where we are out of balance. We can feel what has tipped over too far or not far enough.

OUR LIFE’S DHARMA, OUR PURPOSE.

Our job must fit within our balancing act; it must reflect our purpose, our dharma. If it doesn’t, then we are unhappy in our work and there is no satisfaction in what we are doing with our lives.

If we are aware of our purpose and our job reflects that and we are comfortable in our circumstances. This awareness creates a lovely flow and sense of wellbeing in our daily lives. Things seem to be accomplished without effort or struggle, with little to no stress or fatigue.

Conversely,  if we are not in awareness, balance and flow with ourselves and the universe, we are unhappy, stressed and worn out all of the time, we are creating toxins within our bodies and we will be ill in some or all aspects of our three parts.

Remember that job satisfaction and being happy with ourselves are the 2 MOST IMPORTANT RISK FACTORS for heart disease and other dramatic illnesses.