Deal with emotional pain before it turns into body pain

Pain is the most common health complaint we get to experience or listen from our family and friends. We generally attribute body pains to change in weather or physical strain or stress. Most of the times, popping some pain killers would do the trick for us. However, there are some pains that come up for no apparent reason and they persist for a longer period of time and no pain killer would really help us. How do we deal with this?

Pain can be the foremost indicator for a bigger issue in your environment. Instead of ignoring the pain as a regular one, start listening to your body. Our body is telling us, 'Do not ignore, there is an issue you need to look into here'. The issue most probably is an emotional one. We tend to ignore those small little things in our life, those small differences of opinions or small fights or small hurts. However they go and pile up in our subconscious memory and start playing their part.

They just need a trigger to show up and what else can be a better way, change of season or weather or physical strain. Trigger can be anything from weather to workplace stress. We cannot ignore physical pain, though we ignore emotional pain.

As discussed in our last article, when you stop the energy from its natural flow, it starts stinking. When we experience a thought or feeling or emotion, if we don’t allow it to flow through us but hold on to it, the stagnant energy starts showing up in our body as pain or illness.

Does it mean when we stop energy from its flow, would the energy become negative or bad? Never. Energy is energy and there is nothing like bad energy or good energy. Don’t get into any belief system that there is something called bad energy or good energy. It’s just energy.

If we start looking at our lives and try to understand the most common emotional reason, we experience pains whenever we do not allow ourselves to feel our anger or when suppressing anger. Remember, anger has a wide range of feelings from mild irritation to helpless rage. Each emotional cause leads to a different body pain because each part of the body is connected to a different emotion and reflects different parts of life. You can understand what your body wants to indicate by noticing your pain closely. Do you feel constrained, controlled, suppressed or pushed around? Usually the language our body speaks to us is easy to understand. Let us look at some of the most common and chronic pains, body pains, back pain and joint pain.

We listen to body pain complaints mostly from our mother or grand mothers. They  never opened up and expressed their unhappiness about a situation or felt suppressed or they felt they were not living the life they wanted to live. All the resentment or frustration is not allowed to be felt, so it settles in various parts of body and manifests as body pains. If they go to a doctor, a pain medication may help. But the pain comes back, because they haven't addressed the emotional issues or feelings.

You must have observed people who control others around them. Whenever we allow someone to enter into our boundaries and allow them to manipulate us, they tend to control us. Without our conscious knowledge, we follow them without questioning them or just believing them. Suddenly we feel powerless and realise what happened.  We get annoyed with ourselves, how we allowed someone to control us and our lives. Imagine yourself in the situation, don't you feel constrained, so helpless, so very powerless.

How does the body express these anger based feelings? Through joint pains. Our body literally shows us I feel I am controlled so much I cannot move a step because that's how we feel emotionally, controlled in our movements. It starts with knee pain or stiff knees, loss of cartilage and finally ends up with a knee replacement surgery. It goes well for next couple of years after the operation, however in few cases it may return again because the helpless anger is still unaddressed. But you don't have to beat yourself up, even if you are the controller or you are the one being controlled, any form of control is insecurity about life. If I am not in control, life may go out of my hands! So be compassionate with yourself and address the associated feelings.

I had a client suffering from severe back pain for over 5 years. He works abroad and his family is back in India. When we looked into his history, he said 5 years ago, he experienced extreme financial difficulty and took a lot of burden and stress to get over the challenge. While he was going through those difficult times of his life, he started experiencing lower back pain. He took all possible medical help which helped him to manage pain to some extent.

But the pain didn't go away fully, it was in the background as nagging pain. If we look into it closely, back bone is a symbol of support system and financial security is the biggest support factor in our lives. Whenever someone experiences back pain, there is an issue with support system, either emotional support or financial support. But usually lower back pain is related to financial security. When someone experiences lack of support in financial system, they experience lower back pain.

Once we know there is a cause for any pain, it's easier to heal it, while using our regular medical help, we can also look into emotional issues. Be gentle, compassionate with your body, extend all your love to the body and it will start working with you in sync.

There are some who find it difficult to get their pain healed. Why would anyone want to hold on to pain? At conscious level, no one would like to have pain in their life. But once we start looking deeply, at subconscious level, it is we who hold on to pain not that pain is holding on to us. Because pain has become our identity, we don’t want to let go of the pain. I had a client who had experienced traumatic childhood. All her life is built around the trauma. She invited all experiences around the same. When we started working on her issues, she wasn't ready to let go of her childhood issues. Her question was, what will I hold on to if I let go of my pain and my past?

Let's understand that we are here to experience life and we don't need to have pain as an experiencing process. We have a choice here, either experience life with pain or with happiness and peace. Body is a wonderful indicator for us. Anything you miss at emotional level even by mistake, it actually shows up glaringly into our face, as pain. Stop disconnecting with your body and start building relationship with it. "As eyes are reflection of our soul, body is reflection of our subconscious mind." Your body speaks just the truth.

Even our prospective HR Managers depend on your body language, during interviews they listen to your answers but take confirmations from your body language. How cool it is?! If others are listening to our body language why don't we want to listen to it. Let's listen to our body, our own sweet selfless buddy!

-Ramakrishna Maguluri