In pain management used for patients with chronic pain, it
is taught not to tighten around the pain but to relax and allow the pain to be
present.
The idea is that when pain is resisted, it intensifies. When
we breath deeply and acknowledge the presence of pain, it has room to move and can dissipate more
readily. Pain is there to tell us something, to warn us of possible danger. This
is as true for emotional, spiritual and mental pain as it is for physical pain.
When pain speaks, we need to listen. All it takes is paying attention to our pain so that when it comes we remember to breathe and
get soft. We don’t want to fight with our pain. We want to learn from it.
Time does not heal. But healing does take time. Give
yourself the gift of time. To become whole means that as we open to the pain,
we open to the loss. We break open and, as a consequence, we get bigger and
include more of life. We include what would have been “lost” to us if our
hearts and minds had closed against the pain, we include what would
have been lost if we had not taken the time to heal.
As singer/songwriter Carly Simon tells us: “There’s more room in a broken heart.”
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