We tend to think pain is a problem.

In our collective belief, pain is a disease we must eradicate, find a cure for.

 

Pain is undoubtedly uncomfortable.

Those who live with pain on a chronic and consistent basis will develop an entirely different relationship beyond uncomfortable, often experiencing depression, becoming identified with their pain, its meaning, and more.

 

I want to explore a different angle on the experience of pain.

I would like to propose that perhaps pain is not a disease. It’s not a problem that must be fixed.

I would like to explore how pain is part of a greater intelligent system of information and expression in our inherently intelligent bodies. I would like to share with you how this shift in understanding has shifted my own experience of pain.

 

What if we were to believe we’re not broken?

What if we understood on some very fundamental level, all of our experiences are part of a perfect design?

Life, birth, death, all of the sensations, expressions, and flavours in between.

 

If we are fundamentally not broken, then we do not require “fixing”.

If we don’t require fixing, we can begin to actually start to observe ourselves as the living process embodied that we are – who we are.

 

If we are not broken, we are not “wrong”. We have no need to “perfect” ourselves to be loved and accepted. We can just be.

More so, we can start to actually play and innovate.

When we tap into innovation, we start to touch our greatest resource and gift to us – life force.

 

One of the challenges of getting stuck in the fixing pain loop cycle is that it’s never ending.

It’s never ending because we are trying to eradicate or make wrong an experience that is part of life – and our obsessive focus actually exacerbates and amplifies the expression we are trying to get rid of or move away from.

 

To fully embrace it – along with everything else that is our life force – is to start to really appreciate our body in all of its expression.

 

I share this perspective not from a theoretical sense.

I live these perspectives in my own body and through my own embodiment every day.

This is not some idealistic bullshit I pulled out from some spiritual guidebook – no – this is my own lived out, in process experience, in a human body.

This comes from having experienced 7 years of chronic pain from an injury I sustained in my late teens, and my ongoing journey of 27 years of suffering from severe and often debilitating menstrual symptoms.

I am no stranger to the concept of pain.

 

And yet, my conscious choice (and many years of embodiment work) to embrace pain as part of the wholeness, as part of the intelligence, has allowed me to shift my experience of my body completely.

I no longer hate my uterus.

I no longer resent my female form.

 

I can feel and honour her process, her experience.

I support her needs.

I don’t work when I have my period.

I take an ibuprofen, and I nap.

I read books.

I watch Netflix.

I ask her “what do you need right now?”.

I offer her touch, warm liquids, kitty snuggles.

I encourage her to rage at the injustice of this world and release whatever needs to be released.

I take baths.

I let myself be still.

I don’t answer my phone.

I let myself fully feel her.

All of her.

Not just the cramps, the pain, the nausea, and the discomfort.

I feel the hypersensitivity.

I feel the whole body at once.

I feel my desire.

I let her cry and lick her tears away.

She is not something that needs fixing.

She is whole.

She is perfect.

 

I listen.

Quietly.

Be still.

Embody her.

Embody her fully.