This separation of identity and pain is vital in us changing our relationship to pain.
Think for a moment about your story with pain.
If you were to tell me about it, you wouldn’t talk about pain as a sensation, you would most likely say My back…My knee… I have this… this happened to Me when I was 16 and so on.
When we experience pain, we have a natural ability to insert “I, Me, or My” into it — we make it our own.
When this happens it becomes a part of us in the mind and we start to wrap emotions and identity into the sensation.
Although this is completely normal, it’s imperative to understand that once we add the elements of I, My, or Me, it further deepens and strengthens the bias in the mind that this is now a part of us and will remain a part of us forever.
When our identity gets wrapped up in our pain, not only does it make it more difficult to let go and heal, but we actually do things to sabotage our progress and results because we don’t know what to do without this story we’ve so deeply identified with.
Being consistent and fixing this problem that our identity is wrapped up in registers on a deep emotional level comparable to changing who we are, this exposes us, makes us feel vulnerable – we in a way don’t know who we are without “Our” pain anymore.
We aren’t ready to be without our pain and we aren’t ready to let a part of ourself go.
If we were able to witness and observe “our pain” as a not “ours”, but rather just a sensation, it almost immediately changes our relationship with it.
It’s no longer “my pain” — there is simply a sensation.
The mind tends to respond quite different to this subtle yet impactful idea.
The relationship becomes much looser.
And in loosening up, we can start to separate our identity from our story and pain, and set in motion the mechanisms to start healing at a deeper level.
For today, when doing any Rebalancing Movement Sequence in our Online Movement Therapy Program, when you feel pain, do you immediately bring inner dialogue or your story to it?
Do you meet it with memories and emotions?
Learning to just feel, without bringing anything extra to this is going to be our goal moving forward.