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Fresh pain is immediate.
You put your finger in the fire, it burns, you pulled it out,
you put aloe vera, of course.
And it's over.
Fresh pain, quick, over, you forgot about it,
tomorrow you'll do the same.
But long pain, chronic pain is one of the worst conditions
that humanity suffers from.
At least 20 percent of humanity has chronic pain
and many more people have little chronic pain,
like a few months of this, then a few months of this,
we somehow learn to live with pain as a companion.
As somebody we cannot ever get rid of.
And we don't know how to deal with this pain.
You can see that on one hand our culture developed
fantastic medications against pain that really work.
And each generation, the intensity and the power
of all medications grow higher and higher.
There is something now a 1000 times stronger than morphine.
And you can see that we are evolving very much in how to avoid pain.
How not to experience pain, which is incredibly valuable
because if you have cancer
and your pain is continuous for months on end
we are unable to maintain this level of pain
and it's wonderful to have a drug that can separate you from this.
But I'm talking about chronic pain, not in such circumstances,
but the lower back pain, the migraine,
the pains that most people,
as if agreed, that they must carry in life
and it's like a neighbor you cannot get rid of,
and we have to somehow live with that.
Now, to live in chronic pain, slowly-slowly,
since we have to react to this pain constantly
otherwise we cannot deal with it,
we end up investing all of our energy and attention
in how not to feel the pain.
We move in a certain way, we think certain things,
we don't do any more of those things,
we try to eat for the pain, we try to think for the pain,
our life starts to be all around the pain.
And the world shrinks.
Many people that suffer from chronic pain end up depressed.
End up with a life that is meaningless for them
because life turned up into a point of how can I avoid my pain.
And everything is just around that, which is truly horrible.
And again, you can see that we do a misunderstanding there,
we are ignorant about something that has to do with pain.
We only learn how to push it away, control it, avoid it,
erase it, not feel it. Hopefully give it to somebody else.
And all of those efforts are from misunderstanding of what is pain.
Pain, if it's not the result of something that is killing you,
it's an effort of your body to heal.
The body produces this
so you'll give it the space, time and conditions to heal.
You don't read it correctly.
Because when I take people with chronic pain,
and we have fantastic results with chronic pain,
I teach them first of all not to react to the pain.
Because what happens is that pain is like a force that is pushing me
and I'm pushing back.
If I don't push back, half of the pressure is gone.
It's something that is difficult to understand
but if I push this hand against this hand
this exists only because one hand is pushing against the other,
so what I do is first of all teach my client
to reduce what he does against the pain.
To stop not breathing,
to stop contracting, to stop tensing,
to stop pulling away the attention from the area,
to stop talking about it, finding solutions, etc.
To stop a lot of the activities that we can control
in order not to disturb the pain.
I look at pain
and I respect it by believing that it knows what it's doing.
I approach the body, the body doesn't have pain,
the body is pain.
The body has no things, okay? Our minds have things,
but our body "is", it doesn't have things,
Even in the language, the way we separate ourselves from pain,
I'm not painful, I have pain,
and it's there, it's not here, it's there,
you can see how we misunderstand pain.
Out of respect to the power of pain, I ask and teach my clients
how to drop all the reactions that they have against that.
It's not that I teach them to enjoy pain,
and I cannot say that I enjoy pain myself,
it's not to find the pleasure in pain,
but it's to reduce all the efforts
and the investments of attention and energy
that we do in order to push it down and not to experience it.
Once this is gone,
there is almost immediately a great improvement in pain.
If this is done systematically and in a process format,
structured and teaching a person how to reduce more and more
his pushing against the pain,
most of the time, the pain transforms.
Because we give the body the conditions that are perfect for it
in which it can take this power and instead of it being stuck somewhere
it does what it has to do.
So respect for pain, giving it the space, allowing it to be,
a lot of the times it's enough.
Some of the times it's not,
but then when you start to go into what is the pain now,
after stopping all these reactions,
a lot of the time you find
that those are more established reactions against pain,
maybe even older in time,
but that the person didn't even notice that he was doing them.
And actually the process is to learn now
how am I now reacting to pain
so I can stop these new reactions that I found,
that as I said, they may be old, not new,
and the process is progressing.