A body in pain is a body in fear.

The greater and more prolonged the fear the more chronic the pain.

This fear shows up as the sympathetic activation.

You may find yourself fighting against your pain or running away from it.

This fear also shows up as disassociation and shut down.

You may find yourself numb or frozen because the pain is just too much to bear.

Or you may find yourself bracing to guard and protect yourself from pain.

So instead of chasing, treating or suppressing the physical symptoms of pain you need to address the fear that fuels it.

In The Chronic Pain Solution I teach a 3 step system to heal chronic pain, anxiety, depression, chronic illness and trauma.

And the first step is to disarm the fear that fuels and amplifies pain.

And you do this by cultivating safety.

A brain in fear has lost access to logic and reason and has defaulted to survival mode.

And a brain in survival mode leads to a body in pain and illness.

Cultivating safety helps to regulate the nervous system, calm the cardiovascular system, boost immune function and balance hormones all of which create the climate for your body to break free of the fear pain cycle.

To shift from fight, flight, freeze to a state of parasymthpathic rest takes time and practice and it takes consistency and commitment.

You can think of the nervous system like a sea plane landing on water.

A nervous system in fight, flight or freeze will touch down on water but then bounces back up into the air. 

And this repeats itself many times over - again and again and again before the plane finally settles on the surface of the water in a state of rest.

The more we train the brain and nervous system to rest the more we can unlearn pain.

And it all starts with safety - helping the body, brain and nervous system become a safe place to inhabit.

When this happens we need not fight against pain, run from it or brace and freeze up in its presence.

We grow in our capacity to be witih pain which dissolves the fear producing pain.

To feel safe we need to feel supported and connected. 

A big factor that feeds into chronic pain and chronic illness is a sense of alienation and isolation in suffering with an invisible illness.

Most of the worlds spiritual traditions suggest that much of human suffering stems from a false belief in separation. When we feel separate we often feel unsafe and under supported in our human experience.

The effects of feeling unsafe over a prolonged period of time can become corrosive, harmful and toxic physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

Safety is a feeling within the body that allows us to open to life and feel at home within ourselves and the world.

Yet when the brain has grown accustomed to alarm signals of pain safety becomes the exception, not the norm.

This means we need to consciously cultivate safety resources that can function like buoys in the ocean so the force and current of fight, flight, freeze don’t sweep us beneath the undertow and into more pain and illness.

When we learn to stay above water, overtime we can create a new baseline for nervous system regulation which helps dissolve pain.

We build a safety resource by reflecting upon or remembering a lived experience or memory where we felt safe or as close to safe as possible - the more specific the snapshot in time the better.

Once you pick a memory that you want to use as a safety resource use your 5 senses to relive this memory - see it, feel it, hear it and if possible smell it and taste it. But most importantly do your best to feel the memory.

What does it feel like to feel safe or embraced, or understood.

Circulate this feeling state through your awareness and your breath and see if you can feel it inside your body.

This is the mind training required to heal pain. Because if you are not training the mind the mind is training you.

This isn’t easy and won’t always feel possible.

So you’ve got to remember rinse and repeat.