Pain is a gift

I was sitting on the bus on my way home and I started to mentally tap on my neck pain. I had a car accident in 1991 and my car was totaled, but I walked away but I've had severe neck pain that flares up depending on the stress in my life, and if I maintain a certain position with my arm (at the keyboard using the mouse a lot) and riding a bike (which I haven't done since 1992).

So, I've got my eyes closed and remembering what Robert Smith says, pain is an emotion manifested physically in the body. So I'm tapping away "I choose to release this pain and whatever it represents" (I can't associate a feeling with it) so I'm repeating this mantra and then I add  "I'm open and willing to find out what it represents" and I'm tapping mentally, and I get this sense of calm (this is the part I love!).

Then I realize that pain has has been the point where my body screams that I can't keep doing what I'm doing, change something (position, stop doing that, do this instead) since I have learned to ignore my internal voice - physical pain seems to be the only way I will acknowledge what is happening. And, when I haven't listened to the initial pain, my body amped it up until it shut down.

In 2005, I had been ignoring the depression that was creeping in since 1999, I kept working in a job that I absolutely hated and brought me nothing but stress, panic attacks and nightmares and a burn out. When I had started to feel more anxious AND didn't stop/change/or do something else, my body gave me migraines. One day I woke up, one month before my 40th birthday, with severe migraines. I still hadn't learned my lesson, so the migraines got worse and I ended up in the ER three times over the next month. Then the nausea kicked in, lights and sounds made me sicker (scents and odours would bring on instant migraines and severe nausea), until I accepted time off. I still didn't change/stop/do something else just yet.

I actually went back to that job but I started to look for something else. By a comedy of errors, I ended up resigning and tried to take it back but they refused to let me back. THANK GOD!!!!!

For the next three months, I stayed unemployed and got a little better. The migraines started to calm down, light didn't hurt my eyes so much although scents (perfumes, colognes) would still bother me (like air being sucked out of the room).
I took a contract which lasted for two years in an office environment and I got better and less sick.

Did I learn my lesson about working in an environment that had made me so sick initially? OF COURSE NOT! I took a job back into the previous environment (because the money was great and it was a foot in the door to the federal government) and what had taken me years to become so sick, started happening within one year of the new job.  I had a severe burn out and lung infections, and migraines and asthma attacks and panic attacks and then other physical things started to happen (dislocated hip) until I was forced to go back off work.

All this to say that my body produced pain to stop me as I wasn't listening to the initial signs that what I was doing wasn't working and I needed to stop doing those things.

You see, growing up, any weakness was shameful. I saw my mother with the same attitude end up in a psych ward and when she didn't clue into that, a major heart attack, and when that didn't get her attention, another heart attack and eventually three heart bi-passes and then total illness and permanent disability.

So pain has been a gift to me and I hadn't noticed until today.

Gratitude doesn't begin to describe how I feel about pain right now.

I honour pain, it has been my most caring friend.