Using the "Accept and Allow Meditation" can help relieve chronic pain

Naomi

For most people living with chronic pain, meditation to accept or allow their pain, without resistance, can feel like defeat.

It can also seem crazy. If we just accept it, allow it to exist within us, it’ll get bigger and overwhelm us, right?

Turns out, no. To understand why, we need to talk about stress, relaxation and chronic pain.

Stress and meditation for chronic pain

A chronically activated stress response is one underlying factor in chronic pain. This is why meditation in general can be so helpful in chronic pain management. It turns off the stress response and turns on the relaxation response.

When the relaxation response is turned on: 
  • our muscles relax and that helps joints loosen,
  • our digestion resumes and that can help painful gut issues,
  • our immune system can re-engage, helping the body heal itself, and
  • our sleep is longer and deeper, which allows our body to rejuvenate, clean up and get back on track.
And that’s just the start of it!

Any meditation is likely to be helpful for relieving your chronic pain. But some are more suited to this task than others. One of my favourites is accepting and allowing meditation.

Accepting and allowing meditation for chronic pain

Accepting and allowing meditation takes things one step further. It lowers our resistance and tension towards our pain, opening us up to deeper relaxation.

It also opens us to changing the patterns of belief we hold around our pain (sometimes unconsciously). It encourages us to switch fearful stories of what pain might be coming to a loving story of caring for and nurturing our hurting body; or a combative, "I hate my body" story to an accepting, "I love you as you are" story.

In lowering our emotional resistance to the pain in these ways, we renew our connection to our body. 

We begin to build a loving internal environment.

That means, an internal environment in which our thoughts, feelings and beliefs, and the subsequent physiological responses to those thoughts, feelings and beliefs, begin to soften. We start seeing our body as our friend, something we nurture and care about. We begin to have sympathy for our body's hurting parts. 

In short, accepting our pain, as it is, means we begin to love our body.

And when we start to love our body, I believe meditation doesn't just help us manage chronic pain. It actually helps our body heal from the condition causing the pain.

Bonus: it also makes living in your internal environment much nicer. Your mind is a kinder, more loving, more beautiful place. And that makes life better.

 


A woman sits in meditation. Heading reads Relieving Chronic Pain with Meditation - a self-paced tiny course for those living with chronic pain



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