Ugh...Pain is a Teacher...I Guess

thanks, I hate it!

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

Last week I was awoken somewhere south of midnight to a searing pain in my left shoulder. Rolling over didn’t help, neither did reconfiguring my pillows. Welcome to being 40, I grimaced, where you can injure yourself by sleeping weird.

I’ve never been a person who was particularly in tune with her body. As a chubby, uncoordinated kid, I learned early on that A.) I was bad at all sports and B.) it was less embarrassing to not be seen trying. My fear of humiliation kept me from learning to do the monkey bars. I sat out roller skating. I routinely pissed off my entire gym class by insisting on walking when had to do the mile, thus condemning them to wait outside until I finished my leisurely stroll. This is just one way that my body became a source of shame—Evangelical purity culture (as I’ve written about before) took this to another level. It was better to disconnect, better to live the life of the mind rather than the body.

But sometimes our bodies demand our attention—pain is one such instance.

Americans tend to have a shallow understanding of pain. Because we value innovation, we spend tens of billions of dollars each year on pharmaceutical research and development. This has certainly resulted in plenty of new and effective treatments that have eased the suffering of many, but it also means Americans tend to view our bodies primarily through a medical lens, with an eye to cures. The opioid industrial complex taught a generation of doctors that pain was “the fifth vital sign;” that it was abnormal, something to be fixed.

But is a pain-free life a realistic goal? What would our lives be like if we didn’t feel pain? How would we know not to touch a knife blade or a hot stove? Emotional pain is both a warning of and a reaction to perceived rejection and abandonment, which could’ve been a death sentence to our ancient ancestors. Further complicating this picture is the fact that our mental state impacts our bodies in surprising ways.

Case in point, for years I thought I suffered from severe acid reflux or food allergies, only to finally have a therapist tell me that my heartburn was probably a physical symptom of my chronic anxiety. I was startled: was she telling me I was crazy? Or that I was faking it? This is where our minds tend to go when someone says our symptoms are “all in your head.” For many, even suggesting such a thing is considered deeply insulting.

Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan wants to change this perception. In her book, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness, she presents patients who experience what she terms “mass psychogenic illness.” These patients, she takes pains to point out, are very much not faking it, rather they are having involuntary physical reactions due to external stressors. Some of the groups she looked at were refugee children in danger of being deported, adolescent girls experiencing sexual harassment, and American diplomats experiencing “Havana Syndrome.” Dr. O’Sullivan strives to expand our understanding of the mind-body connection and offer both medical and non-medical remedies for patients experiencing psychogenic illness.

While I still pop TUMS like candy, I am trying to notice and interrogate my heartburn. Is it trying to tell me something? Did I actually need to do something about my stress? After ignoring years of advice from therapists and doctors, I finally decided to give regular exercise a try, starting with yoga.

At first, I was obsessed with doing every move “correctly.” My life then was dominated by black-and-white thinking; I felt self-conscious, like the other yogis were watching and judging me as harshly as I was judging myself. But the more I practiced, the more I started to catch on to the fact that yoga was the opposite of gym class. It was noncompetitive, voluntary, and nobody else really cared what you did on your own mat. When my kids were little, I’d regularly fall asleep in class and when I sheepishly admitted this to the teacher, she’d just reply, “maybe that’s what your body needed most.”

It’s remarkable to me that I can show up to a yoga class feeling muscle tension or carpal tunnel pain, and by the end of class, I feel open and relaxed. Yoga has been one of my best tools for moving from judging my body (for how it looks or what it can’t do) to being inside my body, feeling the pleasure of a deep stretch, of opening.

When my shoulder seized up, I alternated between trying to fix it (ibuprofen, heating pad) and just noticing it, asking what it wanted to say. Was the pain a subconscious reminder of my mother, who had a serious shoulder injury when she was only slightly older than me? Or was it just a sign that I’m old and my body is falling apart? Some yoga teachers like to talk chakras and “energy flow” and I don’t really believe that stuff (not literally, at any rate) but I also know that attending to myself, even if it’s doing a 15-minute YouTube yoga routine, helps.

As my muscles slowly began to unclench, I thought back on what I’ve learned about embodiment in the past month. Now I would say that being embodied is about presence, about facing life head-on. It’s learning to connect to ourselves so that we can better connect to others. Sometimes it’s seemed like “embodiment” just means more homework—and who has time for that? But I also know that our bodies are always with us. Embodiment is as close as our breath, as close as attention. Our bodies are inviting us to be here now.

Has pain ever taught you anything? Is shoulder pain a symptom of perimenopause? Is EVERYTHING a symptom of perimenopause?

BONUS MATERIALS:

• interested in yoga but need adaptations for your body? Jessamyn Stanley is great at showing how bodies of all sizes and abilities can do yoga

• this Invisibilia podcast forever changed how I think about pain

• here’s a funny video for no reason