A Simple, Effective Way to Ease Physical Pain!

Carrying shopping bags can be dangerous, yes, even for a sprightly young lad such as myself! Two days after carrying a particularly heavy load of groceries home, over a 40 minute walk, I noticed a lot of pain in right shoulder. It was a deep pain too. The first day the pain was a minor annoyance, but by the second day it hurt when I breathed in and it hurt to move my arm in just about any way. I also couldn’t lift anything at all with my right arm. It was all seized up!

OUCH!

Young man suffering from pain in his shoulder. Isolated on white.

I’ve been working out…and getting hairier.

So I decided to check Louise L Hay’s “Heal Your Body” book in order to see what might have caused it from a metaphysical perspective. It was all about burdens and not getting enough joy out of my experiences. And yeah, there’s no doubt that this has been a time of great responsibility and change in my life. That made a lot of sense to me, so I kept in mind the affirmation and repeated it to myself a few times.

Later on the evening of the second day my dad reminded me about the Feldenkrais Method of healing; of ease. For the rest of the night I practiced the Feldenkrais approach and guess what! By the next morning the pain was virtually gone! Two days have now passed and I’m basically back to normal, though I’m still taking care not to strain anything.

What is It?!

Moshe Feldenkrais

The Feldenkrais Method, developed by Israeli physicist Moshe Feldenkrais, is a somatic educational system and a form of physical healing that uses bodily awareness with an emphasis on ease rather than stretching and effort; and it’s incredible stuff! I’m no expert on the Feldenkrais Method, but here’s how I practice it in order to ease pain and facilitate healing. There are three important things you must do in order to get the results:

1 – Find The Easiest Way: With my sore shoulder just about anything I did hurt my shoulder; sitting/standing up, turning over in bed, breathing, reaching, putting on clothing and so on. When practicing Feldenkrais the idea is to find the easiest and least painful way to do anything. To move consciously. So instead of just jumping out of bed and cursing the pain, I would take as much time as I needed to find the way of getting up, very slowly, that caused me the least amount of pain and effort. And the same went for everything else. If my phone was on my bed side table, for example, I would not stretch out and reach for it, I would walk to the table and simple pick up the phone. When I had to take my shirt off to get into bed at night I had someone help me because I was unable to do it without hurting myself.

Do you get the idea here? Make every new movement deliberate, focus on your painful area and very slowly make the movement in the way that causes the least pain and requires the least effort.

2 – Focus on What You Can Do: When we have a pain or an injury we tend to focus on all the things we can’t do anymore, all the things that we are now limited by. But the fact remains that there are so, so many things we still can do! Not only this but even our injured part may still be able to do quite a lot. And these things, rather than the limitations, are what should be focused on. For example I couldn’t lift my right arm higher than my shoulder without causing a great deal of pain, but I could lift it up to shoulder height pretty easily which was pretty good! I could also eat with a knife and fork without too much pain at all. I could even play guitar perfectly fine!

So, no matter what you can’t do, no matter your limitations, focus your attention of what you still can do, and watch as what you can do slowly increases as you begin to heal!

3 – Even Thought It Hurts There, It Doesn’t Hurt All Over: Except for some very rare and unfortunate cases, pain is not completely general; we are not in pain everywhere in our bodies at all times! Although when we have a pain our attention is often brought to it, the fact remains that there are parts of our body that are feeling just great at any given time! So take a moment to breath slowly and pendulate your attention between the painful region and a chosen pain-free area. This will put your pain in perspective and will often reduce the level of pain as the physical feelings of pain and non-pain are difficult to concentrate on at the same time and the focus on the comfortable part of the body can bring comfort to the painful part!

So if you are dealing with a physical pain at the moment go ahead and give these tips a go, you have nothing to lose! And if chronic pain is something you suffer from be sure to further research the Feldenkrais Method, there are trained professionals who you can do more intensive one on one sessions with.

Wishing you all a pain free day

Thanks for reading, all the best!

Rohan.

Rohan Healy is the author of “Greeks to Geeks: Practical Stoicism in the 21st Century”, “The 7 Things That Made Me Genuinely & Irreversibly Happy: And How They Can Do The Same For You”, “SEX, Not as a Separate Subject: A Guide to Great Sex with Great People” and Sci Fi Action/Adventure novel Gyaros: The Mice Eat Iron!

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