Addressing The Root Causes of Pain

Experiencing pain in some form is a fact of life on earth. Unfortunately, many people experience chronic daily pain and come to accept it as part of the “human condition.” But have you ever asked yourself why we experience pain?

Pain is a teacher. It comes when we need to make a change, whether it be physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, or relationally. Some of us avoid pain by silencing it or covering it, and some of us surrender to it as our forever reality. When we take these actions instead of responding to the pain and making the change it is prompting, the pain continues. The level of pain increases according to how much we try to block it out. Pain will be heard. It needs to be heard.

Pain makes the unconscious, conscious. It provides the opportunity to ask, “What am I choosing unconsciously?” Pain brings our blind spots to light and stimulates change. In this way, pain is truly a gift.

There is a principle that says, “What we resist persists,” and it is especially true in relation to pain. Below are five laws of the neurology of pain, developed by German psychologist, Edward Friedrich Wilhelm Pfluger (1829-1910).

#1: Law of Unilaterality - You hurt where you injure yourself. If you fall and dislocate your shoulder, your shoulder is what hurts…initially

#2: Law of Symmetry - If stimulus to the nervous system is sufficiently increased by continuing to use the shoulder too quickly after the initial injury, you start to hurt in similar muscles on the opposite side of the body. However, the site of injury still hurts the most.

#3: Law of Intensity - If you push through the pain because you don’t want to miss work, or you take pain meds to mask the pain so you can continue using the shoulder, stimulus to the nervous system increases. The side you didn’t injure now hurts as much as the side of the initial injury.

#4: Law of Radiation - With the continued increase of stimulus to the nervous system, the nervous impulses travel up the spine, activating reactions through centrifugal nerves coming from cord segments higher up. In essence, areas of old injuries become reactivated. Wherever you have had pain in your body in the past, the more those pain pathways become facilitated. When an impulse passes once through a given set of neurons to the exclusion of others, it tends to do so on a future occasion, and each time it traverses this path, the resistance becomes smaller.

#5: Law of Generalization - When the irritation becomes very intense it is propagated in the medulla oblongata (brain stem) which becomes a focus from which stimuli radiate to all parts of the cord, causing general contraction of all the muscles of the body. (Chronic full body pain).

Pain does not go away. Our body and mind are designed to increase pain until it cannot be ignored, eventually forcing us to fix the issue.

With this understanding of why pain is happening in our life and body, we can start to address the root cause of pain. Modalities such as biofeedback, breathwork, and reiki can help retrain the body’s stress and pain responses and address the root causes of pain. Each of these modalities helps re-regulate the nervous system and helps facilitate the change being prompted by the pain. Being pain-free is incredible, and possible for most people. Being able to release pain before it happens or becomes a pattern is even better.