All posts tagged: body scan

I Make Pain Look Good.

Take a look at this person. Take a real good look. Then ask yourself: Is this person in pain? She looks fine, you think. She doesn’t have a handicap placard on her car. She doesn’t walk with a cane. She isn’t wearing a brace.  You furrow your eyebrows, and then you think: She looks totally normal.  The thing is that when this picture was taken, she was in a world of pain. She had three sort-of healed spinal fractures and a calcified nerve cluster. Even though she was smiling under the artful disguise of Microsoft Paint, she was hurting. She was wearing a back brace under that dress. She changed into flats as soon as that picture was taken. She found a place to sit down and close her eyes, trying to match her inhales and exhales to the thud-thud-thudding of her spasming muscles. She had her special dichroic glass pill case in her handbag filled with Tramadol, Nabumetone, and Vicodin. She had already calculated how long she could stand being upright and the time it would take to get back to …

Embracing Pain with Mindfulness

Is it better to ignore pain or embrace it? I thought for the longest time that by meeting my pain head-on, I was doing myself a good service. And it’s true; ignoring pain can be emotionally and mentally taxing. If I embraced the pain, I would be able to discover the edges of it. Then I could encase it in a box within my mind, if that makes any sense. I’d be able to get outside of my own head. Surely this was better than ignoring how I felt? Better than pressing onward despite feeling like a train was chug-a-chug-a-chugging along my spinal column? After the first accident, I thought that I’d felt the worst pain I could ever feel. After the second accident, naturally, I realized that the pain can get worse. The pain can always get worse. And where before I could feel the edges of it, after the second accident I was burning inside, burning outside, just burning. I tried to face it; instead, I was directed by it. If I turned too quickly and felt …