All posts tagged: meditation

Reworking Your Home Life to Minimize Chronic Pain

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We have a lovely guest post from a new contributor, Jackie Waters, of Hyper-Tidy.com!  Living in constant pain can cause worry, stress, anxiety, and depression. You wonder if you’ll ever feel better or if you’ll keep feeling worse. It is possible to get your life back and get a handle on chronic pain. People who suffer from it can incorporate everyday, holistic changes to improve their quality of life and manage their pain. Lifestyle and Diet Mindfulness meditation is a way to effectively train your brain to turn down the volume on pain. According to The Huffington Post, “A typical meditation involves focusing on different parts of the body and simply observing with the mind’s eye what you find.” Doing this makes you aware of the connection between your mind and body; you observe painful sensations as they happen, and then let go of struggling with them. You may doubt the impact mindfulness meditation can have on chronic pain, but it has been shown to reduce it by 57 percent, and skillful meditators can reduce it by …

Everybody Has Something Wrong With Them

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Everybody has something wrong with them. I don’t care who you are or how many marathons you’ve run or how loud you are about it, but literally everybody on this planet, no matter how young or old, has something inside that is actively working against them. That young boy bicycling to school has Type I diabetes. The teacher shepherding students into the classroom has arthritis. The school bus driver has sciatica that runs down her right leg. The mailman has a limp because his hip gave out after twenty years of walking his route. The old woman shuffling down the sidewalk has cataracts, rheumatoid arthritis, and skin cancer from the days of tanning with baby oil. If something isn’t wrong with us when we’re born, something will go wrong. As soon as we are born we start to die, and little chips of us are broken away year after year by means of illnesses and sprains and accidents and cancers. Some people don’t even know anything is wrong yet. Two guys see their coworker struggling …

Why Do I Keep Waking Up at 4:30 AM Every Day?

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Sleep has always been a passion of mine. I’m always a bit grumpy when I have to leave my pile of blankets and start the day. It’s the most comfortable, comforting place I know. Like comedian Jim Gaffigan said to his bed, “You were wonderful last night… I didn’t want it to end.” My high school friends knew not to call my parents’ house after 9 pm because we would be asleep. The weirdest part is that as children, my siblings and I would put ourselves to bed at a reasonable hour. My parents would have friends over, and instead of trying to stay up with the adults, we’d wander downstairs in our pajamas to bid everyone goodnight. My brother and sister have become night owls, but I’ve always needed more time in bed because of my chronic injuries. As such, I was never an early bird or a night owl. I guess I’m sort of a late-morning angry bird. Photo credit: challiyan via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-SA So imagine my surprise this week when I started waking …

Huffington Post: How Long Have You Been Fighting the Chronic Pain System?

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Check out my first article as a contributor for the Huffington Post! How long have you been in the system? The medical system, I mean. I’m talking about the chronic pain and illness patients ― like me ― who make a pilgrimage to the doctor’s office month after month, year after year, until the pain stops (or we die). PHOTO VIA VISUALHUNT   You know someone like this, since one in three people suffers from chronic pain in the United States. That’s right – between you, Mom, and Dad, statistically one of you is dealing with a physical or mental ailment that ranges from mild to debilitating, and has lasted longer than three months. That’s pretty loose criteria. I sailed by that marker about 12 years ago. When I was 17 our car was rear-ended by a man driving 65 miles per hour while we were stopped because of traffic. My aunt was the front passenger and my mother was in the driver’s seat. I could see my mom’s eyes widening in the rear-view mirror. I had …

Does Chronic Pain Need a Mascot? (My Answer? Yes.)

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Readers, meet Rufus. I feel that a mascot is needed in my life. You know, a cheerleader who understands how hard life can be when feeling physically terrible and having your attention constantly split in half. Chronic pain is vague by definition; it can be widespread or localized in the body, stabbing or dull, intense or flat. We only have the unifying term of “spoonie,” which is derived from the Spoon Theory. While that does a great job of describing why we power down without warning (because we’ve “run out of spoons,” each spoon representing a daily activity), it doesn’t give me a good visual besides — well, cutlery. I wanted to show the chronic pain and illness experience, but I needed something that would also put a smile on my face. Like, “Yeah, chronic pain is exhausting and endless. Let me explain my day to you. Let me help you understand. I’ll try to make you laugh while I talk about it, because I know how depressing this topic is.”   I couldn’t design that …

When is a Flare More Than a Flare?

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I’m writing this while wearing my neck TENS unit that also has electrodes snaking down to my shoulders. I have been in a pain flare for weeks. We are talking days upon days of pure, undiluted flare. I can’t remember the last time I felt this rocky for so long. My absence from this blog has been spent just trying to get through the work day without being crushed by my own body. I broke down and took the heavy medications I save for truly bad days, and they did nothing to relieve the pressure. All three levels of my spine are throbbing with different ailments: tension and shooting pain in my neck, head, and shoulders; pulsing rib pain around my trunk; and rickety bones setting off sciatic jolts in my hips and legs. Is it the heat? The constantly-changing weather? The humidity? Work stress? Sitting for too long? Inhaling while turning too quickly? Who the hell knows. What does it mean to flare? A flare is when your normal pain suddenly magnifies for whatever reason. Breakthrough pain occurs …

Mindful Anger Management, Buddhism, and the Neck TENS Unit

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More and more often, I am trying to figure out what this blog is to me. Is it just the tagline, “Using word therapy to work through chronic pain”? Is it an effort to reach out to people like myself and form a network? Is it a chronicle of my wayward pill-reducing efforts, or is it an examination of my transformation from a bitter young thing into a self-aware individual who can control her own anger? I can’t control anything. That’s the first bit of wisdom I would like to impart upon you, my dear reader(s). I’m sitting here at my desk with a neck TENS unit on (it’s pretty rad, and with it looking like a choker, I’m feeling very early ’90s). I can work the buttons on the device, but it only temporarily blocks the pain. It does not fix it. We manage. That’s why pain clinics are called “pain management.” They do not cure your pain; it is only managed. As I said in a previous entry, this current state might be the best it gets …

Names Have Power: a Discussion About Labels and Chronic Pain Patients

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I have long believed in labels. If there is a name for what I am experiencing, I am better equipped to fight it. If I know what I am, I can deal with the world appropriately. Names have power. That’s what Neil Gaiman’s version of John Constantine said. He said it for different reasons and toward a different end, but the fact remains: Names have power. I have collected labels and names over the course of my life: allergic to food/has eosinophilic esophagitis/is a good student/played tennis/played the violin/writes novels/is a lawyer/is disabled/is a chronic pain patient. I define myself by what I do and what I experience. The names are like a shield. A medical ID bracelet naming my allergies makes me feel special and fragile like a unique little glass-winged butterfly, and more than that, it’s a story. I love to tell stories. A scar on my throat is a symbol that others recognize. I have been broken apart and welded back together. I have been remade. So now I face a dilemma because the …

I Make Pain Look Good.

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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 …

Word War Won: “Victim” vs. “Survivor” vs. “Thriver”

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I was going to talk about different words during this edition, but Alexis got me thinking. We had a very uncomfortable session the other day during which she asked me how things are going now that I’ve cut out sugar and alcohol. It started last week when we had a Skype session and she saw my face. She said I needed to do a detox. Immediately. I felt slow and inflamed, my brain was foggy, and even my face looked puffy. I’d gone to a small law school reunion/memorial for my friend Andy and saw surprise on my classmates’ faces; the last time they saw me was thirty pounds ago. (Granted, some of that weight gain was necessary at the time since I was an anthropomorphic coat hanger, but do you know how hard it was just now to type “thirty pounds ago”?) My pain was worsening. I’d been gaining weight despite exercising every day, thanks to my medication increasing my appetite to that of a starving boat wreck survivor. I’d binge in the evenings after work, thinking I deserve this as I snatched …