Being in the Body

How Mindfulness Soothes, Reconnects and Affirms in the Face of Chronic Pain

By Paige Zuckerman

“Going through the motions” is generally a euphemism imbued with tedium and routine. For a body in pain, ‘the motions’ can feel like a mountain’s climb, that one could move along with little connection to the complexity of the movement itself can feel like a privilege. In the current Western cultural stream, disconnecting from those motions is entirely normalized. Awareness is redirected to a tiny high-resolution screen in the palm of the hand.

As a person managing chronic pain for two decades, movement is indeed a gift that is sometimes wrapped in daunting layers. The absence of movement is often even more challenging, as the body begins to ache and creak and stiffen. When even rest is restive, disconnection from my body is nearly impossible. And I don’t begrudge that….I embrace it. I embrace the fact that every day my body wakes and requires me to attend to it with my compassion and patience, with willingness and acceptance. I used to chastise my body for its supposed ‘insufficiencies,’ now I care for it with non-judgment and kindness. How I reached this space was no small process, and no ungrateful privilege.

I have spotty ten-year-old memories of CAT-scans and doctors offices after the onset of crippling migraines. Many days I huddled in darkness, eyes soaking my pillow and an unrelenting clanging in my skull. A child in pain knows little of how to explain their suffering. Fortunately it was not a tumor, as doctors had feared at first.

Acceptance initially arose in me out of an instict to survive and desire to thrive. As I entered my first years of college, I hadn’t yet begun my mindfulness practice, yet making peace with my body was not optional. By then I had overcome an eating disorder that had begun to affect my heart, and I was beginning to lean inward again and ask myself: ‘how come I had so profoundly dissociated from the body I was in?’ I would begin to realise the truth some years later as I toiled away in graduate school with the hope of becoming a mental health therapist.

Learning mindfulness was inherent to the program so I didn’t second-guess it. I simply went along for the ride. At first I treated it as only another ‘brick in the wall’; another course, another assignment. It was not authentic for me….yet. I was assigned to read the canonical “Full Catastrophe Living” by Jon Kabat-Zinn, that book, along with similar texts and exercises, struck me powerfully. I had spent over a decade and a half pushing back against my pain, the intractable fatigue and heaviness in my head, the weight of aching bones beneath a splitting skull. The pushing I had done, the attempts to disguise, deny and blame my pain was merely magnifying it. There would be no growth in the thronged avoidance of the body I had, and no expansion to make space for newness and clarity. My sound mind ached to reconnect to my rigid body. It was time to embrace that which was the full experience of myself and relate to it in a different way.

I began my practice, challenging myself towards moving meditations in yoga and quietness in the body-scan and loving kindness. I opened my consciousness towards each aching, stiffened limb, asked myself to notice it without labelling, and to honor it for its strength. I began to accept that some days would contain more ease, other days more pain, and that neither state needed to be ignored or judged as ‘better.’ My body could shift just as a mighty tree sheds its leaves and regrows them with the changing seasons. All states of being had their space.

Today I continue my practice, with the awareness that there is no arrival time, no set-point, no water-mark of mastery or imprint of failure. I share my belief in and commitment to mindfulness and connectivity with my counseling clients, many of whom have also experienced what our medical models call “chronic pain”, illness, and body trauma. Today I ‘go through the motions’ with gratitude, without judgment, and with ongoing willingness to reconnect every chance I have with the amazing constellation of cells and systems that I live in. I can be at home in this body, and the door is always open.