The Purpose of Pain

If you are a sufferer of chronic pain consider that your condition may have some very real spiritual implications--that there is a very direct message being delivered by your pain. It is my understanding that physical, or psychological pain is contracted as the result of "inhibited soul life," which means that the information being broadcast from the original Soul Plan has been misconstrued, misinterpreted or outright ignored. Remember:  the Ego/Personality that family and society and our own innate biological survival instincts help us to construct during our childhood becomes quite confident and set in its ways. There are often attention-grabbing obstacles or set backs and/or tragic or euphoric events in our lives that shake up the Ego into reconsidering its posturing, its belief constructs. But sometimes even these are not enough to break the constricted thinking patterns that we have grown accustomed and reliant upon. Pain--and especially daily, quality-of-life-threatening pain--has a way of demanding, commanding, even requiring, a shift in behavior and thought. Sometimes this is what is necessary for the Ego to be broken in order to finally let the beacon-like message of the Soul Plan break through the murkiness. Remember: the Voice of the soul is always singing its song, trying to get its message across; it is the Ego, distracted by the Grand Illusions of four-dimensional emotion-based sentient experience, with its layers of survival mechanisms and pleasure and comfort patterns, that fears letting go of its patterns--patterns that it has spent years building and reinforcing and with which it has become quite comfortable and even automated. Thus, pain, in my view of things, is a powerful method that we attract into our lives in order to give us a wake up call--to inform us that something we are doing is out of line with the purpose and goals we declared when we made plans to take on this current human incarnation.
     Chronic pain, then, is similar to an air raid siren in your head that won't go off. Chronic pain changes you. It breaks down the patterns of ease, joy, and free-wheeling fun and play that we may have fallen under the spell of--patterns that, I believe, are contrary to those you had placed into the goals and objectives for growth in your Soul Plan. Chronic pain, in effect, forces us to stop the patterns we had developed and to recreate ourselves in new ways. Suffice it to say, if we find means out of our chronic pain syndromes and patterns, we have discovered insights into our True Nature that can lead us to alternative paths for living and thinking. Even drug regimens, surgeries, or more destructive forms of escape from pain (like addictions and unmanaged anger) offer us glimmers of insight into the illusory nature of our four-dimensional "reality." Ideally, of course, we would find spiritual means to change our ways, to detach from the patterns and illusions that led to our chronic pain syndromes. But We have chosen created many obstacles in the fabric of human experience that impede and distract us from finding these very easily. Remember:  The 21st Century human condition has been expressly manifest to be the most difficult, challenging, "distant" or "deepest" dive into the Illusion of Separation that we can come up with. Our journey back to spiritual consciousness--through the medium of the four-dimensional emotion-based human experience--is supposed to be difficult.

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In a survey that came out in May 2011, sufferers of chronic pain and related syndromes informed the world about how their lives have been profoundly affected by the chronic pain in their lives. This is what they had to say:

  Almost 9 in 10 respondents (approximately 87%) feel they are no longer the person they were before they started living with chronic pain;

 Nearly all respondents (92%) report their condition has had a significant impact on major life decisions, such as:
     o Including whether to initiate or remain in a relationship
     o Change jobs
     o Have children

 Of the more than 650 respondents who have children currently under the age of 18: o 95% report their pain condition affects at least one of their parenting duties, such as:
     o Taking care of daily household and childcare needs
     o Enjoying their children's milestones
     o Managing their children's activities and scheduling

 Approximately 7 in 10 survey respondents (68%) agree that pain limits their ability to care for their family;

 Nearly all respondents (approximately 98%) report they have implemented some type of adaptation to their daily routine in order to conduct activities and tasks; three-quarters of respondents have made three or more daily adjustments;

When I read this information I found myself thinking that every single bullet point had what was to me an obvious message. Let me go through them with you.

The fact that 87% of the respondents feel that they are no longer the person they were  before they started living with chronic pain makes perfect sense. Pain--and especially lasting, inescapable chronic pain--changes the way in which the brain and mind have to respond and react to everything the sensory network reveals; all sensory inputs are being distorted by filters of distraction, discomfort, and misery; all information inputs are being tainted by these "negative" hues. Nothing is being perceived in the same light as it once was.
     Again, the purpose of attracting pain into one's life is to shock the Ego into reconsidering its belief systems, its filters of interpretation, it's concept of Self. To bring chronic pain into one's life must construe far more serious messages--messages of radical annihilation of one's past/previous behavior and/or thought patterns.

92% of the survey respondents claim that their chronic pain condition has had a significant impact on major life decisions, such as whether or not to remain in or initiate new relationships; change career choices, relationship dynamics about and with children.
     I truly believe that some of the patterns that we fall into are patterns that we have become so familiar with that we allow them to perpetuate--at all costs!--in order to preserve that which is known. We fear the unknown! These pain syndromes allow us a radical change in thought and behavior so as to give us excuses to change our relationships to many other things/patterns in our lives--including family, jobs, even daily routines.

95% report that their pain affects the way in which they can parent their children (or partners or other significant life participants). I believe that the current dominant relationship dynamics practiced in "first world" societies has established patterns of eccentric dysfunction--codependent behaviors enabling and even encouraging, nurturing dependent, addictive behaviors.
     I've heard America called "the borderline nation" by psychologists for the fact that the cultural attitudes, values, mores, and behaviors exhibit all of the same symptoms on a collective scale that individuals who are diagnosed with "Borderline Personality Disorder" (BPD) exhibit--which include:

---- Extreme reactions—including panic, depression, rage, or frantic actions—to abandonment, whether real or perceived
---- A pattern of intense and stormy relationships with family, friends, and loved ones, often veering from extreme closeness and love (idealization) to extreme dislike or anger (devaluation)
---- Distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self, which can result in sudden changes in feelings, opinions, values, or plans and goals for the future (such as school or career choices)
---- Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating
---- Recurring suicidal behaviors or threats or self-harming behavior, such as cutting
---- Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days
---- Chronic feelings of emptiness and/or boredom
---- Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger
---- Having stress-related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms, such as feeling cut off from oneself, observing oneself from outside the body, or losing touch with reality.

These symptoms are not the "normal" behavioral reactions of a healthy, centered human to "normal" and typical life circumstances and informational inputs. If we were to go back to consider Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, we would see that something in society has gone awry; something has skewed our interpretation, perception, and reaction to reality (a reality that we had a hand in creating!) Ego/Personalities guided to create constructs based on fear, outside power, helplessness rather than our own personal strength, and, of course, Love and trust, create a psychological topography ripe for dysfunctional distortions and misinterpretations of the realities offered us here in the four-dimensional Earth School. Denied full access of any information regarding spiritual possibilities (because of the stigmas and shame and guilt we have been taught to feel or associate with such belief choices) we are left floundering in a fear-filled, "godless" world--taught to clutter our senses with as many external distractions as possible and then numb or deny any internal pangs of Unity connectivity with myriad choices of addictions.

When we get into pain syndromes that have no known or no understandable cause, it is not uncommon for people to think the pain is all "in their head" (for that is what they are often told). I would like to posit a metaphorical extension to this interpretation. I think we should consider that it is a message coming from the Higher Mind, the Soul, outside or within "the head." Remember:  all of this--even the pain!--is part of the illusory world, part of the infinitely interpretable informational options available to us through this particular contextual field that we have co-created. The message could be as simple as "Make a different choice" or "Take a different path" or as complex as "get out of there" or "stop doing the thinking, behaving that you are doing" or "Time to try on a a new belief system" or even more radically, "Time to get out of here/Time to leave this situation, pattern, relationship, or body," that is, "Time to try a different form/different contextual field."