Is Chronic Pain a Side Effect of Life
anthony bruni
I wanted to share some of my thoughts concerning chronic pain and why it seems so prevalent in the world today.
Health is a word that too often directly precedes the word crisis. How did we get here? When we look around us what other forms of life teeter so close to death for so long yet never manages to make that fatal plunge. An injured animal or plant will heal or be consumed by the indifferent process of natural selection. Plants often have endophytic mushrooms inside them that they exchange sugar for trace minerals with. If the plant shows signs of weakness the fungi will digest the plant symbiont without sympathy. It is not that nature is cruel but circumstances often force life to be efficient. There is often no excess in nature. If you are an organism with 4 legs you will need 4 legs to survive. Break one and fate will turn against you. Harsh as this may be it provides a certain majestic sense of awe when we think how all life forms one gargantuan culinary Rube Goldberg device.
Humans and to be more exact, humans living within the confines of agriculture, are able to transcend this limitation. We have managed for good or bad to have excess food. We can have people tend to our needs while we convalesce. While certainly a privilege I do not wish to give up, there is, a curse attached, that should be acknowledged. Without the threat of imminent death over our heads, it's easy to grow complacent. It’s easy to ignore our bodies. In this mindset, it's easy to grow sick and weak. It is this mindset that epidemics grow out of.
This is somewhat paradoxical as we who live in this moment have access to an amazing health care system when it comes to traumatic injuries. If you had to pick a time period to be irresponsible with explosives in this is your time. Chronic illnesses, however, tend to elude those with an allopathic mindset. Often our chronic pain is rooted in emotional trauma. It can fester barely detectable in our easily distracted environment. With time it can be fortified by dysfunctional lifestyle choices. Our maladaptations may be so pervasive they entwine themselves into our cultural norms. Month and years later they manifest to physical ailments where most doctors will be only able to perceive the biological tip of this bio-psycho-social iceberg.
Massage certainly is not some cure-all for this, but it does provide up a space to check in with our bodies and examine our emotions. I am always surprised by how common it is during the middle of a massage session for people to bring up old often childhood injuries. This is, of usually after they assured me they have no injuries while doing an intake. I completely get it though. I do the same thing. It's hard to be present with ourselves and notice how old wounds are coming back to haunt us while we are performing our hectic part in this metamodern global dance. We need silence, to hear our bodies, to tap into that primal theta brain space where deep healing and repatterning occurs. For many people, massage plays an important role in this process.
Anthony Bruni