Coaching for release: Pain vs. Suffering

We’ve all seen the internet memes: Be kind, you have no idea what any person you meet is going through. Whether emotional or physical suffering, much of the burden we each carry is often invisible to others. The coaching relationship can be one of the few places where people feel safe to be open about the entire load they may be carrying, where to do so in other contexts might seem too imposing or boundaryless.

One of my coachees deals with chronic, multi-modal, and sometimes migratory pain. This is something I resonate with: for the past seven years I have also been working within the constraints of chronic pain which has curtailed a significant range of activities.

What I offer here is all I could offer in reflection with my client, what I’ve learned from seven years of working with pain.

First, consider how our culture seeks to assist us to avoid pain at all costs, and whether that really serves us? Epidemic abuse of prescription pain medicine has led to extraordinary additional suffering, on top of what it was meant to help mask. Therefore, it seems worthwhile to explore alternatives.

While not an exhaustive list, here are three things that have worked for me:

1.     Diversion of focus

My first mentor was an artist and craftsperson who had a scarring disorder. Any injury could result in her body creating copious scar tissue. Eventually, parts of her lower spine were wrapped in this inflexible, fibrous growth that led to pain regardless of her posture (sitting, standing, walking, lying down were all painful in their own ways). When I visited her Alexandria studio, she would regularly close the doors to spend twenty minutes stretching, which was a way to restore a bit of additional range of movement for her after having tightened up. She was religious about stretching several times a day, as the main way to keep her mobility and independence within the constraints of her condition. I marveled how she managed this issue with zero drama or whinging, pain was simply a fact to be managed, and it did not seem to affect her enormous and infectious zest for life one bit.

Those lessons from her lived example were important, but she also managed her pain through Diversion. Her artwork – spinning wool and knitting large installations – demanded an intensity that meant her focus was predominantly outside her body, in the materials she was creating. It was quasi-mythic how children would come to sit at her feet while she spun wool – the process of transmuting the material into yarn was endlessly fascinating. And the focus required meant her mind was fully occupied on that activity instead of the pain.

I had no idea how great her influence would be until, decades later, my own pain arrived. After a lot of initial resistance and trying other approaches (ultrasound, acupuncture, NSAID’s, arnica… anyone with chronic pain has their own long list) I finally recalled and made great use of her example, establishing a stretching routine, and diverting my attention as I could through my own artwork.

2.     Breathing

When pain becomes particularly acute, the world narrows to almost exclusive attention to that sensation. In those cases, simple diversion becomes less effective. What can help is a kind of attentional judo move: instead of seeking to avoid the pain, or divert our attention away from it, we begin to give it our closest, most compassionate attention. 

“In between the in-breath, and the out-breath, there is a place to rest.” – Roshi Joan Halifax

What we begin to notice by applying this level of attention is, as Roshi Joan Halifax has said, “pain is made up of non-pain elements.” These elements can be perceived separately as pressure, heat/cold, a spiking that can wax or wane (with the breath, with the pulse), and other sensations. Breathing into the pain while focusing in this way can help break it into these type of distinct components. By centering attention into the pain, I have experienced that the body itself – through entering into pain with this level of attention – actually dissipates the acuteness to something tolerable. Tolerable as a collection of distinct sensations, as opposed to a roiling confusion of signals that sends us into a distress spiral. For less than severe pain such attention simply resolves the pain through attentive stages of relaxation.

3.     Acceptance

A second aspect of breathing into pain, with compassionate attention, is acceptance. This goes back to the example of my mentor – pain is simply a fact to be managed. A large part of what differentiates pain from suffering, is our layering of resistance on top of the actual pain (as a sensation). This resistance can be emotional, physical, or both.

Tightening physically around the source of our pain can create additional constellations of pain emanating from the original site. Think of how a pulled muscle in your back can lead to the entire back seizing up. Similarly, our emotional tightening around pain (“I don’t want this, make it stop,”) creates a layer of psychological suffering around the pain that doesn’t have to be there. We add it ourselves, and we can choose to take it away. Once we become conscious of that layer, we can let it go, simply through the act of accepting that the pain exists, and it may be with us for a while.

That compassionate attention leads to a softening around both physical and emotional tightening, a release which literally decreases perceived level of pain, while also softening that added layer of suffering.

What pain in your life are you tightening around, and where could you choose to practice softening release instead?

This article is part of a series of posts on life and coaching, with particular focus on the intersection of coaching with our sense of meaning and fulfillment, aligned with what the world needs, and how we can embody leadership (as defined by Master Somatic Coach Amanda Blake: leadership “… as a process of connecting to what matters, envisioning what could be, and taking action to bring that vision to life. When you care about something enough to ask others to care about it with you and you effectively collaborate with others to co-create a new future, then you are leading.”)