Saturday, December 11, 2010

COPING WITH PAIN



When it comes to emotional pains, there are no perfectly sensible ways of  acutely expressing the depth of our experiences, our pains defy mere literary expressions and this is because our emotions are more real to us than the logics and thought processes that attempts to define them, In fact emotions are so powerful that they control our actions without clearly defined motives,  due to this nature of emotions to override pure logic, an attempt to explain pain is thus not absolute but it’s a useful insight that can help us understand our emotional experiences better.
The problem of pain begins first with the unpleasantness in our experience of it that makes it such that even though the emotion tries to call attention to something deep within, most of us care only about getting rid of the unpleasantness and not addressing the root of the pain. Many try to cope with pain by removing the unpleasant effect it causes directly and not addressing the root problem behind the pain itself.
Many do not even try to know if pain has a purpose, many just assume that if it is painful then it is bad, but they do not look beyond the feelings of it to the fact of it. But eliminating the headache behind a brain tumour does not mean that the pateint won’t end up dying from the brain tumour, reducing the pain of fever does not eliminate the infection behind it, thus we see that the unpleasantness of pain is a warning signal and until humanity begins to heed the call of emotion, we will never be free from the threat it is trying to free us from…DEATH
To remind us of the definition of pain again:
“Pain is an unpleasant sensation of discomfort in the body which signals to us the death and destruction of body cells.”
Death is the basis for pain. Death is the reason why pain exists, if there were no possibility of death or its ongoing occurrence, there will be no pain.
 In the body, pain only occurs when cell death occurs and the destroyed cell secretes warning signals to the environment of the wound to set in motion a protective mechanism to prevent further death of cells in that area of the body.Wounds and injuries are usually caused by traumatizing experiences that causes injuries to us and thus causes pain which calls our attention to the injury,
In our lives more than physical pain are emotional pains that are as a result of an ongoing death process taking place within our hearts.
Death here is defined as anything that separates us from the source of life and livelihood. Whenever we are deprived of what we truly need emotionally we begin to hunger and thirst, when this deprivation continues without caution, it leads to emotional leanness and emaciation. If we do not attend appropriately to our state we might begin to fall sick inside and become dysfunctional outside, at this point we get desperate and begin to try all sort of things in the bid to meet our deepest needs. The problem then is that we then go for what we THINK we need instead of what we really need.
WANT is what we think we require. NEED is what is truly essential for our survival.
Have you ever had such painful feelings after a certain loss in your life that you think you will die if you don’t do something about it? Have you ever been in such an inner tumult and conflict that suicide was a safe allurement out of your demise, you have a constant and perpetual struggle that nobody seems to understand, you couldn’t even talk to someone about it because not only is your experience painful but revealing it to someone will be more embarrassing, each one of us have different issues we try to cope with, that we are adults or youths doesn’t really make any difference, your color is not an exception from life issues, that you are religious doesn’t help the matter either, in fact we religious folks know how to keep our issues closed up and privately struggle with all sort of things that nobody must hear about, private guilt and regrets follows, its like there is  no end to our cycle of pain. Pain is real so we must address pain for what it really is.
Pleasure seems to be the obvious cure to pain but it isn’t so, our pursuit of pleasure won’t cure us, it will only lead to addictions, more boyfriends won’t solve your affection problem, sex won’t do it either with the opposite sex or with the same sex, pornography won’t do it either, these things feel like temporary relief but we are aware of how when we think we are the one in control they simply take control of our lives, the drug becomes an addiction,or work becomes a compulsion, sex becomes an humiliation, pornography becomes an embarrassment, drinking becomes a plaque, we are then caught in a web of confusion since nothing then gives us satisfaction, to cope with our pain we must get to the root of it and cure the death with life, and shatter the darkness with light, and dissolve the mountain. There’s hope to cope but we must search well to get solution form the right source.
It is not something that we need it is someone that we need, it is not a human being but a person that can solve our predicament, he who formed man will he not know how to repair man, he who sustains him, will he not know how to contain his excesses, if man as a maker then that maker must have a workshop with spare parts to replace damaged parts for him. All you need to do is meet this engineer. You have tried things it has failed, you have tried people , they have failed you, why not lets try The most important person in the universe, the creator and the sustianer of man himself, if we ever desire change outside him then we hve been deluded,our void can only be filled by one thing, His presence. Go for the presence.


Friday, December 3, 2010

PAIN...good or bad

PAIN… GOOD OR BAD
Many are familiar with the pain of tooth ache, I learnt it’s the most painful pain humans can feel apart from childbirth pain, I’ve persoanlly not felt such level of physical pain before, but I have felt other forms of pain which is deeper and more personal. most people would have felt pain at this emotional level. For example, the pain of failing an all important examination ,loosing a dear friend or relative to death,  may be for you it was the day some one jilted you,ouch! Sorry I had to remind you. Many of us probably had felt pain of disappointment before or that of some one depriving us of what was essential for us, basically more real than physical pain  for most of us is emotional pain and we all go through life having to either cope with or get enroped in one pain or the other. Some pain are temporary, others are lasting and they seem not to be in a hurry to leave us, many of the unpleasant feeling called pain came from some thing that happned to us in the past, some thing that was so devastating we still haven’t recovered. pain can be distateful and if we are not careful, it can control our lives, because most people with pain are always looking for palliatives to take away the pain,many never truly get free from pain and that is because we do not understnd pain and the purpose came to achive. But is pain really bad? is the emotion of pain the real enemy that we must get rid of or pain may be signalling a deeper issue that needs attention.
An insight that will help us understand pain comes from medical defination of pain.
“Pain is an unpleaant sensation of discomfort in the body which signals to us the destrution of body cells.”
That means that pain in medicine calls our attention to the fact that death is going on in our body and that we need to attend to it. So pain  is a signal to what is wrong, Pain thus has an underlying message behind it and that message is to protect and preserve the life of the host, without pain the host’s body will be detsroyed without any warning signal. This is found in leprosy and some herediatry body diseases  where the patient can’t feel pain so,their body gets destroyed and are dead in a matter of months.
The same goes for our emotional pain, we suffer pain when we are deprived of some thing very crucial to our existence, some thing essentail to our life, when we are seperated from these things, then we greive our losses and we have to endure pain. Pain thus happens when emotional death is happening. And pain calls our attention to address the death process that is hurting us.
Pain is thus not the problem, the real problem is the injurious element. When we can identify the cause of our pain, then  we can learn the approiprate way to respond or address this cause, then we can be on our way to healing.
TO BE CONTINUED
THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM SOME OF THE PRESENTATIONS I DID IN A PROGRAM I HOST WEEKLY CALLED ‘HEART-STREAMS’ WHERE DIFFERENT EMOTIONAL ISSUES ARE DISCUSSED AND HELP IS SORT FOR TO ADDREESS THEN THROUGH INSIGHTS FORM THE SCRIPTURES.
Coiled from  
‘THE PURPOSE OF PAIN ,
AND SEVEN PAINFUL EMOTIONS’  
presented by AYO GARUBA..
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