How Yoga Helps With Pain Relief

If you are in pain and keep fighting that reality, if you do not welcome the sensations in your body and the changes it is going through, you are basically going to war with our body.

How yoga can help with pain relief is to show you how you can adapt as your body changes as you grow older, and to help you reframe and learn from the sensations you are experiencing as pain.

When you impose or try to get back to the body you once, or have an image of the body that you think you had or deserve, this causesyou pain. For example, this is common with so many women when they go through menopause, they can suffer from a lot of joint pain and many other discomforts. That desire to not be in the body you are, that desire to get back to the body you once had, this creates a huge amount of suffering.

If you have an strain, spain, illness, injury can you see them as portals or gateways in which to practice curiosity and compassion? What if pain relief was found when you get onto your yoga mat and stay with those sensations that you are calling pain and perhaps trying to avoid or get rid of, what if you could simply and patiently be with that pain but not add any suffering in your practice.

Specifically when pain is in a certain body part. You immediately want to fix that part. This is so common. And relevant to how our medical and many health care professionals who have trained us to only look at the symptoms as they present themselves. The most obvious manifestation: It hurts in the knee. So we try and fix the knee.

It hurts in the shoulder. So we try and come up with ways in which we can work out and concentrate more focus and attention on the shoulder.

Meanwhile you could be ignoring lots of other information about your lifestyle. You might be under a lot of stress or strain. You might be lacking sleep. Your diet may have gone sideways towards comfort and convenience with lots of ultra processed food.

And that knee, shoulder or neck? It might be from somewhere else. It could be the shape of your feet or how you are walking in a certain pair of shoes that is putting a strain on the system. It could be the hours you spend at a computer. It could be there is pressure or lack of mobility in the spine that does not allow for the shoulder or neck to move as freely as you would like. It could be an injury you had as a child falling from a tree.

Your yoga practice is where you find out and discover for yourself what works or doesn't work. And you are reducing the suffering (not necessarily the pain) by doing so.

Yoga should not be used to evaluate your flexibilty in terms of increased range of motion. Or strength in terms of how long you can hold a pose. Or to have only relief and less sensations. Yoga should be used to discover where hidden sensations are lurking in the body and bring them to the surface.

Don't look for comfort or pain relief at this point. That is another legacy we have from the medical profession. Pain "killers" have helped to create a culture where we believe that pain is only ever bad. And it needs to go away. NOW. Sure, it's uncomfortable. Sure, you would rather not have it. Sure, it's debilitating sometimes.

And with all of that - you have a choice. You can kill the pain and not listen to the body.

Or learn how to reframe the discomfort in terms of the body trying to communicate something.

And until you get the message the body will keep on broadcasting. You can mask the pain temporarily but eventually it comes back. If you can receive the messages and work with them.

Be okay with the pain, then there is relief. And I'm not saying this is easy. I know there are people who have such chronic pain that even getting out of bed is hard for them.

And I know that through yoga you can learn to understand, love and live in your body in more and more peace. One small movement, one inhale and exhale at a time.

My teacher Byron Katie says “all pain is either imagined or anticipated”. When you hear about the man, screaming in pain, who was rushed to hospital because a nail had gone straight through his boot only to discover that the nail had missed his foot entirely, you begin be truly curious about what that might mean!