Months ago, I developed discomfort on my right-hand elbow, which aggravated to severe pain. Even at the beginning stage, I knew the reason was my badminton sessions. But I chose to ignore it, not wanting to forgo the joy. Eventually, no longer able to play, I visited my physician. “You should thank your body for signalling pain,” he said. After a pause, he declared, “Pain is good.”
With my curiosity awakened, I did some studies on pain and came across a discovery in 1946, by a surgeon named Dr. Paul Brand, who was working in the Christian Medical College and Hospital, Vellore, Tamil Nadu. While treating leprosy patients, he noticed that they were gradually losing toes and fingers. On investigation, he found out that rats were chewing off these body parts of the patients while they were sleeping, but no one woke up as they did not sense any pain. Dr. Brand found the root cause: leprosy damaged the nervous system, and that resulted in loss of sensation of pain.
After coming to know this, I realised the meaning of what my physician said, “Pain is good.”
Then I contemplated on the usual consequence of pain, which is suffering, because these two are usually uttered in one go, as if they are inseparable.
But on more studies, I understood that pain and suffering can be separated. While pain is a physiological process, originating from body, suffering is psychological, created by mind.
Pain, to a large extent, can be reduced with medicines, therapy and surgery, though elimination is not feasible in all cases. There is another factor to pain. A study by Dr. Susan Babel, psychologist, in Emotions Do Affect Chronic Pain, says stress can cause headache, jealousy can show up as pain in knees, depression could be the reason for ankle pain and so on.
Suffering, arising as a consequence to pain, can be reduced, even eliminated. To achieve that, we need to understand its mechanism — when pain signal reaches the brain, the mind, based on the person’s attitude, emotion and memories accumulated over a lifetime, assigns meaning and value to it. In other words, suffering arising out of any pain can be huge for someone, while an identical one could be negligible for another. My suffering was watching my friends play while I was unable to, which created jealousy and the consequential suffering.
The next logical question – how to reduce suffering?
The tool is practising spirituality. This includes regular meditation, introspection, becoming aware of emotions, being grateful, practicing compassion and doing service to the needy.
Having got these insights, I began to put them into practice. Last month, when I sensed pain in my ankle, first I thanked my body, then stopped playing badminton to give time for healing. Instead of feeling jealous, I watched others play and appreciated them, and utilised the additional time for meditation.
Later, when I shared the above with my physician, he too was happy about my progress on both the vital fronts – body and mind.
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