I think I'm becoming a nerd, I just spent yesterday reading brain research but its fascinating! In 2013 Javiera Hashmi from the University of Chicago conducted this amazing study to see where pain shows up in the brain. She compared patients with acute low back pain ( ie less than 2 months, still sore from an injury etc. ) and chronic low back pain ( over ten years - ouch! ) Using fMRI's they saw that with the 1st group, the acute pain was activating the front of the brain ( that's normal ) and with the 2nd group, the chronic pain sufferers, it had moved to the emotional part of the brain!! 'Curious and curiouser said Alice to the White Rabbit!' So whats going on here?
They carried out this study over one year and during that time the 1st group healed, their pain went away but the 2nd group continued in pain - why you might ask? Well I'm no doctor but when I learned that even the largest bone in the body, the femur bone heals in 6 weeks something else must have been causing my 25 years of pain. It all makes sense now, if the scientists are saying that after the body has healed it's now showing up in the emotional part of the brain then it has to be coming from thought! Emotions are made of thought, we live in a thought created world, and we are always feeling out thinking. For those of us who have suffered chronic pain that means that thought is now producing the pain and we are feeling our thoughts and emotions in our bodies. I recently read of a dermatologist who changed to psychiatry because so many of his patients were 'weeping through their skin.'
Simply understanding that I have Innate Wellbeing and that I don't have to believe, change or fix my thoughts even though they are going through my mind was enough to shift me out of my chronic pain. In fact I see now that it was all the busy work, the writing, the searching and over analyzing that was causing more distressing thoughts and therefore more pain! Watching those thoughts go by, having nothing on them, they have stopped showing up.
Thanks to this insight my body has been pain free for 5 years now and my brain, well, I'm guessing it is too.
