in fear of the pain that was to come. While it’s true that simple acts such as these may make my pain momentarily worse, going into them full of tension and fear only makes the pain that much more difficult to bear.
I have learned in recovery to work on improving my inner strength and my spiritual balance to help alleviate these fears. Movement is not my enemy, and I do not need to walk through my pain with any fear. I have a relationship with a higher power that takes each new step with me—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Each day, each step, each new movement brings me new knowledge of the best ways to manage and live with my pain. As long as I am actively seeking this knowledge, I do not have any reason to fear movement.
I move about freely to the best of my ability. I embrace movement as my friend, and with each move I make in the physical world, I’m increasing my inner strength to handle a life with chronic pain.
SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES
RELATIONSHIPS
“. . . becoming aware of the wishes, feelings, and needs of others, and taking the needs of others into consideration . . .”
Adapted from Pain Recovery: How to Find Balance and Reduce Suffering from Chronic Pain
A solution-oriented strategy to deal with my chronic pain is to develop a habit of thinking and acting that is consistent with the Serenity Prayer’s guidance to “accept the things I cannot change,” and that includes “the wishes, feelings, and needs of others.”
Paradoxically, surrendering to the things I cannot control or change is necessary to reestablish the ability to choose how I want to act and what kind of life I want to have in recovery. One of the most important skills necessary to pain recovery is learning how to cope effectively with the often small, but irritating normal and natural frustrations of life.
I am aware of the small, normal, frustrating aspects of life, knowing that a spiritual awakening depends on my making a habit of dealing with daily small struggles—including the wishes, feelings, and needs of others—in ways that are consistent with the tools and principles I’m learning in recovery.
ACCEPTING FEELINGS
EMOTIONAL BALANCE
“Accepting your feelings takes less energy than trying to deny or suppress them. Also, accepting your feelings sometimes helps prevent them from recurring over and over and enables you to change them. Finally, fully accepting your feelings allows you to shift your energy to productive thoughts or actions.”
Pain Recovery: How to Find Balance and Reduce Suffering from Chronic Pain
When I have emotional balance, I am free to feel my full emotional experience, recognizing that all my feelings are part of me. I don’t avoid any of my feelings when I stay focused on being present in my body. I accept my emotions without labeling them good or bad, healthy or unhealthy.
Understanding that feelings are neither good nor bad (not judging my feelings), seeing that simply experiencing emotions does not hurt me, I know that feeling my emotions results in physical healing. By avoiding my feelings I know I will have ongoing suffering. Balanced thoughts and actions create balanced emotions.
Accepting my emotions, my feelings, frees me from my physical pain. My physical actions and habits lead to physical balance, which makes it possible for me to more fully feel the broad spectrum of my emotions; it’s a loop. Through focus on physical habits I am acting in a way that allows me to be emotionally balanced.
JOY
MENTAL BALANCE
“Remember this—that very little is needed to make a happy life.”
Marcus Aurelius Antonius
Joy is a state of mind, and it comes in many ways. Sometimes it’s just peace and contentment, serenity, inner connection to my higher power, and knowing that I’m in the right place. It’s a smile or a laugh with friends and family. It’s gratitude, knowing I’m in recovery today. It’s the feeling I get when I finish working out or exercising. It’s the warmth inside when I’m in a recovery meeting, listening to others share. It’s a good meal, a good book, a film that moves me, a song that makes my heart sing along. But more than any of that, it’s a state of mind. It’s when my thoughts are directed at that which is fulfilling, uplifting, loving, and light in my life that joy floods in. It’s just as important that I think joy as it is to feel joy. My physical pain may be minimal on any given day, but if my thoughts are directed at the negative, the darkness, then my body will surely go where my mind is already headed.
Pain doesn’t have the power over me it once did. I’ve learned methods to cope with my pain that lessen its grip on me and my life. I use these methods to diminish my pain and increase my joy today.
GRIEF
EMOTIONAL BALANCE
“Waste not fresh tears on old griefs.”
Alexander the Great
Grief can be frustrating, sad, draining, and painful. At times it feels as though I don’t even know myself when I’m in grief. Pain recovery requires walking through all sorts of feelings, the most severe of which is grief. I grieve the loss of my medications. I grieve the loss of my pain as an excuse for my behavior. Being in recovery, and in grief, I may not even recognize my behavior as a reaction to feelings I may never have had to feel before, when they were masked with drugs.
Grief over the loss of a person may be a little easier to identify than grief over a lost behavior, place, or manner of being, but each may be equally painful. Grief may be mixed with many other feelings—anger, sadness, fear, self-pity…all of these feelings may cycle and repeat until finally, I begin to feel forgiveness, and that’s when I think I can love again.
I have learned that experiencing my feelings and accepting them has allowed me to move through them. I don’t need to waste “fresh tears on old griefs.” I feel my feelings and accept them as they are today.
PRAYER AND MEDITATION
SPIRITUAL BALANCE
“And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”
Jesus Christ
There are many kinds of prayer, and many kinds of meditation. Both prayer and meditation are helpful, and both are needed: The Eleventh Step says I need
