Eliminate Suffering from Pain with These 4 Simple Tips
- Brainz Magazine
- 1 day ago
- 11 min read
Lisa Tibando had devoted decades to the healing arts, specializing in guiding others through empowered self-care and personalized transformation by blending ancient wisdom and modern science. Her practice blends deep spiritual insight with a highly educated foundation in anatomy and physiology, reflecting an unwavering commitment to holistic health.
As a human species, designed with a hard-drive brain to protect, heal, and help us navigate through life, we are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Naturally, we instinctively (mentally, physically, and emotionally) avoid pain. But it's not actually the pain we are running from, it's our relationship to the pain. It's how we define the pain. It's the story 'we' create about the sensation or experience of pain that causes our suffering. Pain no longer has to equate with suffering.
We are taught from infancy to “shush” the tears, soothe away the pain, and immediately try to stop or fix the experience of uncomfortable pain we feel and express. We are immediately shown that pain is not welcomed in the world we come into. We cry, and we are asked to stop. We scream, and we are coddled. We produce tears and are quickly shown that the first response is to wipe them away. The message is, clean yourself up from the dirty, dangerous tears of pain.
No wonder we are scared of pain and find it to be something to avoid. It's portrayed as danger, and we are programmed to fight or flee from danger. Add to that the fact that our brains are wired to detect pain-causing experiences and then create mechanisms to ensure they never happen again.
Sure, as hunter-gatherers, we absolutely needed this primitive brain programming to keep us alive, to survive. But we have outgrown, evolved, and surpassed the need for this constant reactionary response. What used to be a reaction to help us survive being eaten alive is now the same internal reaction that arises when we’re stuck in traffic or caught in conflict with another human. Our life is not in danger in our day-to-day experience, but our nervous system's internal response is playing out as if it is.
What is this internal survival reaction designed for? For pain avoidance. It was designed to protect us from physical harm, to prevent our bodies from being mauled by a bear, damaging our physical structure, bleeding out, or being ripped apart. A traffic jam, a major life change, a loss, a meeting that doesn't go our way will not kill us, but we react internally, in our nervous system, as if it will.
All this survival design lives in our fight or flight system, which most of us have become familiar with in recent years. In historical civilizations, we had to fight the other tribe or predators to stay alive, or if we detected that we were the weaker, then we had to flee, to run. In our lives today, the battle is emotional. We fight when we feel anger. We flee when we feel fear.
When we understand that the only thing we are battling is our own emotional reactions, we gain instant access to empowerment and a sense of safety. We can stop fighting our emotions, stop running from pain, and awaken to the fact that pain is actually a doorway to pleasure. We don’t have to run, hide, escape, or avoid pain in order to experience pleasure. We can transform the pain into pleasure. Take the invitation to pleasure that the pain is offering as we face it without fear. On the other side of facing pain is new, empowered pleasure.
If we can simply feel the pain as it arises and then tend to it in a healthy, productive way, the pain won’t continue warning, plaguing, and consuming us. As we pay attention and let the pain express itself in mind, body, and emotion, we can then choose self-care and heal.
When we have acceptance of pain as a call for help to self-care, as opposed to pain being a sign of danger, then we will refuse to be shushed when expressing our pain. We won’t accept a tissue of shame to wipe the tears of pain or subscribe to bottling up our screams of pain. Instead, we express it. We emote it. We let it move through us in a healthy way when it arises. When we do this, pain no longer gets stuck within us as a problem we cannot face or something to fear, run from, and avoid. Instead, it becomes our access point to pleasure, release, and freedom.
So, “how do I make this huge 180-degree shift from pain to pleasure, in a world that goes against everything I’ve experienced, been taught, and shown?” you ask. Well, here are 4 easy starter tips to begin your journey from pain to pleasure, and nothing has to change but your perception and relationship to the pain, which arises from the mind's story of the fear or anger you are experiencing.
4 simple tips to eliminate suffering from pain
1. Name the anger/fear as it arises in your day-to-day life
Start practicing noticing. Notice your emotional shift throughout your day and call it out for what it is. Funnel every disturbance down to one of fear or anger. Call it out. When someone says something to you, and you feel that strong, disturbing emotion, immediately take a moment to label it for what it is. An experience of fight or flight happening inside of you that is yours to own and, therefore, yours to utilize for transformation.
When the traffic jam presents, when the conflict with that co-worker is birthed, when that email comes through that disrupts your peace, when your child doesn't do as they’re told, when the line-up at the grocery store makes you late for your appointment, and you tell yourself a story that you’re a victim to life in some way because things are not going as you think they should, stop! Recognize the change in your feelings and notice the feeling falls under either fear or anger. There is no life-threatening danger, so don’t let an emotion drive you into experiencing life-or-death chemical reactions in your body, which turn into pain.
Notice the only thing that is harmful in that moment is the story you are telling yourself about it, which is usually based in victim mentality. Make an empowered choice to use the moment as an access point for your evolution and growth. From pain to pleasure. Tell yourself a new story of peace and bring your storytelling to a pleasurable one of how the moment is serving you. A learning moment. A moment that is asking you to stop and pay attention. Stop and slow down, relax, and take good care.
Disturbing emotions are access points for healing by providing an opportunity for us to choose a new perspective that serves our higher good. When we interact with a person, place, or thing that causes us disturbance, something inside our emotional energy bodies is asking for attention. A moment to reconsider the story you are telling yourself and change it for the better.
You are not broken. You just have a body and emotions that have been neglected and need some of your love and self-care.
If we have body pain, instead of fearing it or getting angry, we can allow the pressure of a massage or a good stretch to focus on the area that’s stuck in fear/anger tension. Simple love and care are what's needed for release and healing. We don’t run from it, resist it, or avoid it. If we do, it won’t go away. The tension just gets dragged around with us. Anger and fear emotions require us to learn how to calm and soothe ourselves.
If we tend to the disturbing experience and put focus on it with care, we allow a pathway for the emotion to be processed. To be felt, dealt with, and healed. Feel it, deal with it, and heal it.
Telling ourselves scary stories of our experience just makes things worse. Trusting our body to heal, therefore eliminating the poison of resistance, gives our bodies the chance to do what they were created to do, heal. The body, mind, and emotions are asking us to stop and take care of that part. It's telling us it's exhausted, overworked, or feeling ignored. So, the body-mind-emotion complex sends us a signal to make us pay attention.
Pay attention to your anger/fear responses and notice what needs your attention. Choose a practice of self-care, and the pain becomes an opportunity, not a cause for suffering.
2. Ask yourself, question
Investigate possibilities of other ways to perceive what is happening. Then, provide what is being asked of us by our inner self.
If we can stop resisting pain and instead “relax into it” with curiosity, we can use the pain we are experiencing as an access point to heal. It is simply a signal from our body or emotions to care for ourselves.
When an emotional energy system is unobstructed, free of blockages, full of acceptance, and empowered, life happens. We flow with ease and comfort, knowing we are not victims of circumstances. We see things as opportunities for growth. We experience life happening for us and not to us. We perceive the higher good and know that everything is happening in service to healthy growth and evolution. We feel the anger or fear and then ask ourselves, how can I care for this part of myself? How can I show this part of my emotions the love and understanding it needs to be able to calm down and produce a turnaround moment?
So, instead of being full of anger and fear when a situation creates emotional pain, causing us to avoid, resist, or run from it, we can investigate with curiosity. Ask ourselves, what part of ourselves is asking for attention? There is a part, a piece, a segment in our emotional body that has a block. It is an unprocessed past, mixed with pain. In this moment, now is an opportunity for transformation and healing. We can do now what wasn’t available before. We can give this situation and ourselves a loving response to break down the walls of resistance, held in primitive belief systems, birthed from survival concepts that no longer serve us.
3. Breathe deeply
Instantly pay attention to your breath and notice how your breathing changes in response to the emotion that was birthed in the disturbance you are experiencing.
Our breath tells a story of our emotional state. When we are anxious, we shallow chest breathe. When we are nervous, we shorten our breath. When we are relaxed, we breathe more slowly and deeply. Our breath is a conductor of our nervous system. The body’s regulatory system is directly linked to our breath and takes direction from it.
Continually watch your breath as you go about your day and find yourself feeling disturbed.
Whether from a traffic jam or jamming your toe on a table, get curious about how your breath changes in these disturbing moments. Consciously bring your focus only to your breathing and not the person, place, or thing that disrupted you. We bring our focus to our breath, making sure it’s deep and slow. Then, we can find a sense of calm, where a new perception can arise, and a trigger turns into a growth transformation. Freedom and pleasure abide in the new way of seeing the disturbance as your opportunity for healing.
By taking longer, slower breaths, we send a signal to our bodies that we are safe and can relax. Therefore, the body doesn’t switch into fight or flight survival mode for simple inconveniences. We train our bodies to stay relaxed, which, in turn, keeps our minds relaxed. We can process what's coming into our experience with a clearer, broader perspective and recognize events as learning opportunities instead of life-threatening situations.
In threat, our body’s first response is inflammation. Inflammation is the number one cause of disease, issues in our tissues, and our minds. We get inflamed, we’re in flames—on fire with anger and heated with fears. Stuck in fight or flight because we didn’t learn to blow the fires out. We didn’t learn to use our superpower of breath to put out the fire. We can do that now. Breathe. Breathe deep, long, and slow, and your fires will diminish. Your flames will burn out, and you will heal.
A breath of fire instead of a body-mind on fire. Assist your body in getting it out! Breathe it out and find your pleasure in regaining control. Then, the world no longer dominates your inner being.
4. Trust your body and believe me
The body is a fascinating, fabulous, magnificent machine that produces all sorts of chemicals for repairing, regulating, cleansing, and establishing homeostasis. The body’s number one priority is to survive. Secondly, its priority job is to heal. If we are continually surviving, in fight or flight, the body can’t shift into its second job of healing.
When we trust our body, we can accept pain as a signal to check in, slow down, and pay attention, as opposed to a sign of danger. It is a signal to pay attention so we can discern a healthy way to provide what’s needed.
We have every chemical necessary for healing and help within our own bodies. We create painkillers, and we produce hormones and proteins needed for regulation and repair.
This all may sound too simple or too rudimentary for such a dramatic shift from pain to pleasure, but believe me, I know this from experience. Being a woman who has been on the healing journey for decades, I have found a path through my own pains to a place of pleasure, for all the twists and turns that life comes with. I have come to understand and know that everything that happens is an opportunity for growth and healing.
My mother died when I was 12 years old, which created an overactive fight or flight response in my nervous system. Everything in my life experience was equated to danger for a very long time. I perceived the world as a battle, and also myself. A battle of pain and destruction that I came to know very intimately. I went down a road of addiction, self-destruction, and chaos.
Suicide attempts, assaults, abuse, defiance, rebellion, and an extremely low-bottom lifestyle that went on and on. I was creating an external life that reflected my internal programming and reactions, fight or flight. What I finally realized, as my healing journey began, was that the only thing I was fighting and running from was myself.
When I learned to breathe well, practice self-care, and be the one to show up for myself to soothe, comfort, and perceive safety, I became the healer. The healer who could create magic by turning tragedy into blessings.
The neck pain, the shoulder pain, the heartaches, the grief, all became doorways into strength, resilience, and empowerment. The story of the victim became the story of superpowers. I learned to let the pain guide me, let it be a call for help, and I answered the call.
If my back hurts, I spend an hour with it, stretching, breathing deeply into the tight spots, and spending the time required to let it process and be released.
If my body is trembling in fear and my heart racing in terror, I take an hour and go scream out loud, let the tears cover my face with cleansing liquid, let my breath get strong, loud, slow, and deep while I walk out the energy of fear and anger in a healthy way. I became the one, and you can become the one as well. The healer is within you, and the power is just on the other side of welcoming the pain as a messenger, bringing awareness to where self-care attention is needed.
What program do you want to be running? A program of fight or flight or a program of rest and digest, where healing takes place?
Pain is not something to fear, which creates suffering for ourselves. We can choose to have a new relationship with our pain as a friendly reminder. Pain is a guide, a helpful messenger to show us where we need to pay attention so we can learn, grow, and heal.
Read more from Lisa Tibando
Lisa Tibando, Business Owner, RMT, Bioenergetics Facilitator
Lisa Tibando is a leader in self-awareness, self-care, and self-love. After overcoming a history of multiple childhood and adolescent traumas, she embarked on a profound healing journey that transformed her life, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Today, Lisa is dedicated to guiding others through their own healing, drawing from both personal experience and decades of study. Her deep compassion and intuitive understanding create a safe, empowering space for individuals to reconnect with themselves and embrace the transformative power of self-healing.
