I Treat Pain for a Living, Then I Spent 10 Days Learning Not to Fix It

Written by Andy Husler, Acupuncturist, Visionary, and Alchemist

Andy is recognized for his unique approach to acupuncture and integrative healing modalities, supporting people in overcoming acute and chronic physical and emotional pain. His treatments combine results-driven methods with spiritual awareness and energetic alignment, with noticeable improvement experienced in over 80% of first sessions.

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At the end of July, I went into the Swiss mountains for a Vipassana meditation course lasting ten days. For ten days, we meditated for about ten hours a day. There was no talking to other participants, no phones, no outside communication, and very little distraction from what was happening inside ourselves.

I went there primarily for myself. I wanted to step away, clear my head, and reconnect with something easily lost in the pace of everyday life. Looking back, it became one of the most valuable experiences I have had in the past fifteen years. I returned feeling centred, clear, and deeply grounded.

What I did not expect was to return with a different perspective on the very thing I work with every day: pain.

I treat people in pain for a living. When someone is suffering, my professional instinct is to find a way to change it. Yet for ten days, I found myself in an environment where the lesson was almost the opposite. Instead of immediately trying to change an uncomfortable sensation, we were learning to observe it.

That distinction proved far more important than I had expected.

Ten days of total silence

The first three days of the course are largely devoted to laying the foundation for the meditation technique. The environment is deliberately strict. The daily schedule leaves little room for distraction, and silence removes one of the ways we normally escape from ourselves: conversation.

At first, ten hours of meditation sounds primarily like a mental challenge. It does not take long to discover that it is also an intensely physical one.

After hours of sitting, knees begin to hurt. Legs grow uncomfortable. The back starts to complain. The neck tightens. Sensations that would normally prompt us to change position immediately suddenly become impossible to ignore.

I watched people around me struggle with considerable physical discomfort, and I experienced it myself. During the course, I developed persistent tension and pain in the rhomboid muscles between my spine and shoulder blade.

As an acupuncturist, I typically respond to pain actively. I want to understand what may be contributing to it and what intervention might change it. During meditation, however, I began experimenting with something very different.

I stopped trying to make it disappear.

When my own body became part of the lesson

The more attention I gave the discomfort around my shoulder blade, with the intention of getting rid of it, the more dominant it seemed to become. My mind kept returning to the same area, almost as if it were repeatedly checking whether the problem was still there.

Vipassana invited me to simply become the observer.

Rather than immediately labelling the sensation as bad or trying to escape it, I began simply noticing it. There was tension. There was pressure. There was discomfort. But I did not have to turn every sensation into a problem that required an immediate solution.

As I became better at observing rather than resisting, something changed. The pain became less dominant. The more I moved towards acceptance, the less power the sensation seemed to have over my attention. Eventually, it settled.

I cannot conclude from this experience that acceptance mechanically removed the pain, nor would I suggest that people should simply meditate physical symptoms away. What interested me was something more subtle: as my relationship with the sensation shifted, my experience of it changed as well.

Then I began noticing similar experiences around me.

The man sitting next to me was in tears

At one point, the man sitting beside me was in such severe physical discomfort that tears were streaming down his face.

This was probably one of the more difficult moments of the retreat for me. My professional instinct kicked in. I wanted to help him.

Part of me wondered what I would do if this person were sitting in my clinic instead of beside me in a meditation hall. My work with acupuncture has repeatedly shown me that pain can sometimes change remarkably quickly. Knowing that I had a method at my disposal that might have reduced at least some of his suffering made simply sitting there surprisingly difficult.

But intervening was not my role. So I sat beside him and observed.

There was something humbling about that experience. As therapists, we become accustomed to asking what we can do. Which intervention might help? Where can we create change? How can we make the person in front of us feel better?

For ten days, I was confronted with another question, "What happens when I do nothing?"

Later, when participants were able to speak about their experiences, I heard remarkably similar accounts. Some who had initially fought intensely against their pain described how difficult that resistance had made the experience. As they became more able to allow the sensations to be present without immediately reacting with aversion, something began to change. For some, the pain became less intense. For others, it changed in character. Some described it eventually disappearing.

It made me reconsider a distinction that is easy to overlook in pain therapy: the difference between pain itself and the additional suffering caused by our response to it.

What happens when we stop fighting pain?

Pain is real. It should never be dismissed as imaginary simply because psychological and neurological processes shape how it is experienced. But pain is also not a direct measure of tissue damage.

Our experience of pain arises from a complex interplay among sensory input, the brain and nervous system, attention, expectations, prior experience, and the meaning we assign to what we are feeling. This is one reason people with apparently similar physical findings can experience their symptoms very differently.

When pain feels threatening, our natural response is to protect ourselves. Muscles tighten, and attention narrows around the painful area. We may begin to avoid certain movements and anticipate the next painful episode before it happens.

None of this is irrational. Protection is one of the nervous system’s fundamental jobs.

But protection can sometimes become part of the cycle. Pain heightens the sense of threat; threat can increase tension and vigilance; and heightened vigilance can make pain increasingly dominant in our awareness.

What interested me about Vipassana was that the practice approached this cycle from another direction. Instead of immediately trying to change the sensation, we practised observing it without automatically reacting to it.

The sensation could still be present. What changed was our relationship with it.

Getting the mind on board

One of the clearest lessons I took away from those ten days was a new appreciation for how powerfully the mind can shape our experience of the body.

I do not mean “mind over matter.” That expression suggests the mind must somehow defeat the body, which is almost the opposite of what I experienced.

I became more interested in what happens when the mind and body stop pulling in opposite directions.

A person experiencing chronic pain can expend enormous energy fighting the symptom. We may fear it, monitor it, anticipate it, and gradually organise our behaviour around avoiding it. These reactions are understandable, but they can also keep pain at the centre of our attention.

What I experienced during meditation made me wonder whether change becomes easier when the mind is “on board” rather than constantly fighting the body’s experience.

This is not an argument for positive thinking, nor does it mean that people are responsible for their pain because they have the wrong mindset. It means something much simpler: attention, interpretation, expectation, and bodily sensation are not completely separate processes.

If we want to understand pain, we have to consider the person experiencing it, not only the place where it hurts.

Why Vipassana reminded me of Somatic Experiencing

As the days progressed, another connection became increasingly clear to me. Parts of the experience reminded me of principles I recognise from Somatic Experiencing.

Vipassana and Somatic Experiencing come from very different traditions and should not be treated as interchangeable methods. Yet both brought my attention to something I consider fundamental: our capacity to remain present with bodily sensations without immediately needing to escape, suppress, or change them.

Much of everyday life trains us to move away from discomfort. If something hurts, we change position. If an emotion feels unpleasant, we distract ourselves. If tension appears, we want it gone.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Avoiding harm is essential. But there is a difference between responding appropriately to danger and automatically treating every uncomfortable internal sensation as a threat.

What fascinated me during the retreat was watching sensations arise, intensify, change, and sometimes disappear while the person remained present with them. Instead of seeing the body as static, I experienced it as constantly moving and reorganising.

That observation has stayed with me: sometimes our immediate reaction to a sensation may become part of the experience itself.

What doing nothing taught me about acupuncture

There was a certain irony in learning this lesson while surrounded by people in pain.

My professional work centres on intervention. Someone comes to me because something is wrong, and my role is to help create change. In some cases, I have seen a single acupuncture needle change a longstanding pain pattern within minutes. I value that ability enormously.

Watching the man beside me struggle was difficult precisely because I knew there was something I might have been able to do. At the same time, that knowledge created an unexpected sense of gratitude. It reminded me why I do this work.

When you possess a method that can sometimes reduce another person’s suffering, being an acupuncturist begins to feel like more than simply having a profession. To me, it increasingly feels like a form of service to humanity.

Yet Vipassana added something important to that understanding. Helping does not always mean intervening immediately.

Sometimes the body needs treatment, support, or a carefully chosen stimulus. At other times, there may be value in creating enough space to experience what is present without immediately trying to remove it.

That does not diminish acupuncture. If anything, the experience made me think more deeply about what acupuncture may actually be doing.

Perhaps the needle is not simply fighting pain. Perhaps, in some situations, it helps change the state in which pain is being experienced.

Two very different paths towards regulation

This is where meditation and acupuncture unexpectedly connected for me.

On the surface, they could hardly be more different. With acupuncture, we introduce something from the outside. A needle creates a sensory stimulus to which the nervous system responds. With Vipassana, intervention is deliberately reduced. We observe what is already present and practise not reacting automatically to it.

One introduces a stimulus; the other changes our relationship with an existing one.

Yet both experiences have led me to the same broader question, "What allows the nervous system to reduce protection when that level of protection is no longer necessary?" That question has become increasingly important in how I think about chronic pain.

There are situations where tissue is injured and protection is essential. There are situations where structural pathology requires appropriate medical treatment. But there are also people whose pain persists long after the original event or whose symptoms cannot be fully explained by structural findings alone.

For those patients, simply asking, “Where does it hurt?” may not be enough.

We may also need to ask what happens throughout the system when pain appears. Does the body brace? Does movement become guarded? Does attention immediately narrow around the symptom? Has everyday life gradually become organised around avoiding pain?

Those questions do not make pain less physical. They make our understanding of pain more complete.

Knowing when to intervene and when to listen

I went into the mountains knowing many ways to treat pain.

I came back with a lesson I could never have learned in another acupuncture course: sometimes the first thing that needs to change is not the pain itself but our relationship with it.

That does not mean pain should simply be endured. Persistent, severe, new, or unexplained pain deserves appropriate assessment, and there are many situations in which treatment is necessary. Acceptance should never become an excuse to ignore pathology or avoid appropriate care.

But there is another extreme as well: believing that every uncomfortable sensation must be eliminated immediately. The retreat showed me that there can be space between those two positions.

We can treat without fighting the body. We can observe without giving up. We can accept what is present while remaining open to change. For a therapist, that distinction matters.

Final thoughts

Ten days of silence did more than clear my head. The experience centred me in a way I had not felt in a long time, but it also challenged one of my strongest professional instincts. I am trained to intervene. Vipassana taught me to observe.

My own rhomboid pain became less dominant as I stopped fighting it. I watched others move through intense physical discomfort and discover that their relationship with the sensation could change. I experienced how difficult it can be, as someone dedicated to relieving pain, to simply sit beside another human being who is suffering.

I still believe deeply in intervention. I have seen too many patients benefit from the right treatment at the right moment to believe otherwise. But I returned from those mountains with greater respect for the other side of healing: the capacity to observe, to allow, and to stop turning every uncomfortable sensation into an immediate battle.

Perhaps good pain therapy requires an understanding of both: the ability to recognise when the body needs help and the wisdom to recognise when it needs space.

Perhaps the real skill is knowing when to intervene, and when to listen.

Ready to look at pain differently?

What if fighting your pain is only part of the story?

If you are living with persistent pain, recurring tension, or symptoms that seem resistant to change, it may be worth exploring not only what you feel but also how your body and nervous system respond to what you feel.

Sometimes the answer is intervention. Sometimes it is learning to listen. Sometimes, meaningful change begins when we understand the difference.

To learn more about my work and approach, visit my website.

For more insights into acupuncture, chronic pain, the nervous system, and the connection between body and mind, follow me on Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn.

Read more from Andy Husler

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Andy Husler, Acupuncturist, Visionary, and Alchemist

Andy is a certified naturopath specialized in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), recognized for his distinctive approach to acupuncture and integrative healing modalities. His treatments are designed to address acute and chronic physical as well as emotional pain by combining physical, emotional, and energetic alignment simultaneously. With a strong focus on tangible results, more than 80% of clients experience noticeable improvement during their first session.