by Cintain Quintana

Self-awareness is overrated.

No, seriously. Along with all the therapeutic methods that I can avail myself of to help my clients, I’ve been a practitioner of various weird methods of arm-flapping and funny-breathing (rather pretentiously called meditation, martial arts, and qigong) for over 20 years. One could say, this is how it all started for me. Not that I wanted to be a kung-fu master (I actually wanted to be Batman, but never you mind). Rather, I was a horribly sedentary, slightly-overweight couch potato with an aversion to competition and literally zero ability to snatch a ball out of mid-air who was told in no uncertain terms that I needed to do some exercise for my health. I run only when chased by tigers, and bicycles and I have a cordial hate-hate relationship, so my only option was to go Bruce Lee.

Twenty-five years later, I am as couch-potato-y as ever, love food even more passionately than I did back then, and still couldn’t be persuaded to go on a run or mount a bicycle if my life depended on it, but I exercise a lot. On average, the aforementioned arm-flapping and funny-breathing takes between two and three hours of my day, every day. To say I‘m hooked on this stuff is lead runner to understatement of the year, and it’s only March. These practices (calling them ‘exercises’ is also an understatement) are not only fascinating and transformative, they’re literally an endless process of unfolding and recognising, acknowledging and discovering, parsing out and following what’s happening inside my own self, over and over. Twenty-five years after I had my first meditation class, I don’t feel like I’m anywhere closer to “getting it” or being done with it. 

What it has given me is a higher-than-average awareness of myself.

It’s like my attention is always at least partially focused on what things feel like inside. I think it’s fair to say I’m more in touch with my feelings and emotions, as well as with the way things that come in from the outside sit with me, whether they’re food, adult beverages, or other people’s engagement. Oh, and pain. Pain really hurts when it does. And sometimes, it also seems I notice it way before anyone else should or could. 

Some days, I envy the people who deal with pain in their lives by throwing chemicals at it. It’s so easy, right? Just gobble up some pills and carry on. Of course, I can’t do that. It’s not that I’m special, I just know it won’t work. The weaker ones make my tummy ache; the stronger ones make me woozy or just knock me out. When the effect passes, the pain is there, just as before. 

I can only talk about my own experience. Let’s see… in terms of traumatic lesions, I’ve got: ankle sprain (bad enough to need a cast), partial shoulder dislocation, abdominal surgery (two), dental surgery (three!), and damage to the cartilage of one of my cervical joints. In terms of ongoing pain, abdominal and muscular are literally never too far away — you could say they’re my roommates, in the sense that they’re always lurking around when I live, and they come out for a long-winded chat in the living room right when I need to focus on something else. From all of these experiences what I’ve learned is this: it takes a bit more skill and patience to deal with the source of the pain in ways that ensure that it resolves, rather than coming back over and over again. 

Now, I’m not here to tell you that your pain is your teacher and that your body is trying to help you by pointing out what’s wrong — you’ve probably heard it all before and let’s face it: if you’re in pain you don’t care about that feel-good stuff. All you want is for the pain to go away, as fast as possible, because you got things to do that you can’t do because it hurts. And if you’re wired so that taking a dose that would stun a yak works for you, who am I to stop you?

What I would like to tell you is that I get it. Pain is awful, and immediate, and paying attention to it makes it worse. But it is part of life, and when (not ‘if’) it happens, it is better to pay attention, because the pain isn’t something that is happening to you. You’re not its victim. It’s not your enemy.

Your pain is you. 

Wait, what?

You heard it here first, folks. You’re not what you eat, you’re not your possessions, you’re not what you create and bring forth into the world. Well… actually, you are all of those things, too, but at a much deeper, more fundamental level, you are your pain. 

Bear with me for a moment. This gets interesting. All those years paying attention to my own self, whilst at the same time trying to help people with their stuff using the same tools I use to manage my own have led me to understand that we are all in pain, all the time. It drives us and controls our lives from deep within. We are just really good at ignoring it. 

Our brains are wired that way. If things that we perceive become constant and ongoing, we shut them out, presumably because if they’ve been there for this long and haven’t killed us yet, they’re probably less important than the next thing coming that might. This is your hunter-gatherer, natural-prey-to-the-big-cats, seventy-thousand-year-old brain doing its thing as it’s evolved to do. In normal circumstances, we don’t notice things that are always hurting. And because of how good humans have been at creating the illusion of safety and control that makes tigers a much less likely source of lethality, we don’t experience pain and fear in short bursts that are dealt with, over and done. Our current stressors and sources of pain are frequently emotional and relationship-based. They’re like low-grade, ongoing movies where we are the victims of the bad stuff that happened to us, playing over and over inside us, like the muted TV in grandma’s living room. 

Moreover, the mechanism our brain uses to do this cover-up act makes for a perfect double-whammy. When we feel pain, our brain secretes endorphins to cover it up with a pleasure sensation. It does so in the most efficient way possible: it secretes the endorphins directly into the part of itself that process the pain signal. Endorphins make you feel good. They’re your body’s homegrown, organic, artisanal opiates. We are addicted to them. So unconsciously and without any prompting, we seek out the things that trigger our pain to induce the secretion of the endorphins. Arguably, none of us is addicted to alcohol, coffee, abusive bosses or dysfunctional relationships or any of that stuff. The pain that those things cause triggers massive endorphin secretions, which our brains recognise and look out for. The next high is not around the corner in your dealer’s pocket. It’s inside you, waiting for the next pointless argument, the next all-nighter, the next work deadline that you just can’t miss. It drives you to seek those experiences. You are after the high. Your pain is running the show.

So, you might be wondering at this point, what about pain-pain? Not any of this wishy-washy, hippie nonsense about emotional pain, but real, I-twisted-my-ankle or I-threw-out-my-back pain? Why don’t the endorphins kick in then?

Well, the answer is twofold. First, they do, but you’re not going to notice, because you’ve spent quite some time suing up those resources to give yourself a perpetual low-grade high. Second, imagine pain so intense that it literally keeps overriding these mechanisms. It’s not that you’re getting shortchanged by the metabolic lottery. It’s just that whatever pain brought you here is more than your over-used, depleted ability to cope. 

The pain is the same, though; it’s still you. You are telling yourself to pay attention because this is for real. It’s not ‘your fault’, but it is your responsibility. You have to deal with this. Now, do you still want to numb it with chemicals and watch it come back for another turn?

This is why I say that self-awareness is overrated. Being aware of one’s pain more often, more intimately, and with full responsibility for the way it plays out — who wants that? Well, actually, I do. It’s a bit of a mug deal, to be honest, but at least it allows the possibility of improvement. 

The good news is that the tools I’ve learned over the years have a distinct advantage over the ‘numb it, it’ll go away’ model: they all require paying attention, becoming still, and allowing the shift to take place on its own. A lot of what goes on in a treatment with acupuncture, bodywork, craniosacral, or visceral has to do with shifting the state of the person from reactivity and hyper-vigilance to recognition, understanding, relaxation, and release. This is why some of my colleagues tout “the body’s own healing potential”. We are all trying to get better, after a fashion, and sometimes we’ve just gotten too stuck in our own vicious cycle of pleasure-seeking and pain-suppression for our own good. This is what these therapies can help us all with: to find ourselves amidst all the bits of our lives clamouring for attention, make peace with our inner demons, and let go. 

And that is what healing is really all about.