Dear reader, If I could give you only one tip that would definitely be this one…START PRACTICING MINDFULNESS TO COPE WITH TARLOV CYSTS PAIN, TODAY.
In the days following my back pain flare up and diagnosis I not only suffered from extreme pain but I also suffered from extreme anxiety. Negative thoughts would loop on replay in my head…’I’ll never recover’, ‘I’ll never be able to work again’, ‘my family is suffering’, ‘I can’t be sick and be a good mum’, ‘my life will be miserable’. I’d spend full nights awake driven equally by my back pain and my anxious thoughts. Then, few weeks after being diagnosed, I suddenly remembered attending a session at work where a colleague who had been through cancer explained that an ‘8-week program of mindfulness based cognitive therapy’ had saved her life…I just googled those words…found a book…bought it in kindle…started reading…LIFE-CHANGING.
Through that book I learned that the experience of pain (i.e. my back pain) is the combination of ‘primary pain’ (which is physical and arises from illness, injury, or damage to the body) and ‘secondary pain’ (which is the mind’s reaction to primary pain and caused by thoughts and emotions when we resist pain). When we feel pain and start having negative thoughts towards it, our body activates its defense mechanisms stressing and tensing the muscles (getting ready to ‘fight or flight’)…unfortunately, far from helping us overcome our challenges, that tension creates even more pain (which in turn creates more negative thoughts and more stress/tension…) taking us to THE DOWNWARD SPYRAL TO GREATER SUFFERING. The good news is, that you have the power to stop that negative loop. You can’t eliminate primary pain but, with Mindfulness, you can decrease and even fully eliminate suffering (secondary pain)…and this will significantly reduce your overall perception of pain.
WHAT’S MINDFULNESS? You can think of Mindfulness as ‘a fitness program for the mind’…a type of meditation in which you focus (and train your mind) on being intensely aware of what you’re thinking and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment. So, through mindfulness daily practice, when you start having negative thoughts, you will be fully equipped to stop the negative loop and bring the attention back to whatever it is that you’re doing in that moment OR you will just observe your thoughts (i.e. ‘I can’t be sick and be a good mum’) running through your head but you won’t engage in those thoughts…they won’t cause emotional pain to you.
It’s important that you know that mindfulness practice is comparable to going to the gym – training your mind once a month won’t do much…but if you consistently dedicate time to it (20 min every day) you will soon see for yourself how secondary suffering starts diminishing and, despite being in pain and seriously limited, you will stop labeling your illness/pain as something ‘bad’ and you will start regaining the willingness to do things and to enjoy life.
So, my recommendation: start your mindfulness journey today. And if you don’t know where to start, I suggest you start with this book – Mindfulness for Health, by V.Burch and D.Penman. I will tell you more about this great book in my next post.
As soon as I started I could see that I was less tense and less anxious, and I’m convinced this had a great influence in my recovery.
Trust me on this one! Start your mindfulness journey and let me know how it worked for you.