Experiencing pain in some form is a fact of life on earth, and many of us experience chronic, daily pain. We know this, and we’ve accepted it as the “human condition”. But have you ever asked yourself why we experience pain? When you touch a hot pan, you instinctually pull your hand away. How many of us hold the hand to the pan and just take a handful of ibuprofen?

 Pain is there to let us know a change needs to be made – move away from the pain. Pain is a teacher. It comes when we need to make a change, and this can be in any area of our life, physical, relationally, mentally, spiritually, emotionally. Many of us avoid pain by silencing it or covering it, some of us surrender to it as our forever reality, but when we take these actions instead of responding to the pain and making the change it is prompting, the pain continues, and the level increases according to how much we try to block it out. Pain will be heard. It needs to be heard.

Pain is meant to quicken the consciousness, bring our awareness into the present moment, asking ourselves “What am I choosing unconsciously?”. Pain makes the unconscious, conscious. Pain gives an opportunity to make major changes by bringing what we were previously unaware of into awareness. Think about it: often the biggest issues we have are our biggest blind spots “You don’t know what you don’t know.” In this way, pain is truly a gift.

Pain travels through the physical body in a very specific way, and it mirrors this idea that pain increases the longer it is allowed to go on without being fully addressed.

Edward Friedrich Wilhelm Pfluger (1829-1910) was a German phycologist who developed five laws of the neurology of pain through his research and clinical experience.

Stage One

Law of Unilaterality: You hurt where you injure yourself. If you stub your toe, your toe is what hurts. If you fall and dislocate your shoulder, your shoulder is what hurts…initially.

Stage Two

Law of Symmetry: If stimulus to the nervous system is sufficiently increased, (the pain increases because you continue to use the shoulder too quickly after it’s put back in) you start to hurt in similar muscles on the side other than the one you injured, but your still hurt most where you injured yourself.

Stage Three

Law of Intensity: As stimulus to the nervous system increases, ( You push through the pain because you don’t want to miss work, take over the counter pain meds or stronger ones and continue using the shoulder normally) the side you didn’t hurt now hurts as much as the side of the initial injury.

Stage Four

Law of Radiation:

With the continued increase of stimulus to the nervous system, the nervous impulses travel up the spine, activating reactions through centrifugal nerves coming from cord segments higher up. In essence, areas of old injuries become reactivated. Wherever you have had pain in your body in the past, and the greater the pain, the more those pain pathways become facilitated. The law of facilitation says when an impulse passes once through a given set of neurons to the exclusion of others, it tends to do so on a future occasion, and each time it traverses this path, the resistance becomes smaller.

Stage Five

Law of Generalization: When the irritation becomes very intense it is propagated in the medulla oblongata ( brain stem) which becomes a focus from which stimuli radiate to all parts of the cord, causing general contraction of all the muscles of the body. (Chronic full body pain).

Pain does not go away. It must be heard, and our body (and mind) have been designed to increase pain until it cannot be ignored, eventually forcing us to fix the issue.

With this understanding of why pain is happening in our life and body, we can start to address the root cause of pain. Coupling this the frequency of biofeedback to retrain the body’s stress and pain response initially; and other modalities for releasing the emotion, energy and memories from the mind and body that are often behind pain. Regulating the nervous system is the road, not to being rid of pain, but to understanding and learning the pain lesson faster. Being pain free is incredible, and possible for most people. Being able to release pain before it happens or becomes a pattern is even better.

None of the information contained in this article should be considered medical advice. All information is for educational purposes only, and is NOT meant to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always consult your doctor or trusted healthcare provider before implementing any dietary or lifestyle changes or taking a new supplement, herbal remedy, or homeopathic preparation.