Learning to Walk - Understanding Pain

Learning to Walk
If you take walking for granted or have never lived with chronic pain, I highly recommend reading The Man Who Learned to Walk Three Times by Peter Kavanagh to gain insight and compassion. If you struggle with mobility problems and/or pain, read this book and you'll know you're not alone. And if you’re a CBC Radio fan, you can find out more about the author who was a long-time CBC Radio employee.

Understanding Pain
I’ve had two hip replacements and back surgery in less than two years. The biggest problem isn’t the physical pain – it’s my emotional response: fear and anxiety, a sense of worthlessness, and social isolation.

Kavanagh explains it well in his book:

“The dirty little secret of every encounter with a health problem or the medical system is that no one likes to talk about the social and psychological aspects of being ill, experiencing pain, limping or simply struggling to walk. One thing Buddhists know and attempt to deal with is how much the characterization of the self gets caught up in and twisted throughout with each and every aspect of our day-to-day lives. We can use any aspect of life to somehow convince ourselves how special we are. My pain, my limp, come to define me, and I can use them to beat up on myself, to distinguish myself from you and others, or even as the reason why I can’t be happy.”

“As the Buddha once wrote:

when touched with a feeling of pain,
the ordinary uninstructed person
sorrows, grieves,
and laments, beats his breast,
becomes distraught.
So he feels two pains,
physical and mental.

Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and,
right afterward,
were to shoot him with another one,
so that he would feel the pain of two arrows.

“Or, in a less poetic sense, mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn writes: ‘Physical pain is the response of the body and the nervous system to a huge range of stimuli that are perceived as noxious, damaging, or dangerous. There are really three dimensions to pain: the physical, or sensory component; the emotional, or affective component – how we feel about the sensation; and the cognitive component – the meaning we attribute to our pain.’ ”

See also: Bibliotherapy for Legs that Don’t Move the Way They Should