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During menopause women can experience pain and discomfort due to a wide variety of reasons. Some of the most common being:

• Joint Pain - in hips, shoulders, neck, back, wrists, knees  and ankles

• Muscular pain - Leg cramps and

• Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

• Headaches and Migraines

• Widespread , chronic pain ( Chromic pain , more than 3 months)check this out

Many books about menopause bypass this important subject but living with pain can be a very draining aspect of menopause and can led top feeling low and even depression. 

Of course, if pain is ongoing, unbearable and debilitating then it is advised that you should consult your doctor to ensure that there is no other underlying health issue involved. 

But as well as using painkillers to ease the pain you might want to consider trying some other more natural techniques such as mindfulness meditation  or breath work to control your pain levels.

 

 “ when it comes to pain, clinical trials show that mindfulness can be as effective as the main prescription pain killers, and some studies have shown it to be as [powerful as morphine”

(Burch, V. and Penman, D. Mindfulness for Health, 2013:2)

A regular mindfulness practice is now prescribed for many patients to help deal with and overcome a wide range of psychical  and emotional pain. This includes with drawing from additive substances, arthritis pain, the pain of many auto immune diseases such as fibromyalgia, lupus and MS, as well cancer, particularly the side effects of chemotherapy.  It does not necessarily need to replace conventional pain medications but can happily work alongside them. In some circumstances it can be used an alternative.

So how does it work? How can the act of sitting in stillness and focussing on our own pain actually help relieve it? This ideas seems at odds with what we naturally want our minds to do, which is to avoid the experience of pain.  To ignore our own suffering.

Amongst mindfulness practitioner and therapists there is a very is a very well used quote within the that originated with the psychologists Carl Jung.  Jung stated that ‘what you resists persists’ and this is very true of pain.  We spend a lot of energy trying to resist pain, trying to prevent it taking a hold on us and we do this in a variety of ways, like finding something to distract ourselves. This may work for a while but is not a very good solution as the pain always returns and sometimes with a vengeance.  The existence of pain is our bodies trying to get our attention to focus in what the problem is.  It is an alert system for both physical and emotional pain and we need to ensure we give it the time  and attention it is calling for.

By allowing ourselves to focus on our pain we can help it  reduce its grip. By sitting with our pain and suffering  and exploring it without judgment but with curiosity we can answer its call for attention.

Pain can be experienced on 2 levels:

 

Primary pain - This is pain felt by the body as a result of illness. Or injury

Secondary Pain (Suffering) – Is the midn’s reaction to  Primary pain

(burch adn Penmana)

Through their own first hand experience of pain following severe accidents Burch and Penman found that through developing a mindfulness practice they were able to separate primary and secondary pain and take back control of the levels of suffering they experiencing as a result of their pain. Thereby retraining their brains  to filter out thoughts that may create further stress and suffering.

It is very much like the story told by the Bhuddha of the two arrows.

The two Darts Story

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mindful Exercises for Pain

Pain Trigger Diary

Turning down the dial on pain meditation

Exploring pain within the body meditation

Breathworks for pain.