Standing Under Pain: II, a segunda parte

After we appreciate that pain is fundamentally a message from the body (often including very pertinent contents!) to the conscious mind, we can move on to recognizing another essential aspect of pain: that it is at least as metaphysically nebulous as the term "metaphysically nebulous" itself. What I mean with this unnecessarily ambiguous description is that pain as such can not be measured
Or touched
Or seenOr smelled
Or tasted.
It cannot even be felt except within a single person's subjective experience. This points to the fact that pain is not inherent in any object or experience. Instead, it is a post hoc designation, a label that the mind marks a given stimulus withal.Take a rusty nail: this implement can implicate itself in a painful relationship, but the nail itself is not painful. In a hypothetical sequence of events, first, the nail meets an unsuspecting foot. Then the said foot sends a stimulus up the afferent neuron to the spine (where hopefully the reflex-arc quickly responds to unweight the afflicted foot). Eventually, this information reaches the brain. Here, the brain evaluates the essentially indifferent stimulus. If the brain perceives a threat, pain arises—not before! Finally, if we know anything about rusty nails, we figuratively "impale" ourselves upon a second nail simply with the anxiety that likely follows hard upon the actual event (i.e., the cogitative fallout that likely ensues from the imagined prospect of tetanus—uncontrollable muscle spasms, lock-jaw, mortality, etc...). Hence, one essentially painless nail compounds manyfold into several painful ones in our subjective experience.

The better we can understand that pain is not a solid object but rather the brain's interpretation of a given nervous stimulus, the better able we will be to stand with it, obliging it but not obliged by it, ser autores de nuestras mismas obras.

I don't know yet what I'll write for the final installment in this series, but I'll try to think of something. In the meantime, the Traveling Rolfer is back in business. Get in touch to schedule a session & I'll show up at your front door with the massage table in the old Burley bike trailer (provided the weather is reasonable). You don't even have to get out of your pajamas!

Max rides his bike with a trailer attached.