Coping with Pain and Stress

Yea generally speaking telling someone to suck it up and not whinge is most usually useless, but it does work for low level pain and stress so the capacity must exist in some form. For those with practise in it then it might extend to greater pain and stress as a viable option. But being someone with a chronic condition of pain who has spent a bit of time exploring spirituality, its often not as easy as that - since pain is designed to grab your attention the worse the pain the more attention it demands!!!

So how to develop mentally mediated solutions!!!!!!!!!!! That I guess is the million dollar question.

I do though think there is a big difference between physical pain, and the mental suffering such as anxiety, stress and depression. Often the mental suffering is a mixture of exhaustion and dissolution of ones sense of personal agency through absence of free time or abuse etc. Those things seem to be more about fixing the causative agents more then anything, or if they are not completely overwhelming simply growing a thicker skin over time (which is not necessarily an ideal solution).

I tend to take the first option in those cases, and will just pack my bags and move along if life is not being reasonable.

So that leaves my experience with physical pain, which has been much tougher for me. I still persist with it, and have used some Eastern contemplative traditions, that they seem to teach things in a specific order to generate outcomes;

Preperatory exercises to develop;
1. calmness to learn focus, and
2. the doctrine of 'emptiness'.

Path, using the focus to achieve;
3. developing insight to practise dealing with holding complexity within cognition,
4. moving those skills to visualizing energy circuits in the body and synchronizing them with physical action, and
5. visualizing oneself in the form of ones guru or a diety as a 'whole body' (perhaps Force body!).

Outcomes, in the context of suffering;
6. Applying the path to the emptiness doctrine to disassociate ones corporeal experience in more tangible terms.

So in this way a capacity to experience a detachment would be said to be empowered but it would be more like having greater control over that corporeal experience. The other benefit in a general context is it could allow the cognitive or spiritual powers to be refined, related or released depending on where the practitioner is. Unfortunately the worse the pain, seemingly the longer it might take so I don't go around recommending the path just in case so much effort did not generate the desired outcomes - but for me I was interested in it before I got the condition causing the pain so it was like an allied application of my spiritual path.