Hello friends,
It’s been a little while since I’ve written, and to be totally honest, that is because the next of the mindfulness attitudes, gratitude, took me some time to wrap my head around. When I first considered gratitude in terms of my relationship with pain and my scoliosis journey, I felt annoyed and frustrated. I was flooded with thoughts of “my scoliosis is so unfair. It’s getting in the way of so many things in my life. I don’t want to sit here and say that I’m grateful for my scoliosis because I’m not.” Despite my intellectual understanding of the benefits of gratitude practices, and even encouragement of my therapy clients to develop such practices, the idea initially sounded super invalidating and minimizing to me, as I think it does for a lot of people. Scoliosis and chronic pain suck. I didn’t want to be grateful for them.
It wasn’t until yesterday while going on a walk and listening to the “Tell Me About Your Pain” podcast that the idea of the benefits of gratitude in the context of pain started to make sense to me. I put on the episode “How Can I Heal My Pain By Making My Pain Feel Safe?” and expected the podcast to guide me in appreciating the movement of my body, the blue sky, the puffy clouds, and lush summer trees. But as I walked, I was surprised by the discussion of ways that our mind sends our body messages of danger and messages of safety, and how this can impact our mind’s perception of pain. Pain itself is a danger signal – it is your body telling your mind that there is some kind of bodily damage that needs attention. But when we constantly send our brains messages of danger – either personally or societally – our brain begins to believe we are in physical danger, and therefore starts interpreting neutral stimuli as threatening. And this can include by creating signals of pain.
I had heard the neuroscience behind pain before, but somehow this description made it click for me for the first time. I began reflecting on all the ways that I communicate messages of danger to my body – through constant worry about my future, through self-criticism and self-judgement, through comparisons to others, and through replaying times when I’ve gotten hurt. Additionally, there are all the ways that the society we live in communicates messages of danger – consumerism thrives off a scarcity culture in which we believe we never have enough. The world is a mess and any time we consume news media, we are bombarded with reminders that climate change is reeking havoc on the health of the planet and minority rights are constantly being threatened. Social media promotes unrealistic, toxic comparisons and leaves us wondering if our social lives, travel plans, parenting styles, romantic relationships, Tupperware organization skills, or eyebrow hair length are good enough. There is so much, personally and culturally, that is telling my brain it is not safe. I don’t believe that these emotional messages are 100% the source of my pain, but I recognize that they can’t be helping it either.
So how do we counteract all these danger signals with messages of safety – to tell the primitive part of our brain that we’re okay, there’s not an immediate threat that needs our fight, flight, freeze response to be constantly activated. This is where gratitude comes in – knowing that yes, it’s nice to look at and appreciate the blue sky and puffy white clouds, but also understanding that doing so helps soothe our brains’ hypervigilance for threat. For me, I send myself messages of safety through playing the piano and singing along to my favorite show tunes, through getting a hug and snuggling my cat, through enjoying the ritual of sitting at my favorite coffee shop and journaling, and through dancing in my kitchen while cooking a meal, just to name a few. I can recognize that scoliosis sucks while also practicing gratitude for the things in my life that make me feel safe.
Looking back on my old entries, I realize that these posts get a little repetitive in terms of the final message. And although part of me wishes I was having new epiphanies every week, I think this repetition reflects my experience with the nature of mindfulness itself. Mindfulness is simple, but not easy. The concepts are easy to understand intellectually, and yet so challenging to consistently incorporate into daily life. For me at least, continuing to reframe and process these concepts helps me come to a better understanding of them and gives me new actionable takeaways. I’d love to know what this experience is like for you.
Thank you for reading,
Laura
Living Spinefully 
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