What is pain and where does pain come from?

What is pain and where does pain come from?

While pain can be physically associated with inflammation and trauma, it may be associated with any result that you do not want - but cannot otherwise escape or change - in the terms set.  The rage beneath a sense of life denied is not rational but a certain kind of 'rationality' arose to limit and deny its expression. Likewise grief or terror.
The mind - in its personality sense - is a social expression of covering over and mitigating, outsourcing or denying pain. With some arena of expression and redefinition or redistribution in the surface reality of the personal, social and cultural definitions of acceptable or respectable communications and behaviours.

The coping strategies for psychic emotional pain include pushing it down; denial. The conditions are then stored or rather dumped in the body. The pain of isolation is a very deep rooted sense of disconnection from life, from self and from others and world - regardless how much substitution is engaged to mitigate or offset it.

But as I describe now - pain is deeply part of our consciousness - which in some sense is fragmented in a variety of ways as both the results of trying to overcome or escape it - that led to more pain and fragmentation - but also as the adaptation of the personality to cope within 'the human condition' - or indeed as I hold, the human conditioning in which various overlapping consensual definitions  operate as the reality out of which we think - and in which we presume to live. For the identity within limitation, pain can also serve as a reinforcement of limitation - where the removal of the limiting factors would increase fear. Indeed conflicts and confusions can serve as obfuscations of a deeper denial pattern - where some deep shame may hold a greater terror than a set of physical or emotional symptoms of physical effect.

In some ways the persona can act like a lid over experience that has been stuffed down into the unconscious - with the patterns of suppression operating subconsciously - and when this breaks down as a defence - it is experienced as a breakdown of reality.

The trained response of the fearfully identified to pain is to seek to escape it as soon as possible by whatever is to hand, or failing that, to mitigate or mask it. In our fragmented and managed culture, we are not often raised to receive or open to it - as a relationship of some curiosity as to what exactly is presenting. Instead we are identified most often with a contraction into thoughts and feelings that are symptomatic of the pain as a constellation of negative reinforcements of meanings that become part of the narrative experience of the pain. An identity in pain - where a bit less pain can seem pleasure - but whole Souled joy may be forgotten and absent - EXCEPT in the defences raised against it.

Magic answers to relational issues are anything that seems to redistribute energy and attention so as to get some 'time off' from pain... before the 'magic' wears off and the negative default resumes. But genuine resolution of the issues undoes the cause - and releases the being to feel and align in joy in their moment, in their day, in their lives.

The accepted definition and use of the mind is key in all this - and the emotional and physical response and reflection are the faithful feedback or result of the focus, alignment and balance within self as with others and with the world. Trying to be who or what you are not induces conflict and strain in which life energy is given to fear-as-control.
Losing control is socially shameful and personally humiliating as well as target for others whose issues are triggered in response. But regardless the apparent mess, the opportunity is for the waking to a re-integrative movement of being - rather than 'getting back' to persist in an out-of-true representation of what society expects or demands - or what one believes society expects or demands. Life is not just something that happens to us. We are participants - indeed we are Participance. But the recognition, acceptance and embodiment of a true willingness is of an entirely different order from any wishfulness of mental rehearsal or re-enactment - that can be associated with a past that was significantly characterised by evasion - presented as something else.
The thinking can and often does usurp a true checking in within and without as to what resonates presence here and what is superfluous or noise to the core signal of focus now.
But noticing a habit in the act is the opportunity of a choice to make a better one - and get a corresponding result.
The thinking defines our choices in ways that deny choice - and so a break or pause from thinking opens perspective just by relaxing or indeed profoundly yielding everything as it is to being exactly as it is - rather than actively focussing in the narrative definitions, meanings and thoughts around and about or upon the focus of attention.
Nothing requires perfection - but only some movement of true willingness. The signalling of willingness to the being is of a different order to denial - and meets a different set of witnesses or reinforcements. But although such synchronicity can be miraculous as a shifting from siege to connected freedom of being. it is a rededication of self in willingness for life - as a participance and unfolding out of who we uncover and accept ourselves to be by living such steps as are open to take. Awakened purpose may take a significant time to establish - but it is no less a changing orientation to time - for the now becomes a resource from which to renew and live from - instead of setting time as the distance between desire and fulfilment - as in 'chasing carrots', or putting time between issues that call for attending and meeting - as if to delay the 'inevitable'. (stick).
No one can really share pain - or compare pain. Perspectives can radically change even in one lifetime. But who has suffered and in some sense come through pain- has a compassionate solidarity with the being who is in such experience as part of who they are. The capacity to feel joy is the capacity to feel pain. Joy is freedom of being - and regardless our conditions or conditionings - our being is not our personality construct but is infinitely more intimate than anything we seem to think alone. No one else can truly accept me - for me, though their light may wake my own, and no one else's rejection hurts like my own - but it can serve to illuminate where I am so down on my self and thus bring that out to see what that's all about. One step at a time.