Awareness and Self-Compassion: Two Powerful Tools for Chronic Pain

“Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the tangle of emotional resistance against what is already happening.” ~Tara Brach

The wooden meditation hall creaked softly as sixty people shifted in their seats, trying to find comfort in the silence. Outside, winter rain tapped against the windows, a gentle metronome marking time. I sat cross-legged on my black cushion, watching sweat trickle down my temple despite the cool air. My legs burned as if I’d been running for hours, though I hadn’t moved in forty-five minutes.

It was day three of my first six-day silent meditation retreat, and I was learning my first profound lesson about physical pain—not from my meditation teacher, but from my protesting body. Little did I know that this experience would become a crucial foundation for navigating a far greater challenge that lay ahead.

The pain started as a whisper in my lower back, a gentle suggestion that perhaps I should adjust my posture. Within minutes it grew to a shout, then a scream. While other practitioners appeared serene, their faces soft and bodies still, I was waging an internal war. Every few minutes, I’d shift my weight slightly, trying to find that elusive comfortable position. The cushion that had felt so perfect during the orientation session now seemed as unyielding as concrete.

The meditation instructions echoed in my mind: “Just sit and observe your breath.” But my body had other plans. Each inhale brought awareness of new discomfort—a sharp knife in my hip, a dull ache in my shoulders, pins and needles racing down my calves. The physical sensations became my entire world, drowning out any hope of focusing on my breath.

I tried everything. Different cushions borrowed from the prop closet. Various positions—Burmese, half-lotus, kneeling. I even snuck to the back of the hall to lean against the wall, feeling like a meditation failure as I watched the straight backs of more experienced practitioners ahead of me.

Then, on day four, something shifted. Perhaps it was exhaustion from fighting my experience, or maybe it was the wisdom of surrender, but I finally heard what my teacher had been saying all along: “Don’t try to change what’s arising; just be with it with kindness.”

For the first time, I stopped trying to fix my discomfort. Instead, I got curious about it. What did the pain actually feel like? Was it constant, or did it pulse? Where exactly did it begin and end? As I explored these questions with genuine interest rather than resistance, something remarkable happened—while the physical sensations remained, my suffering began to decrease.

“In the midst of pain is the whole teaching,” Pema Chödrön’s words would become my lifeline two years later, when a back injury transformed my relationship with pain from a periodic challenge into a constant companion. I would join the ranks of millions living with chronic pain—a silent epidemic that affects more than one in five adults globally.

While medicine can sometimes dull the sharp edges of physical suffering, many of us learn that managing chronic pain requires more than just medication. It demands a complete reimagining of our relationship with our bodies and with pain itself.

The lessons from that meditation hall now played out in vivid detail through every moment of my daily life. Simple tasks became exercises in mindful movement. Getting out of bed required a careful choreography of breath and motion. Picking up a dropped pen became a practice in patience and body awareness. Each movement called for the same careful attention I’d learned to bring to meditation.

The physical pain was just the beginning. In the darkness of sleepless nights, lying on my floor because no other position brought relief, my mind raced with endless worries: Would I ever recover? Could I continue counseling my clients in person? How would I pay the mounting medical bills? These thoughts circled like hungry wolves, testing the limits of my newfound practice of acceptance.

Working as a therapist brought its own unique challenges. I vividly remember sitting across from clients, maintaining my therapeutic presence while searing pain radiated from my tailbone through my entire spine. Each session became a practice in dual awareness—being present for my clients while acknowledging my own experience. Some days, the effort to maintain this balance left me depleted, with barely enough energy to drive home.

There was also the exhausting social dance of chronic pain. The simple question “How are you?” became complicated. Telling people about the constant pain felt burdensome after a while. No one wants to always be the person who’s suffering. So instead, I’d smile and say, “I’m fine,” swallowing the truth along with the discomfort. These small acts of concealment created their own kind of fatigue, a lonely space between the public face and private reality.

I invite you to pause and reflect on your own relationship with pain. When discomfort arises, what stories does your mind create about it?

Notice how your body responds—the subtle tightening, the wish to push away what’s difficult. Consider what it might feel like to create just a little space around your pain, like opening a window in a stuffy room.

Sometimes I think of pain as an unwanted house guest. We didn’t invite it, we don’t want it to stay, but fighting its presence only creates more tension in our home. Instead, we can acknowledge it’s here, set appropriate boundaries, and continue living our lives around it. Some days we might even discover unexpected gifts in its presence—a deeper appreciation for good moments, increased empathy for others’ struggles, or the discovery of our own resilience.

Working with pain mindfully reveals that healing happens on multiple levels. When we respond to physical discomfort with gentle awareness, we start noticing how our thoughts create narratives about the pain, how emotions arise in waves, and how our nervous system responds to kind attention. Through this practice, we can learn to expand our attention beyond the pain, discovering that even in difficult moments, there is also the warmth of sunlight on our face, the sound of birds outside our window, the taste of morning coffee.

Years later, my pain isn’t as severe, but it remains a daily companion. I carry a back pillow everywhere as if it’s an accessory, mindfully choosing which events to attend and for how long. Gardening, once a carefree joy, has become an exercise in presence—each movement an opportunity to listen to my body’s wisdom. Some days still find me lying on the floor, being with whatever my body is expressing in that moment.

But there’s a profound difference now. Where I once pushed through pain with gritted teeth, I’ve learned to respond to my body’s signals with care and compassion.

This shift feels especially valuable as I age, knowing that new physical challenges will likely arise. Each twinge and ache is no longer an enemy to vanquish but a reminder to pay attention, to move more slowly, to tend to myself with kindness.

The clock in that meditation hall taught me about impermanence—how even the most challenging moments eventually pass. My back injury taught me about acceptance and resilience. Together, these experiences showed me that while we can’t always choose what happens to our bodies, we can choose how we meet these experiences with awareness and compassion. In doing so, we discover that peace isn’t found in the absence of pain but in our capacity to be with it skillfully.

See more posts

About Katie Fleming Thomas

Katie is a trauma-informed psychotherapist, meditation teacher, and guide who helps others cultivate mindfulness and resilience. She is the creator of Freebird Meditations, offering transformative guided practices, and ZenQuit, a mindfulness-based nicotine cessation program. When not guiding others, she finds meditation in everyday life, gardening, baking sourdough, dancing, and hiking with her husband and animals. She believes true transformation happens when we turn inward with curiosity and compassion.

Web | More Posts

Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.

from Tiny Buddha https://ift.tt/AaxcO6f

How Grieving a Dream’s Loss Built Hope for a New Life

“Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.” –Dr. Edith Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible

The loss of an unrealized dream sent me spiraling down, down into the darkness. A darkness filled with a despair and hopelessness that I had not known before.

It was safer and more comfortable for me to attribute all my grief to losing a loving mother-in-law suddenly in the beginning of 2023. Her abrupt absence not only in my life but also in my husband’s and daughter’s lives was incredibly hard.

Though the loss opened the portal of grief, there was more I hid. When I was still in a tender place, intangible losses and a health scare came.

The loss that completely broke my heart was when my husband and I made the joint decision to end our dream of trying to have a second child. A shared dream since early on in our relationship and a dream of mine since long before.

Neither of us could have anticipated my unexplained infertility diagnosis and the four-year-long, beautiful, broken, and growth-filled road to parenthood. Throughout the entire journey, I still held onto hope that we would one day have two children.

The visceral, raw grief that came after we made the decision shocked me. When we had first honestly discussed this idea, I felt excited to build our life as a family of three. I deeply knew our family was complete.

But once we made the decision, grief I did not want or know how to feel consumed me. Grief for all that had been lost. For all that wouldn’t come into being in the future. Invisible to the outside world.

At first, my negative, self-critical talk took over, giving me a hard time for what I was going through. Full of self-judgment, regret, anger, and shame. Overcome with grief, I had forgotten I didn’t have to believe that voice and could be kinder to myself.

Mornings were the toughest. Each day, I would wake up with the weight of unshed tears under my eyes. Though I had slept well, my whole body was heavy and weary. My mind felt foggy. I’d forget small things, which wasn’t like me. Seemingly simple tasks took so much energy.

After dropping off my daughter at preschool, I would sit in my living room alone. I had no motivation to do anything. If I didn’t have a work meeting to prepare for or immediate deliverables to complete, I’d distract myself on my phone, numbing. This unhealthy morning cycle would continue for a while.

Once I started working, I would get in a rhythm and focus on the projects in front of me, which I did enjoy.

My body and psyche knew what had happened was significant. It would take time for my rational mind to catch up. I would need to allow myself to have my full experience of grief.

An Expanded View of Grief

Developing an expanded view of grief and processing my experience with a grief therapist began to help.

One of the first concepts I learned is that there are different types of grief. Through Atlas of the Heart, a book by research professor, author, and podcaster Brené Brown, I understood I was dealing with both acute and disenfranchised grief.

Acute grief is the intense grief that occurs during the initial period after a loss. I was not familiar with disenfranchised grief.

Brown writes, “Disenfranchised grief is a less-studied form of grief: grief that ‘is not openly acknowledged or publicly supported through mourning practices or rituals because the experience is not valued or counted [by others] as a loss.’ The grief can also be invisible or hard to see by others.”

My grief not only felt invisible to the outside, but also, I hadn’t valued the end of an unfulfilled dream as a loss at first.

A second concept was to focus on integrating grief into my life. My therapist shared that it’s not about moving on after experiencing a loss; it’s about moving forward, integrating our losses with how we live our lives.

A third concept came from psychologist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Edith Eger’s book The Choice: Embrace the Possible. Though she had been through unimaginable suffering, she gave a message of hope and healing.

She shared, “When we grieve, it’s not just over what happened—we grieve for what didn’t happen… You can’t change what happened; you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.” We could choose freedom, joy, and love over suffering.

What Helped Me Cope and Rebuild

I began to shift my experience from resistance to instead supporting myself during this period of grief. I started to accept that simply getting through my day was enough. These approaches can be beneficial to anyone experiencing grief, especially if it feels invisible.

1. Support myself and be supported

Once I remembered that I could support myself, my entire grief experience became more manageable. I already had tools to be kind and compassionate to myself. It was a matter of intentionally using them.

I began a practice of noticing and bringing in. Noticing my self-critical voice and, instead of getting caught up in it, bringing in self-compassion and kindness. I would say statements to myself like: It’s okay to feel this way. This is really hard. May I be kind to myself. Sometimes, I visualized wrapping myself in love.

I began to turn toward myself with kindness and love. To be there for myself. To process my experience through writing.

I opened up in close relationships and with my therapist, where I did feel listened to and accepted to share my struggles.

2. Feel my difficult feelings and bring in the light

One day, when I was meditating, I noticed what was happening in my body. I opened to the intense sensations. Before I knew it, I’d gone through a shorter version of Tara Brach’s RAIN practice. This had been a fundamental practice of mine when dealing with infertility, but I likely hadn’t done the full practice in years. The practice remembered me.

This framework means:

• Recognize what is happening.
• Allow the experience to be there just as it is.
• Investigate with interest and care.
• Nurture with self-compassion.

Once the exercise came back to my consciousness, I spent time each morning feeling my painful feelings.

One morning, at the end of the RAIN practice, I intuitively brought in light and love. Another time, I started saying a lovingkindness meditation to myself. I began to incorporate bringing in aspects of positivity after feeling my difficult feelings.

3. Go on awe walks

My grief was the heaviest in the darkness of the winter in Colorado. Toward the beginning of spring, still overcome with grief, I started going on awe walks. Awe walks, a term from Dacher Keltner, are walks where you shift your attention outward. Your task is to encounter something that amazes and transcends. Every day, I looked for new signs of spring at the trail near my house.

I would have missed most of the early signs if I hadn’t been seeking them: flower buds, tiny green leaves forming on branches, the first yellow wildflower blooms that peeked out from behind tangled branches. Then one day, I looked up and saw a canopy of green covering the trees overlooking the trail. Spring had fully arrived.

I discovered that growth starts small; it’s barely noticeable at first. Pay attention to changes happening, to what’s building slowly. It’s the foundation for what wants to come forth. And the bigger message is that winter comes first; only after going through winter is spring possible.

4. Embrace fallow time

Toward the end of the spring, I was getting tired of the heaviness of continued grief. I journaled frantically that I wanted a project. Something new to give my attention to. I longed to experience the energy of summer.

Grief still had more to teach me, though. The next day, my deepest wisdom instead shared with me to embrace “fallow time.” The term is from farming. Allowing the land to lie fallow is a technique where nothing is planted for a period of time. The goal is for the land to rest and regenerate.

Fallow time was asking me to continue to honor the nothingness where dreams once were. To rest in the space before building the next beginning.

I opened to allowing the vastness of where there once was something linger without trying to rush to the next thing.

I discovered that this clearing is where the potential for what’s next would emerge.

5. Reconnect with hope

I had attached so much hope to the outcome of having two children. While hope for a realistic outcome is important and kept me going, I found out its limitations when I let go of the dream.

But hope is so much vaster than that.

One day, I unexpectedly felt the energy of expansive hope. Called transcendent hope, it is broad hopefulness that something good can happen. This form of hope reignited a light deep within me.

Hope to build the beautiful life in front of me that I had once longed for, honoring the dreams, losses and imperfectness.

6. Rebuild possibilities and dream again

Grieving and dreaming felt at odds with each other initially. It turns out, grief would create an opening and space for what wanted to emerge next. Grief was my winter season, my fallow time. It was like planting flower seeds in the fall that won’t bloom until the next spring.

I would first need to accept the past and close this chapter of my life. Then, I could connect with the potential of dreaming again.

The dreams I most wanted to nurture in 2023 were coaching and writing. In the first half of the year, the dreams moved ever so slowly or seemingly not at all.

During this time, I was taking the Playing Big Facilitator’s Training coaching program but had no energy or motivation to start building coaching as I intended.

I also kept trying to write a personal essay about aspects of my infertility journey but felt blocked. I started but kept getting stuck. So instead, I journaled, with writing prompts such as a few things I don’t know how to write about.

Something profoundly shifted within me in September 2023. I became drawn to rebuilding what could be possible in my life.

The personal essay I had attempted to write for months flowed. A story about choosing to focus on personal growth and well-being amid the challenges of burnout and infertility. The final piece would later be published in Tiny Buddha in 2024: How I Found the Good in the Difficult.

As Dr. Egar shared in her book, it was about an experience where I had choice.

September was also the month I started a positive psychology coaching certification program. One reason I selected this coaching program is because positive psychology and mindfulness had been so impactful to me while facing infertility and burnout. Simultaneously, I began offering career, life, and well-being coaching.

I had to go all the way through the intensity of the grief to understand Dr. Egar’s wisdom: “Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.”

I received so many gifts when facing infertility and burnout. Transforming my relationship with myself and my life was the most wondrous. This painful time period was the gateway, on so many levels, for me to connect with a greater sense of meaning and overall well-being. To shift to work that felt more fulfilling. To rediscover my creative self-expression, especially writing, which surprisingly impacted my personal life and work. To uncover a dream to coach others in creating change that matters to them.

My experience in a grief cocoon profoundly changed me. On the other side, I have felt more at home in myself. More at peace with my past challenges. I have sensed wholeness. With a deeper appreciation of integrating it all—the grief, pain, gifts, gratitude, and joy. I am choosing to move forward with renewed hope for fully living my life and honoring my dreams.

See more posts

About Rachael Gaibel

Rachael Gaibel works as a career, life, and well-being coach who helps others get unstuck and find possibilities so they can create change that matters to them in their life and work. She also works as a leadership development content writer, strategist, and consultant. Outside of work, she is a writer, mother, wife, nature lover, and aspiring creative. Visit her website here. Check out her newsletter here.

Web | More Posts

Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.

from Tiny Buddha https://ift.tt/UTmFepK

Standing Up for Yourself Doesn’t Make You Any Less Kind

“Being a good person doesn’t mean being a doormat… You can be kind, giving, and full of love, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept disrespect or allow your boundaries to be crossed.” ~Unknown

I can still vividly remember sitting in my seventh-grade classroom, forcing a laugh as my classmates made jokes at my expense. My cheeks would burn red, but I’d smile along, desperately wanting to belong. For years, I mistook my silence for kindness, my nervous laughter for good nature. I didn’t realize that by laughing at myself, I was slowly chipping away at my own self-worth.

Growing up, I was the “nice kid”—the one who never caused trouble, never talked back, and always tried to keep the peace. When someone would make a cutting remark about my appearance or mock the way I spoke, I’d respond with a practiced smile and a halfhearted chuckle. I thought this made me mature, diplomatic even. “Just brush it off,” my mother would say. “They’re only joking.” But deep inside, each laugh felt like a small betrayal of myself.

The pattern continued well into my teenage years. In every social circle, I became the designated “good sport”—the one who could take any joke, no matter how sharp its edges. I wore this label like a badge of honor, never realizing it was actually a shield I was hiding behind. My inability to stand up for myself wasn’t kindness; it was fear dressed up as politeness.

The turning point came during my first year of college. During a group project, a teammate made a particularly cruel joke about my work ethic. As usual, I started to laugh, but something inside me snapped.

Years of suppressed feelings bubbled to the surface, and for the first time, I heard how hollow my laughter sounded. In that moment, I realized I wasn’t being nice—I was being complicit in my own diminishment.

This revelation led me down a path of self-discovery and personal growth. Through therapy, self-help books, and countless conversations with trusted friends, I began to understand the difference between being kind and being a doormat. I learned that standing up for yourself doesn’t make you mean or confrontational—it makes you self-respecting.

Here are the vital lessons I learned along my journey:

The first step was the hardest: acknowledging that my laughter was a defense mechanism, not a sign of resilience. I had to accept that it’s okay to not find hurtful comments funny. Real strength isn’t in laughing off insults; it’s in acknowledging when something hurts and addressing it directly.

I started practicing simple phrases in front of the mirror: “I don’t find that funny,” “That comment was inappropriate,” or simply, “Please don’t speak to me that way.” At first, these words felt foreign on my tongue, but gradually, they became part of my vocabulary. I learned that confrontation doesn’t have to be aggressive—it can be calm, dignified, and firm.

The most surprising discovery was how many people respected me more when I started setting boundaries. Those who truly cared about me adjusted their behavior. Those who didn’t, well, they showed their true colors, and I learned that not every relationship needs to be preserved at the cost of your self-respect.

Today, I still consider myself a kind person, but my kindness no longer comes at the expense of my dignity. I’ve learned that true niceness isn’t about accepting poor treatment; it’s about treating others—and yourself—with respect.

When someone makes a hurtful comment now, I no longer reach for laughter as a shield. Instead, I stand tall in my truth and speak up with compassion and clarity.

To those who recognize themselves in my story—those who laugh when they want to cry, who smile when they want to scream—I want you to know that your feelings matter. Your discomfort is valid. Your voice deserves to be heard. Being nice doesn’t mean being silent, and standing up for yourself doesn’t make you any less kind.

The journey from forced laughter to authentic self-expression isn’t easy. It’s filled with uncomfortable moments and challenging conversations. But with each small act of standing up for yourself, you rebuild your self-worth piece by piece. You learn that the strongest form of kindness is the kind you show yourself.

Remember: You can be both nice and strong, both kind and assertive. The real magic happens when you find that balance—when you can face the world with a genuine smile, knowing you’ll never again laugh at the expense of your own dignity.

See more posts

About Kalyani Abhyankar

Kalyani Abhyankar is a professor of law and mindset coach, specializing in administrative law and consumer protection. She is passionate about helping others cultivate a limitless mindset and personal growth through her work on LinkedIn and beyond.

More Posts

Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.

from Tiny Buddha https://ift.tt/3aUOJ2F