The MINDFULNESS Magic | Discover the Key to Managing Chronic Pain and Finding Inner Peace
Channel: Starts With Me
Date: 2023-09-30

Explore the intersection of chronic pain, mindfulness, and self-discovery in this thought-provoking podcast. Don Hunter, a psychotherapist with 40 years of experience, shares his personal story, emphasizing the importance of acceptance, meditation, and breaking free from the cycle of suffering.

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One question or one thing that I think if you had any sort of parting words for people with chronic pain and just any last kind of words to help them work through it. And then I have one last question. I think that it's one of the for me, the most important thing is that you have you have created and developed and strengthened the space inside you where the pain isn't present.
So I don't have to actually at the moment, but usually I don't have pain in my abdomen and stomach. So that's where my sort of safe space is. When I do a deep, dark amount of breath, I drop into that space. And because I'm focused on that space and sort of mindful of whatever I'm focusing on at the moment, the pain recedes.
So it doesn't it doesn't interfere in that space. And I could spend whatever time I want there. Sometimes I need to listen to the guided meditation that I do to get there, to get past the pain. But once I'm there, I'm good and there, and I can stay there for a little bit of time. So and doing that every day, I think gives you some hope that you can keep doing that.

And you can't even find the time. You can you can feel life without that pain. Right. And okay, so my last kind of question is the and I'm not sure how you think about this in terms of this is a bit more of a mindfulness question. The the dual non dual discussion and I guess Buddhism and and so that's the know self versus the self and experience idea.

Yeah. I've been in, you know, the no self these when you describe the sense of you recede into the background of your experience so to speak. Right so the at least as I understand it, it's there is no me self or I behind my face that experiences life. Right. Even the myself I behind my face is an appearance in my conscious awareness, like a feeling or a thought.

And I assume or maybe that it seems to me that's kind of what you're describing in your relationship to the pain in some senses that it's just happening and that's here. And if I can remove this sense that it's happening to me. So for me, it's if I, if I'm attached to that sense of myself and I, then everything that happens to me is a slight against me kind of idea.

Right? So you're doing this to me. This is about me. Poor me, poor me, all that kind of shit. So I guess in your experience, when you are going through these practices and the discipline it takes to do it is a lot. And you actually also mentioned in here and it's sort of similar to one thing I've heard John KABAT-ZINN say all the things that come up in our minds, you know, this is a waste of time.

I shouldn't meditate right now. You have other more important things to do than just sit here and do nothing. And then you say, it turns out that meditating could be the most important thing we can do for our physical and mental health. And I think I certainly agree with that. And so, yeah, I guess that's kind of a jumbled thought of of how you kind of center the you behind these experiences.

Meditation, yeah, is another reason why I talk about creating that safe space inside you so that you, you have a space to go where none of that matters, right? And I think that the two things that stand out for me and always have is that I believe that there is a part of our self, right, that that I call the observing self that Thomas Moore called the original self.

So Thomas more talked about the original self. We were all born with an original self that is not affected by the environment yet. And then we go through all these experiences and that original self gets buried. People start to judge what you're doing, tell you things are wrong, you shouldn't do it this way, and that starts to bury that original self.

So I think of the original self as the observing. So the part of you that is different from the mind, me, myself, all that stuff is the part of you that works that you step back from your life and your relationships and your body and what's going on and look at things from a different perspective. Now that I use a lot in the hypnosis that I use with people that can connect with that observing self when they go back, that we do a retro if we do a a timeline and go back in time and go back to an event, they can connect with that observing self.