Practicing Clean Pain
A core exploration in our most recent Personal Compass session was around how we as humans process experiences at a fundamental level so that we can have greater self-awareness to manage ourselves.
Here is the gist: when something happens, we first experience it viscerally in our bodies. You notice this through constriction vs. expansion or pain vs. ease, etc. This is not an emotional response; it’s an embodied response.
Second, this feeds information up to our “lizard brain” via the vagus nerve. The lizard brain does not think - it reacts to protect with flight, fight, freeze mode or relax if it assesses safety.
Third, if the lizard brain feels safe it will allow the thinking brain to engage.
This is pretty basic knowledge about how humans work that most of us are not aware of, given how mind-centered our society is and how we are brought up to function in the world.
Focusing on this information was inspired by content from the excellent book by Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands. We spent time discussing how we personally engage our bodies in processing information and also about a concept discussed in the book: Clean Pain and Dirty Pain.
Clean pain is pain that mends and that can build capacity to grow. It is the pain you feel when gathering courage to confront issues you have been avoiding and it’s pain that helps you grow, increase your range of motion in life and expand.
Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain and it can produce trauma or scars that leave a person constricted and hardened.
In this Personal Compass session once we grasped an understanding of the critical role that our body/nervous system plays in engaging in the world, we went through a body visualizing resource meditation, also from My Grandmother’s Hands book. This meditation directed us to imagine being with a loved person, animal or a favorite place that provides a sense of security and calmness while focusing on the experience of what that feels like in our body. With this grounding, we noticed where in our bodies we might feel constriction or ease. We listened for issues in the heart calling for resolution by experiencing clean pain.
Before leaving this session and returning to our daily lives, we committed to practicing how our bodies can be allies by identifying an accessible opportunity to experience clean pain. Doing this somatic work is about building skills and muscles in these dimensions:
Becoming proficient at settling the body to stay grounded and present
Building tolerance for discomfort
Cultivating courage to walk into and through clean pain
Being in your body and reading its signs
Getting out of your head and moving beyond just talk therapy approaches
Self-love and empathy for others
Practice, practice, practice to build muscle
Other resources mentioned during the course of the session included reference to the book The Body Keeps the Score and somatic tools - Resiliency Building Tools to Practice for Trauma Recovery. Anyone interested in working with their bodies in a deeper way with the help of a professional is encouraged to visit a somatic experiencing therapist to support them on this journey.