Q: I work with people who suffer from chronic pain and I’m wondering what would assist them in dealing with it.
John: To have no personal issue with chronic pain. For the most part, people who have chronic pain are attached to it. Only profound honesty can be in pain and make no story about it.
Q: So the story is the problem, more than the pain?
John: Yes. The dishonesty of awareness to what it knows is what creates that story.
Q: What’s a way in to assist someone in that situation?
John: The way in will be very short-lived. There are many ways in, for example a kind look. When someone who is in chronic pain receives a kind look, for a moment they’re distracted from their pain. They’re distracted from their story because they’re touched in their heart. The touch in their heart has nothing to do with their story.
Q: So, compassion?
John: It’ll be a very short-lived distraction from their story. For that short moment they realize again, without a thought process, what works. The touch in their heart works. Their story doesn’t work, their chronic pain doesn’t work, their whole relationship with it doesn’t work.
The touch in their heart works. Right there, someone in chronic pain knows how to be, and it has nothing to do with their story or their pain.
Q: It’s giving them something, another way of being. If you’re in your story all the time, then that is your experience.
John: Everyone is distracted in micro-moments of being throughout every day. Everyone is distracted from their story.
Q: So is it a matter of bringing their awareness to that valid distraction?
John: Yes, but that won’t do because you’ll need another momentary distraction. When someone becomes honest within that moment, doubling the time of that moment, they realize what they know the truth of.
Right there is where they’re able to be completely free of themselves by sustaining being in agreement with what they know, despite anything that they’re experiencing. Right there is either a micro-choice to remain in that or a micro-choice to turn back to the story.
Q: Is it necessary to get a sense of the response within the body for them to know that’s happening, so it’s a body awareness and not all in the head?
John: Everyone has micro-moments of that throughout the day. You can do something to bring more awareness to that, but that won’t necessarily make a person better. It won’t necessarily really help.
It costs the whole story to walk away from the story.
