Last Updated on July 26, 2018 by melissanreynolds
Recently I was lucky enough to be given a chance to read and review Sarah Anne Shockley’s book The Pain Companion: Everyday Wisdom for Living with and Moving Beyond Chronic Pain.
I was given a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Synopsis of The Pain Companion
In the twenty-first century, one might wish that pain were an easily treatable nonissue. It is not. Millions of doctor and emergency room visits stem from pain, and addiction to pain medications, rampant in the United States, often takes root in an attempt to manage unremitting discomfort.
In The Pain Companion: Everyday Wisdom for Living With and Moving Beyond Chronic Pain (New World Library, June 12, 2018), author Sarah Anne Shockley, who has personally lived with chronic pain since 2007, offers fellow pain sufferers a compassionate and supportive guide for living with pain that can be used alongside their ongoing medical or therapeutic healing programs
Further reading you might like:
For more about meditation and Fibromyalgia see my post about it here.
My Review of The Pain Companion
The book is divided into parts: The pain moves in, the emotional life of chronic pain, meditative approaches to physical pain and when pain is a teacher.
Shockley defines chronic pain early in the book: “Chronic pain is a very complex condition involving much more than just the physical symptoms of the body. It includes emotional and psychological aspects as well, due to the incredible stresses of living with pain on a daily basis, and the ramifications of basically losing one’s life to pain.” P18
And she hits the nail on the head. The emotional and psychological aspects are just as important to address as the physiological ones.Shockley explains how she came to understand this and how it ultimately helped her cope with the pain: “This practice of extending understanding and compassion to myself was more than just a psychological wellness exercise. It was a crucial interior movement that created space for real healing and unexpectedly began to relieve my physical pain as well.” P22
In part three Shockley talks of meditative approaches and not fighting the body and the pain so hard (extending understanding and compassion to herself and the pain). She explains how she began to listen to the pain, to see what it was trying to tell her. And in doing so she reduced the intensity.
We need to ask ourselves: What is this pain trying to tell us? What is its origin?
We are given 12 meditative exercises to work through starting with the breath. Now I have been a meditator for several years now but I still find visualisation and the idea of talking to my pain difficult. However, there are many exercises here that are excellent gateway approaches, especially the noticing the breath and learning to relax this way.
Usually I devour books, but this one I savoured. I read it in sections and really absorbed what she was saying. This is not a guidepost for curing chronic pain, or even how to overcome it, but more about how one woman managed to coexist with it in a way that ultimately reduced her suffering.
If you want to see an interview with the author about this book, see here.
You can get your copy of The Pain Companion here.
For more information:
Come and join my free You vs Fibromyalgia micro course.
