Although I suggest those who come to see me for sessions that they keep consulting their doctors and keep taking medication (if they’ve been taking any) in case they have physical health issues, I believe that one’s mental well-being shouldn’t be ignored either. In fact, the vast majority of health issues are related to stress—and chronic physical pain is no exception. In this article, I’d like to talk about approaching the management of pain generated in the body from the perspective of the mind, which excellently complements medical advice and treatment.

The two types of pain

To quote Lura Owen, we can differentiate between two types of pain: one of them is actual physical pain and the other one is emotional pain generated through the body. To exemplify what I mean exactly, let’s suppose that someone hits you out of anger. If you’re feeling pain right after the moment of being hit, that’s physical pain; however, if that exact same location feels painful even several weeks later and you can make it stronger just by your thoughts—for example, replaying how badly he/she treated you and feeling angry towards him/her—that is called memorised pain, which you are generating in the present moment.

In other words, if you’re in pain in spite of the fact that no outside factor did physical harm to you recently, you can reduce or even completely eliminate it by releasing any emotional attachment to it. It has happened to me countless times that while tapping with someone, we could get rid of any physical pain solely by cleaning up a few memories. Also, according to Robert Smith, if all pains were entirely physical, we wouldn’t be able to alter them with out thoughts and emotions, neither negatively nor positively.

The list of possible mental causes

When I’m addressing pain, I look up the possible mental cause of the pain in The Secret Language of Your Body by Inna Segal. Of course, I’m saying that what this book writes is true for everybody in every situation, it still occurs to me very often that when a person has pain in a certain part of his/her body, what the book describes as mental causes relevant to the part of body in question do appear in that person’s life, and the pain also lessens as we are working on that issue. (And if the pain “comes back”, it doesn’t mean that tapping didn’t work, but that there are more resources left in the mind that serve as fuel to generating pain and need to be cleaned.)

If Inna Segal’s book is not available to you, I also recommend Heal Your Body by Louise L. Hay.

And what if you can’t find the cause of your pain?

Robert advises on his video no. 426 that you make peace with your current situation and start thinking about things that make you feel good and what you can do. There are people who are mad at themselves for what their body is doing to them. But in reality, the body is only doing its job: it lets you know that there’s something in your mind you need to get rid of. Whatever this message of your body means, it’ll be better if you receive it with gratitude and love and you let go of all the anger, resentment, grief, fear etc. you feel with it.

And while we’re at it, whatever your health is like currently, you’re not broken and what your body is doing is not a failure. It successfully operates based on what programs you have from the past, and follows whatever you have in your mind.

Also, there’s a very useful question to ask yourself when you’re tapping: “How do I know this pain is a problem?” As an answer, you may notice inside you that you’re feeling, seeing, or hearing something. Whatever you notice, you can start tapping on it even by yourself.

Conclusion

You can think about your body as a faithful servant: it follows whatever your mind does. Once you take care of the old hurts stored in your mind, you can take control of your body and support its natural process of healing itself. Then, you can replace pain with peace so that you can have more fun in your life.