Learned Pain: What Are We Telling Ourselves?

YS II.16 heyam duhkham anagatam

Pain that has not yet come is avoidable.

(translation by Sri Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)

I’m reading a fascinating book called The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge (you may have found yourself on the receiving end of one of my extremely enthusiastic emails encouraging you to read it – if not, consider this your email!). It’s full of stories about all kinds of different physical or mental impairments (stroke, blindness, loss of a limb) and the often impossible-seeming breakthroughs, adaptations or transformations that have resulted as brain after brain has risen to the occasion and proven its innate plasticity. Simply put, our brains are not fixed and immutable, but constantly adaptable, plastic entities that can change from the inside out to overcome pretty much any situation.

There’s an entire chapter that blows apart our long-standing beliefs about pain. For years it was widely held in the scientific community that the experience of pain was a one-way street: you cut your finger, and your brain registers a sensation that you label as pain. This seems to be a highly provable fact, as anyone who's ever injured their body (who hasn't?) can attest.

But the truth is far more complicated. It turns out that pain pathway goes both to and from the brain, and that far from simply receiving messages from the body about pain, the brain can (and regularly does) produce pain signals as warning measures to guard against aggravating an injury. It predicts future pain, and in order to avoid it, tells us it's happening right now. Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran calls this “learned pain.”  

For the yogi, the meditator, or anyone wishing to deepen their awareness, this is a hugely relevant piece of information. If we expect an experience – physical, mental or emotional – to be a painful one, especially if it’s been painful in the past, rather than just finding some kind of numbing neutral, our brain will go one step further to tell us that we are currently in pain. We take our past and we project it onto our future, and it can leave us paralyzed, immobile, frozen with fear, and in pain that feels absolutely real. If an asana has caused us pain in the past, we may not only expect it to cause us pain, but actually replicate that pain sensation to stop the muscles from going deeper into the present moment experience. (Hanumanasana, anyone?)

From the point of view of the brain, this is a brilliant survival mechanism. And if you’re nursing a broken bone, a pulled muscle, or a broken heart, it may be crucial. But if this learned pain carries on once the break or pull has healed, it will keep us from expanding into our fullest potential in an asana, or at home under the covers instead of out in the world.

So how do we know which pain – learned or current – we’re feeling? At first, we may not. Broken bones and broken hearts both need time to mend, and that time period is going to vary for all of us. But the practice of becoming more aware, of spending more and more time in the present moment, holds the key to our ability to discern for ourselves what exactly we are feeling. We will begin to tease out the finer details of what we are experiencing within each moment, rather than lumping them all into one basket labeled ‘Pain.’ We will come to know and trust our more subtle instincts, and know when it is time to get off the couch, or to try that pose again. And in doing so, we will reeducate our brain on a synaptic level, weakening the circuits that no longer serve us and build new ones that are established in the truth of the present, instead of the pain of the past and the fear of the future.

“Neural circuits, once established, tend to become self-sustaining.” – The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge p. 242