Giving My Pain Permission By Listening to My Body

I think that 3+ years of battling chronic health issues taught me more than I could have ever imagined about how to process pain (physically, spiritually, emotionally, etc). I have been battling chronic UTIs and issues with my bladder since 2019. Both of my grandmothers have spent their entire lives battling the same (thank you genetics and the lack of real attention to women’s health issues :).

The pain in my body was not something I could hide or run away from. It was crippling, exhausting, debilitating and full of shame. I didn’t know what to do with it. As a 20-something year old healthy person, I couldn’t understand why I was given this burden to bare. It has seemed so unfair. I have spent hours and hours and hours and thousands of dollars trying to get answers to my questions. I had to be my own best advocate because I found that no doctor was going to do it for me. I had to acknowledge - over and over again - that my pain was real, despite what other people thought (even people with an MD behind their name).

This lesson for me has been in owning my pain, in allowing myself to acknowledge and hold space for it. It has taken me some years to get comfortable with that. But the lesson I’ve seen revealing itself in the last year or so is that this is just a metaphor for the rest of the pain in my life. Healing doesn’t happen when we don’t give ourselves permission to feel the pain.

Over time, I have learned (the hard way) how to sit with it, acknowledge it and say to myself over and over again - you are in pain, your feelings about it are valid, and I’m not giving up on us. I will hold you until we get this figured out. You are safe here.

I’m an Enneagram 8 and the TRUEST thing about me is that I’m a gut type. I feel everything instinctually. I have a deep sense of knowing that I cannot explain in enough words or express through my feelings. I just know. I feel it in my bones and my breath. Unlocking this part about myself has been the most freeing. To acknowledge that my body has important and real information feels like liberation to me. To really allow myself to BE and to be who I am, just as I am, is the beginning of healing for me.

Thank you, body, for showing me something I couldn’t have learned otherwise. The beginning of healing is giving my pain permission. Permission to be in the world, permission to be held, and permission to be healed.