Living with pain in a weaponised mind

Understanding is an extremely important part of our process of coming to terms with our pain filled condition and really learning how to live with it, not just endure it. One of the ways we speak about it is that the sensory, the emotional, and the conceptual dimensions of the pain experience can be uncoupled from one another, meaning that they can be held in awareness as independent aspects of experience. Once we see that our thoughts about sensations, for instance, are not the sensations themselves, both the experience of the sensory and the cognitive dimensions of the pain experience may change independently. This is true for our emotional reactions to unpleasant sensory experience. This phenomenon of uncoupling can give us new degrees of freedom in resting in awareness and holding whatever arises in any or all of these domains of experience in an entirely different way, and dramatically reduce the suffering experience.