If you are running low on spoons, or if you just need some tips on saving your spoons, finally, we may just be saved. Introducing a whole new kind of superhero…
SpoonGirl
Rescuing Pain Princesses and Warriors with Emergency Spoons
Read on for the first post in this new series of chronic pain management and coping tips to save your spoons. If the idea of spoons is perplexing, read this: The Spoon Theory.
Spoongirl’s Spoon-Saving Tips | 0.1
If you are running low on spoons, instead of become frustrated, angry, anxious, or any other less than helpful emotion, stop. Take a deep breath. When things become stressful on top of your pain and other symptoms, it’s easy to also become tense, and a tense body is far more painful than a relaxed one.
To relax and calm your mind and in turn body, mentally attend to any parts of you that you are unconsciously holding. It’s natural to stiffen up when in pain but when pain is a constant part of your life, for your own sake, learning a simple relaxation technique, or few, can be true sanity-savers.
Try This for Instant Calm
Relax every part of you as best you can. Take deep inhalations into your belly and slow, even exhalations. Focus on your breathing and allow all that is outside of you to drop away. Become still, the calm in the chaos. Your body may be torchurous but your mind can be still, even if only for the briefest of moments, though the more you practise this, the more easily and swiftly, you’ll relax.
Spend a couple of minutes breathing in and breathing out, letting your belly rise and fall, while keeping your breath gentle, even, and calm. Using deep breathing is one of the finest and ever-accesible pain management tools you have. It’s free too.
Next, imagine your mind is a grand blue sky. All those thoughts, concerns, fears and worries are simply clouds passing through. Imagining your thoughts as clouds helps because you do not need to attach yourself to those thoughts, however persistent they may be. Just watch them. You, as this serene, blue sky, allow nothing to tamper with your calm. You merely observe, allowing even those persistent woes, worries and concerns to pass too.
When you cannot alter a tough situation in the moment, this present moment, engaging with thoughts or ruminating about what you used to do, longed to do, may never do or simply anything that exclusively makes you feel bad only serves to depress you, literally push you down. No one likes to be depressed or indeed add to what is already an incredibly challenging situation.
Although this is far from your choosing, you can choose how you react in this instant, to this moment, and in this moment you can give yourself a gift. The gift of a calming meditation of passing clouds and blue-skied-stillness. It can calm both you and your sympathetic nervous system, which naturally calms your pain.
There. And with that, you have a free spoon.
Spoon Girl also features her spoon-saving tips in the Princess Post. Sign-up at the top of the site or using the drop-down menu. You can also sign-up via the Facebook page, here.
[avatar user=”Spoon Girl” size=”thumbnail” link=”www.princessinthetower.org” target=”_blank”]Spoon Girl X[/avatar]
Meditation, breathing and visualization help me all the time. While waiting on the pain meds to work, I often practice visualizing a beautiful, favorite scene with as much detail as possible, like my dream house, or the perfect koi pond, and I breathe slowly, deeply as I do this. Sometimes I tense and relax each section of my body, breathing in healing (pinky-peach colors) and exhaling pain (bruised purple/blue). Meditation (along with breathing slowly and deeply) helps while waiting to see yet another doctor or endure the anticipation/fear of another painful procedure. With practice, these have come to be really useful tools in coping every day. And they don’t cost a dime!
Thanks Peachy, that’s wonderful. I think it’s such a soothing and calming practice but also the fact we can visualise ourselves in far finer places and climes is such a gift, especially because it’s free and always accessible. With the colours and deep breathing fused with meditation too, it sounds like you have a very useful tool in your pain management toolkit. Thanks for your lovely comment. ♥ x
Thanks…I will give it.a try !!!
Do, and keep me posted if it helps. I’ll be sharing more quick tips next week too. Thanks for your comment Valarie. ♥ x