The PRINCE was in pain. Are you?
We all suffer from a sexually transmitted disease (dis-ease) called life and for even the healthiest of us, or the most health-conscious of us, like Prince, it can be ever so painful.
Pain that exists for a long time or constantly recurs is considered chronic and millions of people suffer with it incessantly. Chronic pain is both endemic and pandemic and is an equal opportunity experience and predator.
Americans filled 4.3 billion prescriptions and doled out nearly $374 billion on medicine in 2014, according to new data from the IMS Institute for Healthcare Inform. We are a diseased people and culture.
Americans consume 80 percent of the world’s supply of painkillers — more than 110 tons of pure, addictive opiates every year — as the country’s prescription drug abuse epidemic explodes.
Pain pill prescriptions continue to surge, up 600 percent in the last ten years, thanks to doctors who are more and more willing to hand out drugs to patients who are suffering. How much of the pain is psychosomatic and how much of the treatment is placebo?
As more people get their hands on these potentially-dangerous drugs, more are taking them to get high. Legal, over-the-counter drug abuse leads to 14,800 deaths a year — more than from heroin and cocaine combined.
As a species, we don’t know how to avoid pain whether physical or emotional. Because of the panic and our presumed lower threshold for pain, we’ve become obsessed with trying to manage it. Or just trying to feel more comfortable in our skin as human beings.
We’re all involved in a kind of global group therapy, where religion tends to be the suggested or presumed treatment, but often fails. Some think the acquisition of money and things or perhaps various dietary disciplines treat the pain, but for whatever the reason, the pain for most persists. And the placebo factor is proving less effective as even religious people are recognizing that their pain is persistent and consistent between Sundays and even during most Sundays for them.
We habitually develop coping mechanisms and behavioral modifications all toward the goal of managing our pain. It’s not that we hurt or even why we hurt, but in the ways we manage our pain that concerns me most. Pain is unavoidable, but misery is a choice. One we can change.
We must consider both personal or individual as well as collective and cultural ways to manage the pain of life and the pain in our own lives.
Pain is energy and takes energy to express itself. Refocusing both the energy and emphasis of our pain is the first step to healthier ways of managing it. We must ask ourselves not just why am I hurting, but where does the pain originate? We must deal with Source more than symptoms. Pain killers deal only with symptoms. Healthy choices deal with source or as Jesus would say, “lay the ax to the root” of the plant or pain in our lives and slowly, organically and infinitely transcend our habit and addiction to it. How do you handle your pain? Are you using healthy ways to manage it? If you don’t go within, you’ll go without! Manage your pain internally more than externally.