WHAT Chronic Pain recovery MEANS TO ME
Let the inner door open—light unfolds, love guides, transformation begins.
Pain once shaped my life. It narrowed my choices and quietly convinced me that I was what hurt. Pain felt like my identity.
Through the teachings of the ancient Indian philosophy of Nondualism I discovered the deepest truth of who I am has never been touched by pain at all. Instead of fighting suffering, I learned to turn toward it. I asked the question at the heart of the Indian Sage Ramana Maharshi’s teaching: Who am I?
I asked this question with the guidance of Richard Miller, the founder of the iRest Institute, and studied other Nondual teachers. I saw that the one who suffered was not the True Self, but a collection of memories, and conditioned beliefs. Pain lived in the body, the nervous system, and the mind. However, it did not live in the awareness that witnessed them.
I came to recognize awareness as my "Essential Nature". Richard Miller called our Essential Nature "open, spacious, unmoving, and untouched". He taught me that all experience, including pain, "arises within awareness". I began to sense a deep embodied presence, my True Self, my Essential Nature, and suffering began to loosen on its own.
Healing came when I stopped identifying with pain. I am not the pain. I am the one who knows it. I am not the trauma. I am the space in which it once lived. As my embodied awareness replaced fear and resistance, my nervous system settled, my emotions softened, and my body felt liberated. Healing emerged not from effort, but from truth.
