WHAT Chronic Pain recovery MEANS TO ME

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Overcoming chronic pain and trauma has been more than a physical transformation for me, it has been a spiritual homecoming. 

For almost 40 years, pain and trauma shaped the boundaries of my world. It dictated my choices, narrowed my imagination, and convinced me that my life was defined by what hurt. I lived inside of pain as if it were my identity. 

But through the teachings of Nondualism, particularly those of Ramana Maharshi, Richard Miller, Rupert Spira, and the ancient Indian lineage of Advaita Vedanta, I discovered that the essence of who I am has never been touched by pain at all.

Nondualism taught me to look inward in a radically different way. Instead of fighting my suffering or trying to escape it, I learned to turn toward it, to ask the question at the heart of Ramana Maharshi’s teachings: “Who am I?” 

When I asked this sincerely, not from the mind’s desire for answers but from the heart’s longing for truth, I began to see that the “I” who had suffered all these years was not the true Self, but a collection of experiences, memories, sensations, and beliefs. 

Pain lived in the body. Pain lived in the nervous system. Pain lived in the conditioned mind. But it did not live in the awareness that witnessed all of these.

I came to understand that awareness itself, my essential nature, is open, spacious, unmoving, and untouched. This awareness holds everything through Richard Miller's guidance, reading Rupert Spira and watching his Youtube videos,  reading the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and other contemporary Nondual teachers in books, Youtube videos and online retreats. 

All of these experiences rose and fell within awareness, like waves rising and dissolving back into the ocean. And slowly, through this recognition, the suffering began to unravel.

Overcoming chronic pain, for me, has meant recognizing that I am not the pain. I am the one who knows the pain. I am not the trauma. I am the space in which trauma once echoed. I am not the broken body. I am the unbroken, ever-present field of being in which the body appears and disappears, breathes and softens, trembles and heals.

With this realization, something beautiful occurred: my relationship to pain changed, and then pain itself changed. When I no longer fought it, when I no longer fused with it, when I stopped naming it “mine,” the grip of suffering loosened. Awareness washed through the places where pain had once lived like a permanent tenant. 

My nervous system began to settle. My emotions found room to breathe. The body remembered its natural intelligence. Healing emerged not from effort, but from alignment with what is fundamentally true.

To overcome chronic pain and trauma in the language of Nondualism means this: I returned to the Self I had always been.

It means I reclaimed a fullness that pain had overshadowed but never destroyed.

It means I now live with a depth of joy I could not access when I believed I was a damaged, hurting person.

It means I feel an aliveness and energy that comes from no longer being at war with my own experience.

In the deepest sense, overcoming pain and trauma was not something I achieved, it was something I recognized. The recognition that the Self, the pure “I Am” at the core of existence is untouched, inviolable, eternally whole, revealed a freedom that had been here all along.

My recovery is not separate from this realization; it is the embodiment of it.

Today, when I stand in this body, stronger, lighter, freer, I do so from a place of profound reverence. My healing is not the erasure of my past, but the integration of it. It has taught me that suffering can be a doorway, pain can be a teacher, and the body can be a sacred site of awakening. 

Nondualism gave me the language, the map, and the lived experience to understand that my healing was never about becoming someone new. It was about remembering who I truly am.

Pain no longer defines me. Awareness defines me.

And in that awareness, I have found peace, freedom, and a joy I once believed was impossible.