Dealing with Chronic Pain
Eyes still closed and there it is. That ache. Already waiting for you—like it never left, because honestly it didn’t. And before you’re even fully awake, you’re already doing calculations: how bad is it? A four today? Seven? Can you get through work, dinner, all those “I’m fine” smiles when nothing—absolutely nothing—feels fine?
It’s a double life, this. People see one version of you. Functioning. Present. Holding it together. Then there’s the real you, behind closed doors, counting hours until you can drop the act. Some days you wonder… is this just it now? Forever? And the loneliness. God, the loneliness. Not just physical isolation but something deeper—being trapped inside a body that’s become almost a stranger to you.
You know what might be worse than the pain itself though? How it leaks into everything. Your patience—gone. Your hope—wavering. That person you used to be before this became your constant shadow. People who don’t get it offer advice. “Have you tried yoga?” Sure, Margaret. Yoga. That’ll fix the nerve damage. You smile anyway because explaining feels harder than just… carrying it alone.
Here’s the thing though. This struggle—your body becoming a source of suffering instead of support—it’s ancient. Older than modern medicine, older than painkillers and diagnoses and all our clinical language for it. Roman philosophers dealt with this exact thing. Medieval mystics too. People in concentration camps. Buddhist monks. They all wrestled with the same basic question: how do you stay yourself when pain keeps trying to swallow you whole? What they figured out wasn’t about curing what couldn’t be cured. It was something else entirely.
You’re not the first to carry this
Voices Across Time
Let me introduce you to four people who actually understood this. A psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and somehow found meaning there. A Roman philosopher with terrible asthma who spent half his life sick. A German abbess in 1150 who had crushing migraines and still wrote about the soul. And the Buddha—who made suffering his starting point, not his ending. What they learned about pain, about its nature and its weird gifts, still matters. Especially at 3 AM when you’re staring at the ceiling wondering how much more of this you can take.
“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
Viktor Frankl — Austrian psychiatrist, 1905–1997
Man’s Search for Meaning
Frankl didn’t philosophize from some armchair. He lived through Auschwitz. Lost nearly everyone. Had everything stripped away—health, family, freedom, future. What stayed with him? Just one thing: the choice of how he’d respond to what he couldn’t change. He didn’t say meaning erases pain. That would be stupid. He said meaning can exist right alongside pain. Doesn’t make suffering pleasant. Makes it… bearable. Sometimes even purposeful. Which sounds crazy until you’ve been there.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.”
Seneca — Letters from a Stoic
Seneca knew physical suffering firsthand. Asthma so bad he couldn’t breathe. Fevers that knocked him out for weeks at a time. Did he pretend it didn’t hurt? Nope. Did he fake optimism? Also no. Instead he did something radical: accepted that bodies break down. That’s what bodies do. His job wasn’t to fight that. His job was making sure whatever time he had left didn’t get wasted on complaining and worrying. Pain took his comfort. He refused to let it take his attention too.
“The soul is the vitality of the body, its very life force. When the body suffers, the soul does not abandon it but rather reveals itself more fully.”
Hildegard von Bingen — Causae et Curae
Hildegard spent a lot of her life sick. Those “pressures” she wrote about? Probably migraines. Maybe cluster headaches. But instead of seeing illness as punishment—which would’ve been the medieval default—she understood it differently. Illness revealed something that ordinary health hides: how determined the soul is to keep expressing itself. Even through a body that’s failing. In her suffering she found not defeat but a different kind of aliveness. Strange, but she insisted it was true.
Buddha made a distinction that sounds simple but really isn’t. Pain—the raw physical sensation—comes with having a body. Period. That’s unavoidable. Suffering though? That’s the story we build around the pain. The resistance. The “why me.” The fear of tomorrow. We add that part ourselves. Now, this isn’t about pretending pain is fine or doesn’t matter. It’s recognizing there are layers here. Some layers you can’t control. Others? You have more power than you think.
“Pain is certain, suffering is optional.”
Buddha — Spiritual teacher, 5th century BCE
Buddhist teachings
What connects them all
What They All Understood
Four different people from four different worlds, yet they all landed on something similar. And it’s counterintuitive: fighting pain with resistance tends to make it worse. Not because pain isn’t real—it absolutely is—and not because you should passively surrender either. But because warring against your own body drains exactly the energy you need for actually living. They each found ways to acknowledge what hurt without letting it consume who they were.
What they shared wasn’t a cure. Wasn’t a trick either. It was a shift in how they saw themselves. You are not your pain. You’re the one experiencing it. Sounds like a small distinction on paper. Try it though. In practice it changes… well, not the sensation itself, but everything about how you relate to it.
Before you go
A Moment for You
Look, I’m not going to tell you ancient wisdom cures what medicine can’t. That would be insulting. Perspective doesn’t stop the burning or ease the throbbing. But here’s what I will say: you’re more than what hurts. The pain might be constant but it’s not everything you are. There’s something in you—soul, consciousness, whatever word works—that can observe the pain without being swallowed by it.
Finding that observer won’t take the pain away. But it might give you something else. Moments of relief. Not relief from pain, but relief from the prison of being nothing but your pain. That difference is bigger than it sounds.
If you want to explore what these voices might say about your particular situation—your specific weight, your possible meaning—our InnerCalm+ offers that kind of deeper, personal conversation.
This post is also available in:
