Prayer and Meditation For Pain Relief
Are you feeling stressed out lately? Not tending to that stress can have a significant impact on your well-being. Not only does it affect your emotional health, but it also erodes your physical and spiritual health. So, what happens in our bodies when we are stressed? To answer that, we need to know more about the nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system has two parts: the sympathetic and parasympathetic (also known as the “rest and digest” state), and when your nervous system is dysregulated, it becomes out of balance.
The sympathetic nervous system, responsible for managing stressful incidents and emergencies, becomes overly dominant. So your parasympathetic nervous system, which helps you calm down, relax, and rest, is unable to exert any significant control over how you are feeling, thinking, or behaving.
In other words, the “fight or flight” stress response becomes overly active, putting your body in a very stressful, high-alert state.
Long-term stressors can cause constant unease, uncertainty, and worry. This can also happen due to past traumas or continuous exposure to stressful “breaking news”. Traumatic experiences manifest in our body, making it think we are constantly in a state of emergency, and this is where the term dysregulation comes in. Our brain and body, when under constant stress or as a result of extreme trauma, is, over time, less and less able to enter into the ‘rest and digest’ state…which can impact our mental and physical health.
What can that look like?
· Difficulty focusing and regulating emotions
· Sleep disturbances
· Digestive problems
· Physical expressions of emotional symptoms, like headaches or unexplained body pains
· Physiological responses such as heart racing, dizziness, and feeling out of control
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· Body tension
· Sudden feelings of panic or dread
· Explosions of emotions that don’t necessarily call for a drastic response
If you’ve made it this far in this article, you probably wonder if you’ve picked up a medical newsletter instead of a church one. Hang with me for a little longer, and you will see where this is going. Gratefully, some of our spiritual practices are excellent tools for regulating the nervous system. Done consistently, our bodies, minds, and spirits can find a place of health and rest over time. Look at the list of ailments above. How much time have you spent chasing down solutions to these problems? The solution is in you and has been all along.
If you want to learn more about these practices, join me on Wednesdays at 10:00 a.m. beginning on February 26th. We are calling it Prayer and Meditation for Pain Relief. These practices help regulate the nervous system and help our body produce endorphins, which are natural pain relievers. So, spend some time in God’s presence amongst friends and heal.
When stress comes your way, and it indeed will, you will have the tools to regulate yourself. You will be able to be fully present to act out of a place of calm rather than reactivity and fear.
7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:7