
How Do I Get to the Root of My Pain?
Tell Me About Your Pain
The Feeling of Home
The reason why your brain has a tendency to gravitate toward preoccupation, toward fear is pretty simple. It's because the feeling that you get in your body when you're in a state of fight or flight has become so familiar that your brain gravitates toward it over and over and over. Even though it doesn't make you feel good, it's become home. I think a lot of our listeners will be able to relate to Chris and that he keeps getting pulled back into these negative thoughts.
00:00
Transcript
Play full episode
Transcript
Episode notes
Speaker 2
But that skepticism is coming from a world in which, and this is what everything everywhere all at once gets to the heartbeat of, we feel overextended and exposed to every conceivable answer that humanity's ever given. Our knowledge of the past is actually greater than it was for many people who lived closer to it. You know what I mean? It's like, because we just have more archaeologists and more people on the earth digging more stuff up. We have more history departments and like we just know more about the past. We know more about each other through the internet. That doesn't mean we know each other, but it does mean we know more about each other. And so that it feels chaotic and that's what that movie is tapping into. But Easter is a chance to refocus the lens a little bit and say, are two great enemies as human beings are sin and death? And when you focus it in like that, then the resurrection is what it actually is and we can see it for what it actually is, which is the ultimate triumph of Christ over the enemy. But yeah, it's like whenever I'm in an apologetic kind of conversation or just a conversation with someone who doesn't believe like I do and we're missing each other, I always want to dial it back one level and say, I'm probably assuming too much here. You know, tell me, unpack your assumptions for me. And I love it because I think your conversation with Matt got to the heartbeat of that, which is it's a conversation about imagination. How do you perceive the world being?
Speaker 1
How do you perceive the meaning of the world being? Yeah, the existential off ramp that you're talking about might be the real connection point between the facts of the historical life, death and resurrection of Christ and the meaning organ of modern, modern people, you know, the imagination that's asleep. And I say that thinking of several people, fictional and real. A few years ago, I wrote this piece called Jordan Peterson, Pottaglum and what's too good not to be true. And I know it'll surprise no one, you know, that I'm associating these two figures or that I'm making another Narnia reference because, no, I'm me. But you know, the famous scene in the silver chair, where Pottaglum stamps on the green lady's fire, he does this speech afterwards where he's like, you know, maybe you're right. Maybe this underworld that you've been in telling us about really is all that exists. Maybe the sky and trees and rivers and puddles of water and Narnia and Aslan himself are just things that we've imagined that we're just, we're just kids playing a game. But he says, you know what, even if that's true, our game beats the socks off of your real world. If this is really all there is, then it's not really worth living for. So we're going to set out and look for the play world. I'm on Aslan side, even if there isn't any Aslan deleted. And that's this, there's this existentialist move. It feels existentialist, right? That he's making. He's like, he's like, you know, the facts be darned. You're too good at convincing us of how things are. I can't argue with you. You're a better debater than I am, green lady of the green kurtle. But even so, my imagination cries out for something else. It longs for something that I know must be out there simply because I, simply because I long for it so fiercely. And this is, of course, Lewis's argument from desire. And what he's saying there is not that we can substitute and imagine an imagined reality for the, for the actual world that we can just live in a fairy lane. He's saying that our desires are themselves a guide to what's real, a guide that's so strong, the devil and his, and his wilds and his materialist spell that he's been weaving over the West for the last several centuries can't break it. It can actually break his spell, the desire there. And I associated that with Jordan Peterson because he said a lot of things along the lines of puddle glamour. He just, he wants, he wants a certain amount of the Christian story to be true just because it's so beautiful. And he's not even sure what to do with it. But he's like, I think that Jesus is, is, is truly Lord. And I think he truly rose in this deep, meaningful mythological sense, you know, and he tries to, Peterson said that. Yeah, dude, he's, he said things that are, you know, essentially theism with a little sprinkle of, of existential, existentialist philosophy on him. And so he's not quite there because he's still conceiving of these things as myths and archetypes, but he hasn't quite made the connection with the, he calls it the world of, you know, the world of meaning and the world of fact. And he said, I'm not sure if they meet. And Jonathan Pajoe, who's this Eastern Orthodox podcaster and icon icon engraver that you don't say you draw icons in the Eastern tradition, you say that you write them, right? So so, so he does icons. He's been working on him pretty hard for a few years. So we'll see what happens with that. But, but he's doing that existentialist thing. And I think we ought to be careful not to stomp on that as some sort of retreat into untruth or to, to mirror longing because that longing can lead you somewhere.
Living with chronic pain means living with chronic worry. But it's actually this fear, frustration, and despair around the pain that keeps your pain signals activated. Even once you know how destructive these thought patterns are, it’s so hard to keep your mind from going there. In this episode, Alan and Alon explain why your brain keeps pulling you to pain, and how you can break this habit. Alan talks to Chris, a chronic pain sufferer with so much fear and frustration around his pain, he can think of little else. Alan teaches him a new technique to calm these thoughts, cutting off the fuel source for his pain. Then Alan and Alon describe how you can use this same technique to overcome your own pain.