What is pain?
We have all felt it. It may be the one experience that truly connects every human being, regardless of age, background, or belief. And yet most of us have never really stopped to ask what it means. We just want it gone.
Is pain an enemy to be silenced? A malfunction to be fixed? Or is it something more: a message, asking to be heard?
Pain as signal
The body is built for this conversation. Specialized nerve endings called nociceptors sit throughout the tissue, watching quietly for trouble: heat, pressure, injury. The moment they sense something worth attending to, they send a signal up through the spinal cord to the brain.
The brain doesn’t simply relay that signal. It interprets it, weighing context, memory, emotion, even expectation, before deciding how much it matters. This is part of why two people can experience the same injury and feel pain so differently. Pain was never a purely physical readout. It is a negotiation, carried out by the whole nervous system, moment to moment.
When this system is working well, it is almost graceful. Touch something hot, and the hand pulls back before the mind has caught up. Sprain an ankle, and the pain keeps weight off it just long enough to heal. This is pain as protector, doing precisely the job it was built for.
Chronic pain tells a different story. Tissue heals. Scans come back clean. And still, the signal continues, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. The nervous system itself can become more reactive, more easily triggered, occasionally out of step with what is actually happening in the body. The pain is no less real. It is that the alarm has, in a sense, forgotten how to rest.
Pain as blockage
Long before anyone understood nerve signaling, Chinese medicine had already been sitting with this same question for over two thousand years, and arrived at an answer still spoken in clinics today:
通则不痛，不通则痛
“Where there is free flow, there is no pain. Where there is no free flow, there is pain.”
A simple line, carrying real weight. In this framework, pain is not a malfunction. It is what arises when qi and blood, the body’s vital, circulating resources, meet an obstruction. Something interrupts the flow, and pain rises at the point of interruption. That obstruction can come from many directions: an old injury, unprocessed stress, poor diet, overwork, cold, or simply the accumulated wear of time.
Set the ancient language aside, and this is not so far from what modern medicine also observes: restriction, tension, poor circulation, inflammation. Chinese medicine simply begins from the belief that the body wants to move, wants to flow, and pain is what it feels like when it cannot.
Where the two views meet
Pull back far enough, and two systems of medicine, separated by thousands of years and an ocean, arrive at something close to the same understanding: pain means something is not flowing or functioning the way it should. Neither tradition treats pain as random. Both treat it as information.
And both, at their best, agree on something further: that quieting the signal is not the same as resolving what caused it. A treatment that only silences pain has not necessarily addressed why it appeared. Real care means asking what the body is responding to, and meeting that directly.
Avoid it, or lean into it?
Should pain be avoided, or embraced? The honest answer is neither.
Avoiding pain altogether is not just unrealistic. It can be dangerous. People born with an inability to feel pain often suffer serious, preventable injuries, precisely because nothing warns them to stop. Pain, at its foundation, is protective. It is not a flaw in the design.
But leaning into pain for its own sake, treating endurance as a kind of virtue, misses the point in the other direction. That is not wisdom. It is simply tolerating static instead of tuning in to find the signal underneath it.
The steadier path sits between the two: neither fighting pain nor glorifying it, but meeting it with real curiosity. Not how much can I withstand, but what is this asking of me.
Why it feels so big
Pain is one of the most universal experiences we share, and yet it rarely gets discussed calmly. We worry. We spiral. We tell ourselves stories about what a passing ache might mean: is it serious, is it permanent, is something failing.
Some of that response is simply biology. Pain draws on the same threat-detection circuitry involved in fear and anxiety, so a physical sensation can become entangled with real emotional alarm almost instantly. Some of it is cultural: many of us were taught, one way or another, to treat pain as weakness, something to push through quietly rather than something worth listening to.
And some of it comes from the particular loneliness of pain: an experience everyone has, and yet one no one else can feel alongside you. Something entirely common that still lands as entirely private. That combination is part of what makes it feel larger than it sometimes is.
What the philosophers said
Pain has occupied thoughtful minds for as long as there have been minds to think with. A few worth sitting with:
Marcus Aurelius, writing privately as Roman emperor, reasoned that pain which is unbearable ends quickly, and pain that lingers can always be borne by a mind steady enough to bear it. Stoic logic, plainly put, but strangely grounding.
Kahlil Gibran, in The Prophet, described pain as the moment understanding breaks open its own shell, not damage exactly, but a necessary rupture that makes room for something to grow.
And Rumi, centuries earlier, offered what may be the most quoted line on the subject: that the wound is where the light enters. It does not ask anyone to welcome the wound. It simply asks them to notice what comes through it, afterward.
None of these are medical claims. But each circles the same idea this piece has been circling too: that pain, looked at closely, tends to be less about damage and more about the door it opens.
How this shapes treatment
In the treatment room, this distinction shapes everything. Two people can arrive with the same words, “lower back pain,” and be carrying entirely different stories underneath. One may trace back to an old injury and physical restriction. Another may have little to do with the back at all: stress, poor sleep, or a body quietly asked to do too much for too long without support. Treatment does not begin with where it hurts. It begins with why the flow stopped.
That is the foundation of how I approach chronic pain and musculoskeletal conditions, working with the person in front of me, not a protocol assigned to a category. I ask a lot of questions, because the answers are usually there, waiting, if we are willing to sleuth a bit. When did this start. What else was happening then. What makes it better, what makes it worse. Pain rarely arrives without context, and the context is often where the real information lives. Tracking real change over the course of care matters just as much as the first visit does; you can read more about how progress is measured along the way.
So the next time something hurts, get curious right along with me. Instead of only asking how do I make this stop, try: what is this trying to tell me?
Pain is not the enemy. It is the messenger, and it has been trying to reach you the whole time.
A pain that keeps circling back? Let’s talk, or book a visit and we’ll sleuth it out together.
Sharon Sherman, MSOM, Dipl. AHM (NCBAHM), L.OM., L.Ac., has practiced East Asian Medicine since 2001, and at True to Life Wellness in Freeport, Maine since 2025.