Beyond the Divide: A Non-Dual Perspective on Pain, Health and Healing

When pain persists, it can begin to feel as though there are two opposing sides: me, and the body that is causing the problem.

A person experiencing sciatica may think:

“I am suffering from sciatica.”

There is the person who feels the pain, and there is the painful object: the back, the leg or the sciatic nerve. Around the physical sensation, further thoughts may appear:

“What will I do if this does not improve?”
“What if I cannot work, exercise or travel?”
“Has something become permanently damaged?”

This is an entirely normal way to experience pain. It is also necessary within healthcare. We need to identify symptoms, examine the body, consider possible causes and determine whether treatment, rehabilitation, investigation or referral is appropriate.

However, the familiar separation between the person and the problem can become restrictive when it is treated as the whole truth.

Life may seem unable to continue properly until every unwanted sensation has disappeared.

A non-dual perspective does not ask us to deny these distinctions. It invites us to examine whether they are as solid and absolute as they appear.

The subject-object structure of experience

Ordinary perception is usually organised around a subject and an object. There is the subject: the person who sees, hears, feels and thinks. There are then the objects being perceived. Some appear externally through the physical senses, such as another person, a treatment room, an MRI image or a painful area of the body. Others appear internally as sensations, emotions, memories, thoughts and mental images.

With sciatica, for example, the experience might include:

“There is pain at the back of my leg.”
“This must be my sciatic nerve.”
“I may not recover.”
“I will not be able to cope if this continues.”

The sensation, anatomical explanation, prediction and emotional response all become objects appearing to the person who seems to be observing them. This structure is useful. Without it, communication and clinical reasoning would be extremely difficult. We need language such as “my leg”, “my symptoms” and “my treatment plan”.

The difficulty begins when a changing experience becomes a fixed conclusion:

“I am damaged.”
“My body has failed me.”
“This condition now defines me.”

Pain is real. Injury and disease are real. Yet the story constructed around them may extend beyond what is known clinically in the present moment.

Why the mind makes experience feel solid

The human mind simplifies experience so that we can function.

These labels are useful representations, but they are not the whole of reality.

A scan may identify structural changes, but it cannot fully determine how much pain someone will experience or how well they will recover. A diagnosis may guide care, but it cannot describe the totality of the person.

A thought such as “I will never improve” may feel convincing, but it remains a thought arising now, not verified knowledge of the future.

This is not a defect in the mind. It is part of how perception works. Problems arise when we forget that our interpretations are interpretations and begin to experience them as unquestionable facts.

Our pursuit of pleasure and resistance to pain

The same subject-object pattern shapes much of everyday life.

We naturally pursue experiences we consider desirable:

• comfort
• happiness
• laughter
• approval
• pleasure
• entertainment
• security

We try to reject or escape experiences we consider undesirable:

• pain
• disappointment
• sadness
• uncertainty
• loneliness
• emptiness
• loss

For many people, this may seem so normal that it does not require further examination. Seeking comfort and avoiding harm are not inherently wrong. They are part of healthy human functioning.

The difficulty is that this movement towards the pleasant and away from the unpleasant can become automatic and relentless. We may begin to live on a psychological hamster wheel: waiting for the next enjoyable experience, fearing the return of discomfort and continually judging the present according to whether it matches what we want.

When pain is involved, this pattern may intensify. The physical sensation is accompanied by checking, bracing, worrying and imagining. A person may begin to believe: “I can only be all right once this pain has completely gone.”

Relief remains a reasonable clinical goal. However, when life is entirely postponed until discomfort disappears, the struggle surrounding pain may become almost as limiting as the pain itself.

What a non-dual perspective means

Non-duality is difficult to describe because language generally works by separating one thing from another. At its simplest, a non-dual perspective asks us to investigate the assumed division between the person who is experiencing and the experience itself.

A sensation is noticed.
A thought is noticed.
Fear is noticed.
A mental image of the future is noticed.

Even the sense of being “the person to whom all of this is happening” can itself be observed as part of present experience.

From this perspective, sensations, thoughts and emotions may be explored as events arising within one field of experience, rather than only as separate objects confronting an entirely separate observer. This should be understood as an invitation to inquiry, not as a metaphysical statement that a reader must accept.

Practical distinctions remain. A person is still a person. A painful leg still requires assessment. A practitioner must still consider neurological function, strength, mobility, sensitivity, medical history and any relevant warning signs. A non-dual perspective does not remove the conventional world. It helps us hold its divisions less rigidly.

What this approach is not saying

Precision is essential when discussing non-duality in healthcare. This perspective is not suggesting that:

• pain is imaginary
• physical symptoms should be ignored
• seeking relief is wrong
• avoiding preventable suffering is misguided
• conventional clinical reasoning is inferior
• diagnosis and investigation are unnecessary
• awareness practices can replace appropriate healthcare
• patients are responsible for creating their illness
• non-dual-informed care will permanently eliminate pain

It is also not another self-improvement project. The aim is not to become an ideal non-dual practitioner or a spiritually superior patient. That would simply create another division:

“I am inadequate now, but a better version of me exists somewhere in the future.”

Non-dual practice is not primarily about becoming someone else. It is about seeing more clearly how present experience is already being interpreted.

What science can and cannot tell us

Research in neuroscience and psychology increasingly suggests that perception is an active process shaped by sensory input, prediction, memory, attention, emotion and context.

The nervous system does not simply record the world like a camera. It continually interprets incoming information in relation to prior experience and perceived threat.

This is especially relevant to pain.

Pain is not always a direct measurement of tissue damage. It is a protective experience influenced by multiple interacting processes, including:

• sensory information from the body
• inflammation or injury
• previous experiences
• sleep
• stress
• expectations
• emotional state
• attention
• perceived safety or danger
• social and environmental context

This does not mean that pain is “all in the mind”. That phrase falsely divides mind from body and may invalidate genuine suffering. Pain involves the whole person and their nervous system. Traditional contemplative traditions describe some related patterns using different language. They may speak of conditioning, identification, attachment, aversion and the tendency to mistake thought for reality.

Science and contemplative traditions are not making identical claims, and neuroscience does not prove non-duality. They can, however, both help us recognise that perception is selective, conditioned and incomplete.

How this differs from ordinary whole-person care

A biopsychosocial approach broadens clinical care beyond anatomy. It considers biological, psychological and social factors that may influence a person’s symptoms and recovery.

A non-dual inquiry adds a different question. It examines the apparent boundary between the person and the experience being managed.

Instead of seeing:

“I am a damaged person, and this pain is my enemy,” the experience may be reframed more accurately:

The physical problem has not been denied. The person’s relationship with it has changed.
The diagnosis remains useful, but it does not need to become an identity. The body still requires care, but it does not need to be treated as an opponent.

Why I am writing about this as a chiropractor

After decades of working in healthcare, I have repeatedly seen that pain is rarely only a mechanical event. Joint restriction, nerve irritation, inflammation, injury, muscular guarding and altered movement all matter. They should be assessed carefully rather than dismissed.

At the same time, pain is always experienced by a whole person.

A patient does not arrive as a spine, shoulder, hip or sciatic nerve. They arrive with a history, a nervous system, relationships, responsibilities, fears, beliefs and expectations.

Two people with similar clinical findings may experience very different levels of pain and disability. One may remain active and relatively confident. Another may become frightened of movement, increasingly vigilant and restricted in daily life. This does not mean that one person’s pain is less genuine. It demonstrates that anatomy alone may not fully explain the total experience.

Over time, my clinical approach has therefore widened to consider physical function alongside movement, stress, sleep, breathing, attention, fear, behaviour and the meaning that a person gives to their symptoms. This does not mean abandoning clinical reasoning. It means widening it.