>>48639
>I was lead to this realization after I tripped and sprained my ankle.
Funny you mention it. When I was a kid I use to play a lot in the streets and it was not uncommon that I would get a sprained ankle. When that happened the first thing I did was to step as hard as I could all the time with the sprained ankle. It hurt sure. but each time I did it it got less painful. It would take only a few hours for it to heal completely. I am not advising you to do the same, since depending on your mental state it might make things worst, but for me it always worked.
>By ignoring the pain we are telling our body that the injury is not worth healing!
This is 100% correct. But when we go to sleep or simply relax, our bodies start healing by default since there's not a false believe stopping it.
>I'm still not confident if we can apply these ideas to mental or spiritual pain in the exact same way
You have to. I mean with mental and spiritual pain the matters are kinda the same but different. They are the same in the sense that accepting the pain and giving it your attention in order to heal are the correct approach. They are different in the sense that whereas your body will heal eventually even if you don't consciously help it, the mental and specially the spiritual NEED you to do this.
In the mental field injuries that are not consciously dealt with slip to the unconscious, and anything in the environment, or sometimes even the act of being alone with no distractions, will cause it to arise to surface. Mental injuries are like digestive problems. You might forget about it but unless you act towards correcting it, it will keep popping up at seemingly random times.
For simple illustration. Think of a kid in school. He goes and tries to read something and he can't read it. For added effect there is pressure from the teacher for him to read, maybe his classmates make fun of him. There are ways to deal with this but lets say he made the wrong one decision which cause a mental injury, like stepping slightly the wrong way might cause a sprained ankle. Now the mistake he made was in considering that forcing his reading (more or less applying strength to it) would help him to read, or at least convince the teacher he was really trying. So he traded his integrity for an "outside" result. The way that manifested was in him reading in a sort of stuck up way trying really hard in a way you almost feel he is lifting those heavy words himself. Now he got a problem reading out loud, which might follow him throughout the rest of his life, unless at some point he decides to deal with it. The reason for this is, that the loss of integrity slips into the unconscious, and the actual physical tensions associated with it, remain as Wilhelm Reich called it "muscular armoring"(in this case around his throat). If you solve the mental you will solve the physical, but if you try to solve the physical the mental will immediately rise to conscience and ask for a solution.
Here's another situation. That same boy who can't relax when reading, has the teacher asking him to pay attention. He doesn't know what that means, clearly because it is a word and he is a kid. But he knows more or less what it means. He knows that the teacher wants him to raise his head, look straight at her and look real stiff and with a serious look on his face. And that is what he does. Again he trades his integrity (his own internal recognition of values) for the fear that he might get in trouble if he doesn't do so. Now he associates paying attention with being rigid, he develops a muscular armoring along his upper abdomen and maybe around his eyes/face too and he know has another mental "sprained ankle".
As for the spiritual side I'm sure some other anon can enlighten us about, since I'm not that good in that area yet. I think it does follow the same line of thinking though.