THE ESSENCE
Find a comfortable posture and comfortable place that allows you the freedom and space to investigate this experience of pain.
Pain is not a singular event but may be seen at times as a cluster or constellation of sensations that increase and decrease in frequency, changing sensations that appear and disappear.
The natural response to pain is to try to wall it off, to push it out, to banish it from our lives.
This response roots the pain and can even magnify one’s experience of pain.
Letting go of our grip on the painful sensation is the first step toward diminishing the power of the pain over our body/mind.
Releasing our grip on the pain sensation allows the beginning of a softening in the painful area.
Secondly, use your imagination to actively expand and soften the painful sensation.
Vividly expand that painful sensation so that it is the size of your room, your apartment, your house, your neighborhood!
The expansion of the painful sensation into a vast space frees your body/mind from the white hot tightly gripped pain and the sensation drains away.
In some painful sensations this single imaginary act can provide tremendous relief to an experience of a sharp painful episode.
Dealing with long term pain requires a slightly different approach. One may need to connect their breathing to the softening and expansion visualization.
The inhalation and exhalation provide softness and expansion to the sensation of pain.
Continue breathing as normally as possible while maintaining the imaginary expansion as long as necessary.
Practicing this visualization/meditation before a painful episode occurs equips you for the time when the painful sensation strikes.
May my heart be filled to the brim with gratitude for all of the blessings of this moment.
A COMMENTARY
Find a comfortable posture and comfortable place that allows you the freedom and space to investigate this experience of pain. You may find that being prone is comfortable, or that laying flat is not. It may be to your advantage to sit in a recliner, or lay on a mattress on the floor. No one can tell you what posture is best. You are about to investigate a sensation of pain, and your choice of position is the final authority.
Pain is not a singular event but may be seen at times as a cluster or constellation of sensations that increase and decrease in frequency, changing sensations that appear and disappear. Pain is experienced in so many varied ways that at times it might not even seem to be the same sensation. There are deeper meditations that investigate the multifaceted aspects of pain, but this is not one of them. Here we will work with pain at a higher level.
The natural response to pain is to try to wall it off, to push it out, to banish it from our lives. I dislike pain and clench my body in resistance to the ache. It’s easy to harden the body and attempt expel this awful experience. Grimacing and crying out are natural responses to a painful sensation. Yet, there is another way to experience pain.
This response roots the pain and can even magnify one’s experience of pain. As difficult as it may seem our natural response to pain is almost always guaranteed to increase our painful experience. By gripping our pain we’ve insured it cannot escape and by trying to wall off the area of pain we’ve confined it to a particular location in our body.
Letting go of our grip on the painful sensation is the first step toward diminishing the power of the pain over our body/mind. For some of us this is not easy to do! It seems that screaming pain compels the viselike clamp we keep on the painful part of our body. Yet, a release of the grip can be an astonishing revelatory experience in our relationship to our pain.
Releasing our grip on the pain sensation allows the beginning of a softening in the painful area. This hard spot of pulsating pain is suddenly allowed to expand. But that is not the only positive move we can make.
Secondly, use your imagination to actively expand and soften the painful sensation. The use of your imagination at this moment begins the process of reducing, attenuating and under some circumstances, eliminating the painful sensation.
Vividly expand that painful sensation so that it is the size of your room, your apartment, your house, your neighborhood! This is the key moment. Taking that painful sensation and allowing it to expand out of your body into a huge space reduces that white hot sensation of pain. There is no imaginary limit to your expansion!
The expansion of the painful sensation into a vast space frees your body/mind from the white hot tightly gripped pain and the sensation drains away. The efficacy of this technique has been proven in the lives of thousands of people around the world. It works, yet works in different ways depending on the pain sensation.
In some painful sensations this single imaginary act can provide tremendous relief to an experience of a sharp painful episode. In the cases of some injuries the sharpness of the pain can be reduced so greatly that the mind is so surprised that it loses the imaginary construct and the pain returns instantly. This has happened to me. The antidote is to return to the imaginary space inducing vision and the pain can disappear.
Dealing with longer term pain requires a slightly different approach. One may need to connect their breathing to the softening and expansion visualization. One can only maintain an effort while they are conscious, it requires a focus to keep this going for long periods of time. By tying your inhalation or exhalation to the expansion process (like blowing up a balloon!) your breath propels this effort. If your pain requires painkillers this pain mediation can provide an adjunct to “take the edge off” during periods between doses of meds.
The inhalation and exhalation provide softness and expansion to the sensation of pain. You may find that inhalation allows for softness to be created in your heart toward you sensations, your pain, your discomfort. This softness allows rather than rejects the pain. The exhalation might be seen as a way to “pump up” the expansion of the expanded floating pain sensation. It’s increased buoyancy reduces its weight and allows it to float higher and farther away from you.
Continue breathing as normally as possible while maintaining the imaginary expansion as long as necessary. It does not require too much energy to visualize this expansion. It can be kept up for long periods of time. Do not be surprised if the experience leads to drowsiness. Relax and go with the flow that gives you the best result.
Practicing this meditation before a painful episode occurs equips you for the time when the painful sensation strikes. One of the keys to the efficacy of this meditation is practicing the imaginary steps you take to soften and expand the sensation of pain. Any sensation in your body/mind could be used in practice. Your practice will allow you, in the midst of sharp pain, to recall the steps you can take to reduce or eliminate your receptivity of the sensation of pain.
SOURCE(S)
I give all credit to my successful use of pain visualization/meditations to the writings of Stephen Levine. His teachings found in seminars and books provided the groundwork for many people to adapt and utilize these principles of the body/mind. He published books over a long period of time so it’s important to consider the book that he saw as the one that distilled years of experience and practice into a single volume. This book that contains a heart of his compassionate teachings: Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings. Stephen goes into far greater detail than my adaptation of his method presented above. As he put it in the Foreword “This book is meant to be a culmination and distillation of these “technologies of the heart” and we offer them as experiments in the “healing we took birth for”.”
DISCLAIMER
The information on this site is not implied or intended to substitute for professional medical advice. All content on this website is for general information purposes only.
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