Its been an extremely busy week. Dealing with pain was one of the themes and so I’ll address that and leave the others for next week.
A common difficulty people have when they work with a mental technique to relieve pain is that this somehow means the pain is “in my head” or that the pain is not “real”.
I will deal with pain from a more neurological perspective in another post. Practically, there are two facts that can help us use mental techniques to relieve pain without getting hung up on what that means about the pain.
- Pain is in your head because when you are having an operation we put your head to sleep with anesthesia. So even surgical pain is in your head.
- Some people can have an operation without pain by using hypnosis instead of anesthesia. So there are things you can do with your head to eliminate real pain.
Moving on to the technique.
In this technique you allow your mind to settle and focus on the intention of experiencing a healing presence flow into your body to relieve pain and increase comfort. You allow your imagination to create the details, you focus on getting more absorbed in the experience. You trust your imagination to handle the process.
Its a bit like how you use a cell phone. You have the intention of calling a friend, so you touch icons on the display or buttons to make the call. If your friend answers you enjoy the conversation. You don’t have to know the details of how this is happening or the inner workings of your cell phone. You allow those to work.
In the same way you place your mind in a state in which your imagination can work on helping you experience an idea. In this case the idea of experiencing a healing presence that gives you more comfort and relief of pain. You let the imagination give form to that presence and simply enjoy interacting with the forms that arise, just like you enjoy the conversation with your friend on the phone. You leave the details to the imagination.
Note: You can use this method to experience any number of ideas, in particular qualities that you want to develop, such as patience, or kindness, or wisdom. More on that later.