Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

Many people live with unnecessary pain which can be relieved naturally, without drugs, using simple mental techniques. This is the first of two posts about some of those techniques.

Pain is, of course, a warning. It’s the body’s alarm system, and before you decide to switch it off or reduce its volume you should consider whether it is warning you about something you need to act on, or whether you are already aware of the issue and don’t need further warnings.

photo credit: flattop341

But given that you’ve decided that you already have the information that the pain is conveying, and you’re already doing everything you can about addressing the cause, your first option to relieve it is by using your attention.

There are two kinds of attention techniques for relieving pain. The first, which is more applicable for milder pain, is dissociation, and the second, for more severe pain, is association.

These techniques apply to emotional pain as well as physical pain, by the way. We give these two phenomena the same name because they do have many similarities. Pain is not just a sensation, but a perception, and the pain control techniques I’m about to discuss work by shifting that perception. This is just as applicable for emotional pain as for physical pain.

photo credit: the half-blood prince

Dissociation Techniques
Dissociation techniques are aimed at removing your attention from the pain by placing it on something else. This could be your environment; positive thoughts or memories; or a meditative strategy such as repeating a word with each breath. I’ve posted before about using the Relaxation Response Practice as an emotional management technique; it’s just as applicable to pain management. The principle here is that by distracting yourself from your perception of pain and focusing on another perception or activity, you reduce your experience of pain.

Unfortunately many of us use dissociation techniques which involve taking in substances that are not healthy for us – various forms of drugs including alcohol and tobacco, excessive or unhealthy food, or whatever your particular choice may be. This isn’t necessary. You have all the resources in your own mind that you need to achieve dissociation, and if you practice, they will be just as effective as those other distractions, without the health drawbacks (or the financial cost). Dissociation using something harmful to your body is simply compounding the problem, not solving it.

photo credit: Norma*Iriz*

Association Techniques
With strong pain, dissociation techniques are too difficult – you can’t distract yourself from the pain because it is too intrusive. It demands your attention. So in association techniques, you give it that attention.

Again, I’ve written before about how attention is necessary for life change and a simple mood control technique using attention. The underlying idea of association techniques is that you pay attention to the pain but shift your perception of it, from something that you are immersed in to something that you are aware of. in other words, you shift your perception from subjective (“I am feeling pain”) to objective (“this part of my body is feeling pain”), and attempt to remove the “suffering” aspect from your perception.

“Suffering” implies that you are subject to the pain, that it is overwhelming you, that you are being swept along by it. A metaphor I use with my clients for emotional management, which is just as valid for associative pain control, is that of standing beside a road watching the traffic. You watch the cars go past, back and forth, but you yourself are not in a car, being carried along the road; you are standing still, observing. If you find you have jumped out into the road and got into a car and are being driven away to somewhere you don’t want to go, you simply choose to get out again and go back to standing beside the road and watching.

photo credit: Dan Kamminga

The cars in this metaphor are thoughts and feelings and sensations. Being in the car is being carried along by the experience of these things. Being beside the road is simply observing their occurrence.

There are two possible ways here of being “I”. There is being “I” who is being carried along, who is suffering, who is feeling pain and feeling emotions and thinking thoughts, and there is being “I” who is watching and observing as if these things were happening to someone else. The mental trick is to shift from the suffering “I” to the observing “I”.

In the next post, I’ll talk about pain management through imagination techniques.

Relevant Product: Pain Management (audio CD)

Technorati Tags: pain, pain management, pain relief, pain control, techniques, drug-free, natural pain management, mental techniques, attention, dissociation, association, emotional management, emotional pain, suffering, awareness, meditation, anaesthesia, analgesia

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