I am loving this journey with you all. Alan, your sense of humor is such a balm in the demonstrations when you say "Great!" when someone manages to pay attention to pain or even have pain. Smiling is definitely part of re-wiring our stubborn minds.
I swear that addiction is a trance and that my pain is part of my addiction to adrenaline. At a chemical level, when I hurt I am likely producing natural endorphins to kill the pain. I think I got addicted to this when I was really young. I remember being about five and sitting in the back seat of my parents car and announcing, "Everything in me feels good right now! Nothing hurts!" (I had a lot of tomboy accidents as a kid and was always getting a bump, bruise or bandaid.)
Your story of the blood phobic must be a common thing at Stanford and other schools! I laughed when I read this: cognitive therapist David Burns, MD has a very similar story but he was in medical school and avoided blood for the first couple of years; entirely! Finally he went to his dean and confessed and the dean assigned him to the ER where his first task was pulling dozens of shards out of a man whose homemade bomb went off in his house. By the end of the bloody day, David was no longer afraid of blood, and after years of practicing psychiatry, he worked with the early cognitive therapists on such techniques as exposure therapy!
We are exposing ourselves to our symptoms instead of running from them.
Fear has a funny acronmyn: F--k Everything And Run. Run from pain, run to get food, run and drink, run for tv, sex, you name it, we run for it. We are so fortunate to have found a community where doctors like Sarno, Schubiner and Schecter and researching and writing about this phenomenon. It's a defense against pain. Fortunate for the therapists who take this up as a calling (Alan!)
So long as I place my pain in this context, and have a direct contact with my ego (which isn't easy, it's mostly unconscious), then I can place my ego into the care of something else: my pre-frontal cortex, my greater Self, my higher power, it doesn't matter so long as the ego is not in charge and deciding how to avoid pain.
This took me years to understand. And it takes even longer to remain humble to how enlightenment is something I do each moment, one moment at a time. I always thought I had to find the cure, the cure that lasted forever. I thought relapse was a shameful thing, which only made matters worse.
A technique I might add to the tracking and curiosity practices, that has helped me enormously when I am not forgetting to use it: pendulation. It's from the early teachings of Peter Levine who developed Somatic Experiencing. Once you feel pain, notice where in your body you feel good or neutral. Then, decide to move the pain from the source of the pain to the place that is neutral - and back again - and back again. After a few 'swings of the pendulum' the pain has subsided. My patients have been known to call it Witchcraft but it's really mindfulness and curiosity and compassion - giving that little kid Alan referenced yesterday - a game to play with the pain. And we know kids love games, including inner kids.
Gosh, had no idea that I had so much to say today. Well, that's what happens when I feel good and on day ten I have to say I am feeling better than in a long, long time. Beginner's Mind: starting over with any program... reboots the system and allows for upgrades!
Thank you.
