Written by Jack Blackburn
Practical Exercise – Presencing Pain What if instead of moving away from the pain as our first reaction might dictate, we instead used the pain as a random signal to ask ourselves: “What is happening right now”? So we presence the pain; feeling into it, qualifying, quantifying, assessing, exploring it. We can use our curiosity for this exploration. We can also observe the mind’s attempts to come to conclusions about: the cause of the pain, the probable diagnosis and prognosis, and/or apportioning blame for the pain. We can observe those mind-reactions and the accompanying fear messages and resist going with any conclusions. These conclusions can be seen as attempts to distance ourselves from the pain and form it into an abstraction. With this exercise, as with Rumi's teaching, we can start to approach our pain by breathing into it, tasting it, listening to it, touching it from the inside of our body, sinking into it with our awareness.
“When we feel the pain rather than trying to get rid of the pain, we open to the mystery of healing.” Paul Brand M.D. author: The Gift of Pain. From my interview with Dr. Brand.
Presencing Pain: Getting to Yes - case study with a Trager practitioner
In a recent session I asked a client, let’s call her Elizabeth, to feel into her body parts wherever she could feel my hands. I also asked her to describe what she was feeling to the best of her ability. She was willing to do this. So as I felt the tissue tone and movement restrictions, Elizabeth was telling me what she was feeling from inside. In the beginning, she would flip back and forth between the sensations in her body and what she was feeling emotionally.
I found it best to stay with her responses by mirroring back what she was reporting and helping her to translate emotions into bodily sensations. As she came into her solar plexus she said: ”I’m feeling a lot of stuff… it feels like anger.” I could feel the muscle tension in her solar plexus with my hands and said: “ So Elizabeth, you’re feeling anger here under my hands… notice how the anger is showing up and give me a sense of what it feels like.” She responded by saying: “It feels like a burning pain, as if I have hot coals in my stomach… and the heat and the pain are radiating out to the rest of my body.” As she said this I observed that there was a palpable softening under my hands. I also noticed that Elizabeth was taking deeper breaths into her chest. I echoed: “The burning pain feels like hot coals, right here under my hands…” She said: “Yes and it’s cooling down now.“
We continued this same process for another 20 minutes, moving from place to place in her body. Elizabeth became more used to reporting sensations, sometimes adding emotional content. All of a sudden she announced: “I’ve been saying ‘No!’ to everything in my life ever since my divorce!” As she made this statement, I was working on her right shoulder, which had been extremely painful to her for a long time. I was palpating the levator scapula attachment with my left hand while decompressing her rhomboids with my right hand. “So, you’ve been saying ‘No!’ to everything… come in right here Elizabeth, and notice what ‘No!’ feels like…” As I said this, I paused, removed my hands, and stepped back so she could feel without associating what she was feeling with my hands. I observed as she did so that she was taking very deep breaths. I found myself saying to her: “What would it be like if you were to say ‘Yes!’ to everything?”
I then brought my hands back in and we continued what we’d been doing except that as she would report her sensations she would also say:” Yes!” I began to notice that each time she said “Yes!” there would be a definite softening in the tissue. I could tell that her attention was right where my hands were because I could feel some tingling sensations and a palpable breath pulse in the tissue. It didn’t seem to matter whether Elizabeth was reporting her experience or silently saying: “Yes.” Under my hands everything felt freer, softer, and warmer. After about ten minutes of this she started to laugh, gently, quietly at first and then louder and fuller.
Finally she said: “This is impossible… I feel no pain in my body! I feel like I’m bubbling over with energy! I can’t believe this is happening!” As I reflected her words back to her, I realized that her body felt totally different and I shared this with her. “Maybe saying ‘Yes!’ to your body is like saying ‘Yes!’ to your life.” Background: Elizabeth is a 42 y/o professional caregiver, working with extremely difficult patients. She is also a single parent with two adolescent children. She had experienced a very painful divorce 15 years before and still felt unworthy. She reported that she has fibromyalgia, chronic joint pain, and stiffness after sleep or prolonged sitting. Respectfully submitted. © Jack Blackburn, 2005
From Elizabeth herself: "... about the case study. Honestly, I had to read it a couple of times to remember. I know I was in a very deep place in our session… and so it is that I don't remember so much of the specifics as I do that felt-sense of "yes" that I experienced. I'll never forget that. The case study is just a wonderful reminder for me."