Dissolving Pain

We have not been informed that our bodies do what they are told, if we know how to tell them.

IMAGINE OWNING a sports car, an expensive, exquisitely designed piece of equipment that superbly handles all kinds of driving conditions. Imagine, though, that you were never taught to drive properly and for years you drove the car in just two gears. Something seemed not quite right, but you got used to it, and after a while it seemed fine. Then one day a friend comes by and says, “Can I drive it?”

“Sure,” you say, and you get in next to him and head out on a winding road, where the friend, who knows how to drive, expertly shifts between all six gears.

“Holy cow,” you think to yourself. “I’ve been driving this thing wrong all this time. It is a much more high-performance machine than I ever imagined.”

So it is with the human central nervous system. Chronic pain is largely the product of not knowing how to properly operate the mind-body system. We have control over aspects of our physiology that seem beyond our control. It’s been well researched and established, but somehow forgotten.

In addition to the research presented earlier, in the 1960s, John Basmajian, a Canadian researcher, was studying motor units, an organized pathway of nerve cells that extends from the brain down the spine and out to the muscles. He placed a tiny needle electrode into the muscle at the base of the thumb and amplified the sound of a firing neuron making clicks on a small speaker. Eight of Basmajian’s sixteen subjects were able to learn to fire those few cells at will and make clicking sounds on the speaker. After a little bit of practice, the subjects learned to play distinctive rhythms by firing these cells. They could imitate the sound of a horse galloping or do drumrolls when asked. They didn’t know how they could do it, they said, they just could.

Basmajian’s work, which he wrote about in his 1979 book Muscles Alive, astounded the nascent field of the operant conditioning of autonomic responses, which later became known as biofeedback. Do we really have that level of control over our physiology?

The answer is yes, and Open-Focus attention training is about learning how to control functions that seem beyond control and putting this ability to work effortlessly to reduce or eliminate pain, among other applications.

The first big breakthrough in the field came in the late 1950s. Neal E. Miller, doing research at Yale, proved he could teach lab animals to alter certain autonomic functions, at the time considered independent of voluntary control.

Miller investigated rats to see if they could control their heartbeat. To eliminate the possibility they were using the muscles in their chest, he injected them with curare, used by tribes in South America to paralyze their prey. He stuck an electrode into the pleasure center of the rats’ brains, and every time they lowered or raised their heart rate, he gave them a jolt of good feeling. Within ninety minutes, they were able to alter their heart rate upon command by 20 percent.

Miller then moved on to human subjects, a group of patients with an abnormally fast heartbeat. Whenever a subject’s heart rate fell to a healthy level, he was rewarded with a pleasant tone. And he taught subjects at Harvard Medical School to raise and lower their blood pressure. (Incidentally, the subjects in this study were males, and their reward, when they changed their blood pressure in the desired way, was a glance at a Playboy centerfold—not exactly the type of feedback one would see in such studies today.)

Some of the early operant-conditioning research that gained a great deal of attention was the operant conditioning of brain waves. As I mentioned earlier, the first to realize we could control our brain waves was Dr. Joe Kamiya, a researcher at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute. He designed an experiment to see if the subjects could tell what frequency range their brains were in.

During the first session of the first experiment, the subject seemed to be guessing what frequency range he was experiencing. But by the third and fourth sessions, the first subject could easily tell when he was in alpha. By the fourth session, the young man correctly guessed his brain state four hundred times in a row. Kamiya was astounded that this subject could so successfully recognize his own EEG activity.

In follow-up experiments, Kamiya wanted to see if the student could generate alpha at will. “Go into the alpha state when you hear a bell ring once,” the young man was told. “If it rings twice, do not go into alpha.” The student was able to control his brain waves perfectly. Others also learned control of their brain waves.

What captured the imagination of the public, though, was the fact that people who learned to generate alpha at will left the experiments feeling calm, clear, and refreshed. It was the first modern alpha training, and it led to the field of neurofeedback, teaching people to handle many stress-related problems on their own. There has been a rebirth of brain-wave training around the world, with thousands of practitioners using neurofeedback to treat attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, anxiety, chronic pain, and a host of other disorders.

Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Clinic also studied the phenomenon of self-regulation. The Greens took a portable research lab to India to study Eastern holy men. The subject of one of the most intriguing experiments was Yogiraja Vaidyaraja, the so-called burying yogi, who often spent two or three days buried in a box several feet underground to demonstrate his spiritual development and devotion.

For the purposes of the test, Yogiraja Vaidyaraja was seated in the lotus position in a completely airtight wooden cube measuring three and a half feet by three and a half feet by five feet. One panel of the crate was a door, made of quarter-inch plate glass, through which the Greens and their team could see the yogi. The cracks around the door were sealed with a quarter inch of foam. Green felt the box was sealed more tightly than a refrigerator. An associate of the yogi burned a candle in the box, and it went out, for lack of oxygen, after ninety minutes.

Instruments were attached to the yogi to measure, among other things, his heart rate, his galvanic skin response (GSR), which measures the rate of sweating, and his EEG. The Greens thought the yogi would reach his limit in two hours, while a doctor present said he would need to be let out after four hours to avoid losing consciousness.

After nearly eight hours in the airless box, the yogi signaled to the researchers that he wanted to be let out, complaining that he had received electric shocks from the equipment. Green was astounded. During the yogi’s stay in the box, his respiration rate had dropped to less than four breaths per minute, and his pulse rate had dropped by more than half. After the yogi emerged from the box, researchers tried to take a blood sample, and they couldn’t—the holy man had stopped the flow of blood to his extremities.

The EEG showed that the yogi “produced alpha almost continuously,” the Greens wrote. They also found the yogi had the unusual ability to move quickly between disparate brain frequencies. When he entered the box, he switched nimbly and almost instantly from beta, or normal waking consciousness, into a deep alpha state.

Such experiments are more than just interesting stories—they demonstrate beyond doubt that humans have the power to self-regulate, to control functions we have been led to believe we have no control over.

The goal of Open-Focus training is to gain a measure of voluntary control over our attention and subsequently over our physiology in order to manage pain. While it may take years for someone to become as adept as the burying yogi, learning to control attention styles, and managing our pain, can be accomplished in fairly short order.

Step by step, the Open-Focus exercises teach us to move effortlessly out of narrow-objective focus into a more open, immersed style of attending. This in itself often releases accumulated stress and tension and allows us to feel better, lighter, clearer, and more present in the now. Eventually, we can move awareness closer to our pain to dissolve it. Other exercises teach us to maintain this awareness on a daily basis. These exercises are pieces of a whole, learned one at a time. It’s similar to learning to play the guitar: first we learn to hold the instrument, then we learn to find the notes on the neck, and then how to strum the strings. Then we learn to put these skills together to play a song.

With practice, we can learn to move into Open Focus seamlessly, as second nature, using our ability to attend flexibly. That means dissolving pain and tension as they begin to form in our awareness. When we learn to dissolve pain, the pain becomes an important signal, a prompt to shift attention styles. The idea is to catch pain as it arises, before it becomes monumental and permanent, to merge with the pain and truly dissolve it, as opposed to distracting ourselves from it as most of us normally do.

Integral to Open-Focus training is developing our awareness of space. Becoming aware of space helps keep us from getting stuck in narrow-objective focus. To optimize our mental and physical health, we need to apportion as much attentional importance to space as we do to objects, feelings, and thoughts.

We can meet much of life’s pain with these skills and not only dissolve pain but get more out of life, and make it a much deeper and richer experience. Over the years, two clients who had learned to dissolve their anxiety later became pregnant, and both used dissolving pain techniques to merge with and dissolve their childbirth pains. They found their experience at the time of birth to be not only much less painful but much more loving as well. Both were second-time moms and felt they had a better emotional connection at birth with their second child.

A masseuse familiar with Open Focus uses it to teach her clients to dissolve muscle tension while she works on them with her hands. Imagine the space around the tension, she instructs them.

Once dissolving pain skills are learned, you can feel into places where you normally don’t experience pain, find hidden tension, and dissolve it as a preventative measure. Remember that tension is a precursor to pain and takes a toll on performance. Many people have said that they didn’t know they had pain until they began doing the Open-Focus exercises. Obviously, it was blocked from awareness, and blocking discomfort takes an increasing toll on the body and on performance. As confidence in your ability to dissolve pain grows, it becomes possible to intentionally bring hidden pain to the fore, to let it rise in consciousness so it can be dissolved. By imagining painful situations from the past, we can also acknowledge any associated emotional pain that may have been suppressed and dissolve it using Open Focus—before this blocked emotional tension leads to RAS and physical pain.

There is more recent research that supports the validity of the operant-conditioning model. At the Stanford Systems Neuroscience and Pain Lab, researchers are using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to allow chronic pain patients to see the brain activity associated with their physical pain as it occurs in real time, and to help these patients to learn in short order to reduce that activity and end the pain. It’s cutting-edge neurofeedback, the most powerful of all because it allows users to see an image of their brain in operation.

“Everyone is born with a system designed to turn off pain,” said Christopher deCharms, a pain researcher with a company called Omneuron, who is working on the fMRI project. “There isn’t an obvious mechanism to turn off other diseases like Parkinson’s. With pain, the system is there, but most of us haven’t initiated control over the intensity dial.”

My work indicates that we do in fact have control over the dial—we can control it with our attention. While using modern imaging technology may be a powerful way to turn off pain, so is understanding and gaining control over our ability to direct our attention. It’s far less expensive and far more empowering.

Children, incidentally, are very adept learners when it comes to the dissolution of pain. I have taught children in less than five minutes how to feel and dissolve everything from stomachaches to headaches to muscle pain. They are naturally more flexible when it comes to attention and haven’t learned all the bad habits of chronic narrow focus. Since children already have flexible attention skills, it would make great sense to teach them to stay flexible with a series of simple exercises that could be integrated into school curricula.

Open-Focus training is available to everyone, to enable them to stop pain and gain control over their lives. It’s simple and easy to learn.

Can you imagine a world where you are free from the constant throb, ache, or stabbing of pain and instead live in the broad surround of open awareness and flexible attention?

Many native cultures understood how to dissolve fear, pain, and discomfort. Indigenous peoples had no advanced medical procedures, hospitals, or antidepressants. Young people were schooled in how to manage pain. Coming-of-age rituals were often lessons in learning to dissolve pain—for example, by handling a hot rock. Perhaps these were key opportunities to learn the principle of merging with pain instead of running from it. In our modern culture, we seem to have lost this knowledge of how to self-regulate in response to pain.

In The Open-Focus Brain, I wrote about a psychologist friend of mine who went with a medicine man into a Native American sweat lodge, which is something like a smoke-filled sauna. The intense heat and smoke overwhelmed him, and his throat and sinuses burned in pain. But my friend was able to draw on his Open-Focus training and decided to melt into and merge with his discomfort. When he did this, he found that almost instantaneously the pain vanished.

Then something even more remarkable occurred. Reaching into the pile of heated rocks in the center of the lodge, the medicine man picked up a large, very hot stone and handed it to my friend. Again, his Open-Focus training came into play, and he was actually able to melt into and dissolve the pain of holding the stone. The burning sensation stopped, and he was able to hold the rock for a while. Surprised at my friend’s ability to manage pain, the medicine man asked him, “Where did you learn to do that?”

Becoming aware of how we attend to our internal and external worlds is, I believe, an emerging aspect of human evolution. What we pay attention to, and how we pay attention to it, dictates our reality. Part of that is the ability to generate an awareness of yourself that is free of pain.

The first step is to understand that we have a range of attention styles to choose from. Then we can move to expand our awareness beyond a narrow scope of attention to a broader aperture, one that admits all peripheral experience at the same time. When we are able to do that, we have expanded our consciousness to the point where we are no longer caught up in, nor overreactive to troublesome stimuli, such as pain, because they are now only a small part of our awareness.

When we fully develop flexible attention skills, we become better adapted to our world—we can be an inclusive, loving being one instant (in diffuse-immersed attention) and an ambitious lawyer devising a strategy for a court appearance (in narrow-objective attention) the next. We can lay down our problems and responsibilities and our pain as we choose and, if appropriate, pick them up again. We can diffuse pain, depression, and anxiety. We can move through life using our attention skills the way they were meant to be used, to have a fuller, richer life, free of pain, anxiety, and worry, one in which we are deeply connected to the people we love. One could say that fully flexible attention gives us the keys to the kingdom.

Exercise

Dissolving Pain (Short Form)

I went to see my optometrist one day, and, after a few pleasantries, I realized he was upset. He told me that he was overcome by grief over his mother’s recent death and broke down crying. Knowing that I am a psychologist, he asked me if there was anything that he could do to stop his embarrassing bouts of crying. I offered to teach him Open Focus to manage this crisis, and he was willing to try it. I asked him to feel the space in the whole room and beyond whenever he felt as if he was beginning to be overcome by his grief and crying.

The next time I came to see him, he was beaming. He said being able to feel the space in the whole room, and beyond, helped him greatly. When he did this, he could feel the tension in his chest melting. This is an example of how, with practice, we can quickly dissolve pain.

The following exercise is an abbreviated form of the “Dissolving Pain” exercise presented earlier in the book. Use this exercise, for example, after you’ve been successfully practicing Open Focus for a period of time. Then the short form can be used when you don’t have time for the longer form.

Remember to allow fifteen seconds between the end of one question and the beginning of the next question.

Guiding Questions

Can you imagine paying attention to any feeling of chronic pain that is present right now? (Keep in mind that if you don’t feel a well-defined pain, you can address any unpleasant sensation, such as chronic tension, pressure, weakness, tingling, or heaviness.)

Can you localize your pain? Can you imagine feeling where in your body your pain is most intense?

Is it in your throat, chest, stomach, or perhaps behind your eyes? It can be anywhere in your body, around your body, or in your mind.

If you have found 100 percent of your strongest chronic pain in a particular location in your body, choose a number on a 0 to 10 scale, which represents the intensity of this pain.

If you have localized less than 100 percent of your strongest pain, imagine what percentage remains unlocalized, and repeat the process of localization until all the pain has been found at one or more particular locations in your body.

Can you imagine paying attention to the feeling of space in the whole room you are in?

Can you imagine paying attention to the feeling of space your body occupies?

Can you imagine paying attention to the feeling of space your pain occupies?

Can you imagine gently placing your attention underneath the location of the pain and, in slow motion, floating upward, until you arrive at the heart-center of your pain?

Can you imagine the pain spreading through this attention, which is you, through your body, through the boundaries of your body, through the space your body occupies, and through the space in the room in every direction, simultaneously?

Can you imagine experiencing immersed attention, that is, a feeling of absorption, when you feel the pain spreading?

Can you now imagine rating on a 0 to 10 scale the intensity of the remaining pain?

Can you imagine repeating the cycle of objectifying and merging with your pain, then using a 0 to 10 scale to rate the intensity of remaining pain?

Can you imagine repeating these questions, moving toward any remaining pain from various directions? For example, can you imagine letting this immersed attention, which is you, float down into the pain from above, or letting it float from in front of the pain, or from behind, or from the sides, into the center of the feeling of pain?

Can you imagine repeating this process until the pain is completely dissolved?

Can you imagine dissolving the next most intense remaining pain? First by localizing, in the body, the most intense physical or emotional pain. Second, by letting that awareness, which is you, merge with your pain, letting your pain spread through the surrounding body and space. Third, by paying objective attention again to how much pain remains and rating the intensity of the remaining pain on a 0 to 10 scale.

Can you imagine again merging with any remaining pain and letting the pain spread in any direction?