And then the pain went away…
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It happened when Barbara McGavin and I were teaching Treasure Maps to the Soul in Italy a month ago, at the lovely Castello di Spannocchia in Tuscany. When I teach I like to stand up… and sit down again… and then stand up… and so on. And I had bare feet — it was a warm day — and I was using my foot to pull my chair under me to sit again. And then it happened.
OH! In the moment I realized the chair leg was ON my foot, the weight of my body coming down on my own foot, I yelled and stood up again as fast as I could. But my foot had taken a hit. It hurt rather a lot.
I told the group I needed a bit of time to keep company with the injury, and invited them to go on discussing with Barbara. (I found out later that no one knew what had happened, they just thought the chair had started to tip.)
Without even looking at my foot, I simply brought my awareness to the sensation there. I felt it, felt into it, sensed it and sensed its qualities. I kept company with it. It gets to feel how it feels, exactly how it feels, and I’m there with it.
This is easy for me now because I’ve done it so often, but when I first tried it, many years ago, it was hard. It felt like I was making it worse. Now I know that’s not true, just the opposite is true. Awareness is part of what an injury needs to heal.
In the first moment of sensing I could tell it was not “serious,” nothing was broken or needing medical attention. Then I just kept it company. About ten or fifteen minutes later, the pain went away. And it never came back.
About ten minutes after that, I felt another kind of sensation, sort of a “full” feeling in the foot. “It’s asking for ice,” I thought, and when I checked with it, that felt right. Class ended soon afterward, and I asked someone to help me get some ice for my foot. I limped toward the door, and that was the first time people knew of my injury.
The foot itself didn’t look so good — the skin was broken and there was a big swelling over the whole top of it. When I saw it, I almost forgot to stay with the feeling of it. In the feeling, it was OK. My friends brought me ice and I spent the evening with the foot up. The pain never returned. I had a comfortable night, and in the morning, no limp, no swelling.
…and never came back
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From a medical point of view, I’m not sure how to describe what happened. (They would probably say, it couldn’t have been that severe an injury!) But the phenomenon is real; I’ve heard from many other Focusing people about it. Barbara McGavin has a lovely article about the use of Focusing with colds, insect bites, and small injuries.
A few days ago a woman came to me for her first Focusing session. “It’s hard to settle into my body,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of pain, it’s a sort of whiplash from an amusement park ride.”
“Maybe it would be OK to just be with that pain,” I offered. “And let’s not even call it ‘pain’ yet, just take some time to be with the sensation, and sense it just as it is right now.”
She willingly closed her eyes and found the sensation with her awareness. She described it… and stayed with it… described what she was sensing now… checked with it… described what it was like… And after about ten minutes of that, I saw her rolling her head on her neck. “Wow,” she said, “the pain is gone!”
She started to laugh, a bubbly joyful kind of laughter. “I’m not sure why I’m laughing,” she said. But I recognized it, I felt it in Tuscany. It felt so good to spend time with something that hurt, and have it respond to that company by not hurting any more. Like a kind of euphoria, more than just the absence of pain. Like something really really right had just happened.