Before I get to this week’s Tip I want to share an email I received from Buddy, who suddenly had a very good reason to try the tips I’ve been offering on Focusing with pain. Here are his own words:
"Last Monday I was working in wood shop, using the 10 inch table saw, I made a mistake and put my thumb through the saw. I cut off about 1/2 inch of the tip of my thumb. One of the fellows in the wood shop took me to the Emergency Room. The nurse took my name and told me to have a chair and they would call me. The entire staff was overwhelmed with patients so it took a long time to get the doctors’ attention. The pain was tremendous (level 9 or 10). I thought, "This is a perfect time for me to try Ann’s pain management technique," so I put all my attention on the tip of my thumb and practiced accepting what was there. I would say that I was in Presence. In about 20 minutes a nurse called me to take my blood pressure and asked me what was my pain level. The pain had reduced by that time so I answered about level 6. About an hour passed and they asked me again what was my pain level and I answered about 2. There was an ache and throbbing but little pain and the pain did not come back. I saw the doctor about 8 hours after I arrived at the Emergency Room and was released 1/2 hour later. They gave me a bottle full of pain medication and told me that I would need them by morning. The next morning I woke with no pain.
"As instructed I went to Minor Injury Care and they changed the dressing on the thumb. I asked the nurse "Why do I not have any pain?" She said "You probably severed a nerve ending and killed the nerve." Later that day I hit my thumb on a drawer in the kitchen and the pain was very great. I knew then that the nerve was not killed. Whenever I felt pain I quickly went back to focusing on the tip of my thumb and soon the pain would be gone. Now it is Friday afternoon and my injured thumb feels like my other thumb, there is no pain. I tell people that and it is hard for them to believe me.
"I want to thank you for your telling people about to manage pain. It has been of great relief for me."
And thank YOU, Buddy, for that great story! The implications are mind-boggling, aren’t they?
Focusing vs. The Law of Attraction
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"How does something called the Law of Attraction fit with Focusing? If you Focus on something in your body … is that not attracting the same problem to us over and over again?"
Malcolm wrote me this week to remind me of this question that someone asked me at my free phone seminar on pain, where I talked about burning my arm late at night and bringing my full attention to it in an interested, sensing way… and having the pain go away–permanently–in about 20 minutes. Much like Buddy’s story.
Malcolm was also kind enough to transcribe my answer! Here it is…
What I have experienced in the last thirty-five years with Focusing is that by bringing awareness to what is true, to what is so, at the felt sense level — I find in that there is always fresh life-forward movement. But we get stuck because we’re not actually letting ourselves sense what is here now. We get stuck in concepts, we get stuck in stories, and the stories repeat over and over and they really don’t have a way through. So our stories and beliefs, "I’m a failure, I’ll never have more money than I do now" — those kinds of stories don’t have that fresh-forward life movement in them. And the body is always available to give a felt sense which sums up the whole of the situation we’re facing, from a new perspective. And that new perspective always has in it the healing forward movement.
So no wonder I felt so good in that Buddhist monastery in Japan when I brought awareness to the burn. There was a profound satisfaction because I was keeping my body company in the healing process that it was already engaged in. I was feeling my profound faith in the healing process.
And there was nothing in that that was an invitation to be burned again. Instead, I was keeping company with the truth, the reality, the satisfaction of being with what is so below concepts and beyond concepts.
It’s this whole body wisdom that contains the forward movement of our life, that when we leave that body and go into thoughts that are divorced from body about what should be true instead of what is true — that way lies stuckness, that way lies repetition of old patterns and frustration.
It’s when we bring awareness to what is so, freshly, in this moment, that we are joining, not old pain, but the healing of pain, and the sense of the whole body feeling into fresh movement. The deep profound knowing and wisdom that’s found in every cell of our body of how our own unique life force goes forward, is something that can be trusted. And as we surrender into trust of that, it carries us forward. And there’s a felt experience of a profound rest into that.
Focusing is not Repeating the Problem
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The Law of Attraction people might have a point. There does seem to be a kind of repetition, a dwelling on the negative, that doesn’t take us forward.
But that isn’t what Focusing does!
When you get a fresh whole felt sense of the situation, you are doing something quite different from just repeating a stuck problem. When you stay with how it feels right now, sensing and symbolizing that, even if how it feels is quite difficult, you are doing something you’ve never done before. It’s not a repetition. So there is a fresh feeling to it, an Ah!…
That’s because contacting a felt sense is contacting both "how it is" and "how it’s becoming, moving, implying, forwarding, … " The felt experience of trust that that is happening brings the body’s own healing.