The Evolution of The Pain Release Technique

My first introduction to the idea of turning towards pain and allowing myself to experience it fully without resistance, agenda or expectation was at a Journey Intensive weekend run by Brandon Bays in 2007. I was so excited by this approach as it felt intuitively that it was exactly what I was needing to do myself at that time. I was also excited about the results I thought I could get using this approach with clients in my own practice.

I had been working as a homeopath for about a decade and my approach was always to explore with my clients the origin of their illness – when did things start to go wrong? When did the innate healing mechanism that had up to that point worked well enough stopped working? What made them ill? Clients often found that this approach helped them to make sense of their illness and also see what needed fixing.  But some could not answer the questions, they had the feeling that they had never been well or they could not put their finger on the time when things had started to go downhill.  Others felt that their problem was purely mechanical and was the result of a slow deterioration in their condition.  I realised that I could help fill in some missing parts in the jigsaw by using the journey process to access unconscious and forgotten incidents that had had a profound impact on my clients’ health and I could then use this insight to find a homeopathic remedy for the condition that I would not otherwise have seen.

The journey process is based on the premise that unresolved emotional pain is stored in the body and can eventually lead to mental or physical illness. Brandon Bays developed the technique after exploring deeply within herself to discover what may have helped to trigger a uterine tumour.

In her inner exploration she noticed that she could feel areas of tightness, holding and closing off in her body and discovered that when she brought her awareness fully to these areas she could allow pain that was being held there to be released and fully felt. She also found that by re-feeling the pain briefly the causal event was made conscious and she was reminded of incidents in her past. Once the memories were conscious she was able to use a number of psychotherapeutic techniques to address the trauma and let it go and, miraculously, her body then began to heal. Her understanding was that the emotional pain had threatened to overwhelm her at the time so her unconscious mind had suppressed it to protect her from feeling it fully, and there it had remained stuck for twenty years or more. Eventually the pain had found an outlet through the physical body in the form of a uterine tumour.

On hearing her story I immediately signed up to train as a journey practitioner and embarked on the most transformative experience of my life. The training is undertaken in a series of residential workshops held over a year and I came out of it much more aware of my ego patterns and the beliefs that I had inherited and never before questioned. I also learned some tools that would help me to break free of some of my destructive behaviours that I had not even been conscious of a short year earlier. This was not a once and for all process but, once I had the means, a way of life: an uncovering and releasing process that continues to this day.

I gained my accreditation in 2008 and have been developing personally and as a practitioner ever since. In 2009 I was drawn to attend a silent retreat with Gangagi. I knew little about her at the time save for the fact that she had the same teacher as Brandon Bays. This teacher was Sri Poonja who had himself been taught by Sri Ramana Maharshi, perhaps the most influential mystic of modern times.

Ramana taught that there were only two ways to achieve inner peace. One was to explore who we are: what is the ‘I’ that we identify ourselves to be. By following this line of enquiry we are drawn deeper and deeper within ourselves until we realise that there is no ‘I’, there is simply a presence that has been termed many things including God, spirit, the ground of being, source or inner peace. All other identifications that we have are simply constructs of the thinking mind. One of his favourite quotes from Psalm 46: ‘Be still and know that I am God’ or I think he would also consider it true to say: ‘Be still and know that you are God’.

The only other method that he recommended to his followers was simply to surrender entirely to God’s will, quoting Jesus: ‘Not my will but thine be done’.

Gangagi helps her followers to free themselves from suffering, which is all a construct of the thinking mind, by simply meeting the emotion, allowing it and enquiring as to what is in the heart of it. Due to Gangagi’s own profound stillness and presence she shows her followers the way to enter into their pain and find the peace within –  what Ramana called peaceful consciousness and you may prefer to term Grace, love, source, the ground of being, enlightenment, Samadhi or God.

In my own meditations I noticed that emotions were like waves: they arose as a strong physical sensation and then subsided again leaving me in peace.  At times of intense pain, such as when grieving a loved one, the waves were strong but they passed, to be shortly followed by another. My experience was that it was fine to simply allow the waves to come and go and by fully acknowledging the grief in this way there were increasing period of peace between the waves.  My realisation was that by resisting the waves I was impeding the process of the grief and, paradoxically, prolonging it. The same is true for any pain, physical or emotional. The pain may be present in the body but, without resistance, it passes through without disturbing the deeper peace within.

This is a difficult idea for the thinking mind to accept.  Our culture has taught us to fear pain and find ways of avoiding it and to allow pain to pass without resistance seems counter-intuitive. I was unsure how to convey what I had learned to my clients, many of whom had little experience of or interest in spiritual practice.

My next teacher, in 2010, was Joel Young, a fellow Journey Practitioner who has developed a profoundly powerful process that he terms Non-Personal Awareness or NPA. NPA allows us to realise that our painful emotions are not personal to us and that by allowing them to be fully felt we can release them leaving us in a state of peaceful consciousness. The process is accomplished by repeating a simple mantra three times, and my understanding is that by giving the thinking mind a job to do, that of repeating the mantra, we can slip beneath the radar and communicate with the unconscious, suggesting that it releases the pain, thus exposing a deeper truth. The process is easy to learn and once experienced it can be used at any time to reconnect with our inner peace. Joel’s teachings have already had a huge impact on the spiritual community in the South of England and he is now teaching NPA more widely to great acclaim.

Perhaps the most influential of my teachers have been my clients, and in particular those who have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia: I wanted to give then a tool that would help them to cope with their persistent and debilitating physical pain. It needed to use words that would be acceptable to somebody who had no spiritual or religious belief and I wanted the process to be usable without any explanation and without a need to introduce the concept of a connection between their spiritual, mental and physical health. If I could do this it would allow the client to make sense of their pain in their own way.

I wrote the PRT with these things in mind and began to use it on my clients who were experiencing chronic physical pain. The effects were immediate and profound. For many they found that their physical pain receded and they experienced a new freedom and lightness. I asked them to practice the technique at home and the feedback was gratifying, they reported better sleep, waking in a better mood, better morale and less pain, they said that they were finding that they could live with the pain where before they were constantly battling against it.

Heartened, I started to use the PRT with my other clients and I found it invaluable for discharging pent up emotion. One of my regular clients arrived in tears, it was Friday evening and she had just finished a week of teaching bottom-set year elevens maths, she was near the end of her tether. I saw that there was a likelihood that she would spend the entire consultation talking out her frustration, this might have been helpful to her but would not really change anything. I asked her if she would mind trying the technique and within less than 5 minutes she was a picture of serenity and ready to look forward to the weekend. I gave her the wording and suggested that she practice PRT every day when she gets in from school. She now has a way to drop the stresses of the day and enjoy her evenings.

The rest, as they say, is history. I now use the PRT with most of my clients, it is beneficial for long term health conditions, addictions, depression, anxiety and psychosis, in fact almost all clients I see in general practice.

With the help of my professional friends and my students the PRT continues to evolve. Once learned it can be used to address resentment, fears, blocks and deep seated emotional pain. With practice it can serve as a profoundly powerful healing tool and as it can be used when alone, as part of a meditation, it can support spiritual development on a daily basis.

The PRT can be learned in a single half-day workshop. By the end of the workshop clients are able to use it to support their own health and on their family and friends. They are encouraged then to use it for a while and gain some confidence and experience and then they many find it useful to attend a second workshop where they can share their experience and learn more about the deeper applications of the technique.

Many people who have learned the technique have enquired about qualifying as a PRT practitioner. This can now be achieved by attending a third workshop which addresses practice issues, insurance, accreditation and the Absolute Specialists code of practice. They are also supported in developing their practice through one-to-one telephone support sessions and group supervision.   Qualified practitioners are listed on my website and are benefitting from the increasing awareness of the technique as more and more people discover its benefits and seek out a teacher.

www.clarewaltershealth.co.uk