I will try and convey my understanding of how the Pain Release Technique works by using a model. Imagine that we have five levels of consciousness: the first two of these we can picture as being in the brain, and we can call these the thinking mind and the unconscious mind; the third level is the feeling body which is aware of the world around it and the fourth level is the soul. The soul is in touch with the collective consciousness and therefore is not confined to the individual but we can imagine that it is located in the heart and the deepest level is the ground of being, which can be neither located nor defined.
The ground of being is the universal presence that is timeless, spaceless and without form. The thinking mind is unable to make any sense of it, describe it or understand it. It is something that has to be simply experienced and we do this when we feel in the presence of the divine. This may be when we are still, when looking at a work of art, listening to a piece of music, being at one with nature or when we are feeling deeply in love. It slips out of reach the minute the thinking mind attempts to define it, but it can be alluded to, as it is in poetry, prayer and song.
The ground of being is what we experience when we feel enlightened. When we are conscious at this level we are not aware of a personal self, the thinking mind is stilled and we are aware that we are part of an infinite presence. It has flavours at different times of peace, joy, acceptance, love and a oneness with everything.
The collective conscious is more accessible, and I think that most of us are aware at this level for at least part of the time. It has been explored extensively by Carl Jung and his followers and is the level at which we experience a subtle and deep familiarity with a feeling: we know it, but it does not feel as if we are the only person to have experienced it, It is the level of archetypes and shared understanding with others. I call this level the soul and it feels to have deep roots. Our soul is touched when we feel a connectedness, as if we belong in a place or with a person, it is also where we recognise that our behaviour or response is not based on our personal experience but feels habitual, even the first time that we do it. It is a shared human experience.
The feeling body is more personal to us as individuals. It is the level at which we relate to the world around us, so it perceives a blow or the touch of a hot object as pain, and a caress or a good meal as pleasure. It also feels our own emotions physically, for instance we may experience fear as a clenching in the guts or happiness as a swelling of the chest. On a more subtle level the body is emotionally literate, feeling, for instance, the grief, anger and fear of others.
The feeling body passes information to the unconscious mind and the quantity of this information is unimaginably huge. Just consider that as you sit reading this that your eyes are sending input, but also your skin is noticing the ambient temperature and the touch of your clothes, your bottom is sensing the pressure of the chair, your stomach is feeling pleasantly full from the last meal, your bladder is filling, your ears are perceiving noises from the street and within the room, your mouth has the lingering taste of tea and so on and so on. The unconscious mind necessarily acts as a filter, deciding which bits of this information are going to be passed to the conscious mind and which bits to ignore, and this process is under constant review. The first time you hear a strange noise your conscious mind will be alerted and identifies it, dismisses it or gets you to go to the window and investigate it. As the noise continues your unconscious decides that it is not important for you to be aware of it any more and stops sending the information through. It is acting as a gatekeeper for the thinking mind.
The gatekeeper role of the unconscious mind extends to information that is received from emotions that are experienced by the feeling body. Consider the intense fear that you should feel when noticing that a lion is stalking you. The unconscious mind suppressed this fear to prevent it from overwhelming you so you can keep a clear head and make some snappy decisions. You will have time to panic once you have escaped to a place of safety!
If you imagine an iceberg, the bit below the surface of the sea is the amount of activity that is going at an unconscious level and the bit above the water represents the proportion that is conscious. The conscious mind has the task of reasoning, planning, creating, remembering and judging. It is the seat of the intellect and the ego.
In health, there is open communication between these five levels and I can best illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you have news that someone dear to you has died. You instantly feel the shock and the pain of the grief in your body, perhaps as waves of clenching in your chest and you sit down and allow your attention to be focussed on the emotion. At the same time you are aware at the deepest level that you are anchored by the eternal presence of trust, acceptance and peace that is your ground of being and you know intrinsically that although the physical presence of the person has left you, that their love still remains.
Your soul recognises this pain of losing someone as a shared human emotion, and yearns to connected, perhaps to be surrounded by loved ones in a place where you feel to be at home. Your unconscious mind allows free communication of these truths to the thinking mind which plans for you to return to your family home and take some time to reflect and allow the physical pain of the grief be felt and expressed as you come to terms with the loss.
The body is also aware of the pain of others, your heart tells you that they must react to this in their own way and that your love can support them as they do this and your thinking mind decides that right now what they need is a hug.
This is all beautiful, but it is not always what we find ourselves doing. The thinking mind often chooses not to be guided by the wisdom of the heart, it believes itself to be in charge and that it needs to take control, that it is solely responsible for us and our actions. Let us look at how this has come about.
Since the rise in popularity of reductionism over mysticism in the 17th century the tendency has been for us in the West to place more and more faith in the intellect. We believe that everything can be explained by logic, by breaking things down to their component parts, that we can work everything out and create solutions . The thinking mind can answer all the great mysteries of the world: the meaning of life, the origin of the universe and the secrets of perfect health if we only work hard enough. It can find the answers to our problems: our fears, our pains and our frustrations.
This defiant approach can be heard in our speech. There is the obvious example of our need to ‘defeat’ Al Quaida, but listen for a while and you will hear that this is the language we use in our approach to most things. We must ‘tackle’ world poverty, ‘beat’ cancer, ‘wipe out’ malaria, ‘combat’ child abuse and ‘drive up’ literacy levels.
The thinking mind sees just about everything as a challenge. It believes that it alone is responsible and that it must take control and whenever it believes it is losing its grip it is fearful: it fears for its own survival. And it is not enough that it perceives threat in its present situation, it also looks ahead and anticipates threat that may come to it in the future, and looks back and replays threats that either happened or might have happened in the past. It strives to keep us safe by learning from past events, being on guard in the present and anticipating the future.
In reality the mind does not have total control over everything, and that includes our own bodies. It cannot always prevent pain and this scares it. So, using the example of grief again: if someone close to you dies you feel the pain of the grief in your chest. The thinking mind is not in control of this pain but it has learned that it can regain some level of order by suppressing the emotion, by capping it off. This is something that we practice as a culture, so usually it is not a conscious decision but an unconscious one. Once the cap is in place it blocks the free communication between the different levels of consciousness. In effect we become closed off from the heart, our source of love and compassion, and the ground of being, our source of peace and security. The thinking mind then feels even more isolated, our actions become more informed by fear and we create a cycle of pain.
We can gain some temporary solace from this pain through distraction, perhaps by apportioning blame ’it is my fault, I should have been there’ or ‘it is the doctor’s fault, she should have seen this coming and acted differently’ or by turning our thoughts outward, to the pain of others, believing that if we ‘fix’ them it will lessen our own pain.
In many cases we begin to relax the defensive behaviour as time passes, we can then release the painful feelings of grief and reconnect with our deeper levels of being, we are restored to balance and health.
There is, however, some pain that is considered by the unconscious mind to be too painful to ever be felt. It decides it is not safe to revisit the memory and it continues to block it out and distract the thinking mind indefinitely. This often happens with early experiences when we did not have the wisdom or experience to make sense of an event. For instance, a child experiencing the full wrath of an adult aimed at him feels terrified and helpless. In such cases the unconscious caps off the feelings as a survival measure and it also decides that it will never be safe to revisit the memory and release the emotions so they remain suppressed indefinitely.
The unconscious uses this sort of experience as a source of reference in an attempt to ensure that we do not encounter similar pain again, it develops fears, judgements and beliefs such as ‘I must not make people angry or they will annihilate me’, ‘that person is not OK because she has an angry face’ and ‘anger is a frightening emotion and I must never express it’. Because we never explore the root of these beliefs they remain with us, unchallenged and immovable and no amount of positive affirmation or forgiving thoughts will truly expunge them.
The capped off feeling of terror remains as a dis-ease in the body and any time we experience a feeling that reminds us of it our reactions seem to be out of proportion to the stimulus. An angry voice that reminds our unconscious of the event that caused us terror as a child will make us feel deeply disturbed and panicky.
This dis-ease can remain dormant for our whole lives. However, it can sometimes find expression through dreams and flashbacks, such as in post-traumatic stress disorder, or through physical dis-ease. In recent years the link between emotions and physical symptoms has become more widely accepted: the relationship between anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome is well known, and we would probably all agree that our skin can itch when we feel frustrated; our throats can ache when we feel sad, our blood can pump audibly when we are angry, and we can ache with tiredness, feel a sudden stab of fear in our guts and our hearts can burn with hatred. I would take it further and say that most of the physical symptoms we experience in chronic illness are an outlet for suppressed emotions.
Emotional pain can express and physical symptoms, but it is also true that physical pain can cause emotional symptoms. The two are interlinked and co-dependent. It follows that by releasing pent up feelings we can reduce the intensity of both, and it is surprisingly simple to do this once we have been taught a method.
The Pain Release Technique is a very simple tool that allows us to do just this. By noticing where in the body the pain is felt we can bring our attention to it and invite it to be fully expressed. The initial pain may be physical, such as an aching hip, or emotional, such as resentment felt in the chest. As we bring our awareness to the pain we can become aware of its origin and allow this also to be fully expressed. There follows a discharge of emotion and if we do not resist it but allow it to be fully felt we can remove the blocks that have been put in place by the unconscious and we can reconnect with our heart and our ground of being.
Coming back to the example of a grief felt after the loss of a loved one. By consciously inviting ourselves to experience the physical pain of the grief and allowing it to continue to be expressed until it is exhausted keeps us open to deeper levels of consciousness. This lets us feel supported by the love and acceptance that are ever present within. The tsunamis of pain soon subside if we allow them to pass without resistance and we experience diminishing waves of grief over the months that follow. And between the waves is a peace and a wisdom that supports not only ourselves but all others that grieve.
clarewaltershealth.co.uk
