Dissolving Pain

Introduction

Once you have learnt to move into Open-Focus awareness, it becomes possible to use your attention to dissolve physical and emotional pain. In Open-Focus your pain is a much smaller part of your total awareness; it becomes no big deal and is easy to accept and therefore easy to dissolve. This exercise teaches you how to move closer to pain in a broadened awareness until the pain diffuses and disappears. Simply accepting the feeling of pain while resting in Open-Focus is often enough to dissolve the pain.

Preparation
Sit quietly, accepting potential distractions. If you have pain – a headache or muscle tension or anxiety – allow yourself to become aware of its location in your body and then feel into the pain as openly and directly as you can, without resisting it. Dissolving pain can be accomplished only after you have precisely located the feeling in your body.

1: The sense inventory
Gently do a mental inventory of the perceptions of all your senses. Attend, for example, to your sense of hearing. Be aware of sounds while equally and simultaneously attending to the silence between the sounds travel towards you through three-dimensional space. Let this awareness deepen for a few seconds.
Now add vision, noticing the space and objects that you seeing or visualizing (if your eyes are closed).
Be aware of any tastes, including the taste of space. Let this experience deepen for a few seconds.
Add an awareness of your thoughts and the mental silence from which they emerge, the silence in which they exist, and the silence in they dissolve.

Now add awareness of a sense of nowess, the feeling that you are in the present, experiencing all of your sense existing in present space, silence, and timelessness simultaneously.

In the centre of this diffuse attention is the sense of feeling, which includes the felt presence of your body, the feeling of absence we call space your body occupies. The more we increase the sense of the simultaneous presence of all our senses in space, centred in feeling, the more we deepen diffuse attention and the Open-Focus experience.
　
　
　
2: Expanding and dissolving the pain
Can you imagine centring this expanded awareness on your pain? Now can you imagine feeling the space around the pain and feeling the space in which they exist?

Now allow your awareness to diffuse through the pain, feeling the pain more. Alternatively, let the diffuse through your awareness. Bathe in the pain. Let the pain diffuse by feeling it more – not less. Let pain spread through surrounding areas of the body and into space. Don’t try to make the pain spread. It will naturally diffuse as you acceptance of feeling it is more pervasive.

You’ve increased the breath of your awareness and allowed the pain to become a small part of that expanded awareness. The pain no longer encompasses all of your awareness if it’s a small part and it’s no big deal. Expanding your focus allows you to be more comfortable with moving into your pain, to feel the pain, to feel the pain more. Understandably, most people try to avoid their pain. Yet what actually makes the pain overwhelming is our narrow focus on it, which allows the pain to dominate our awareness. When we open up our awareness, our pain becomes a small part of the totality of our experience and feels less threatening. It’s no longer scary to merge with it and let it diffuse into surrounding body and space.

The goal of this exercise is to open our awareness and dive into and through the centre of the pain and then let the awareness of pain float in an open and inclusive awareness where it can dissolve. If the pain doesn’t completely and immediately dissolve, dive back into its care. Some people can dissolve their pain in one or two passes, while others require more.

We can also dissolve our pain as we carry out daily activities by maintaining a feeling sense of space and other sensations in and around our pain as we talk on the phone, shop for groceries, prepare meds, and so forth. We don’t recommend – in fact we caution against – practicing Open-Focus and dissolving-pain exercises while operating any vehicle or in potentially harmful conditions.