Pain Control

Last night I had an unusual headache. I don't generally get headaches, thank goodness but this one was a doozy. I was all out of advil and had nothing else in the house. Maybe I was obsessing, but the pain seemed to completely absorb my attention once I laid down. I tried to locate the source of the pain. It wasn't located at my temples or the back of my head like a regular stress headache, and it didn't pound like a sinus headache. As I searched, the source became more and more obscure. I realised the pain was radiating from a central point. Trying to locate that central point was a trip, succeeding mainly to increase the pain. I realised I had to do something in order to fall asleep. My mother has been advocating self hypnosis as pain control for decades now. Due to severe alergies to many common drugs, she had to develop alternate ways to block her pain.

I've used her techniques and have devised my own over the years to deal with my own pain in the past. I figured last night was a good time to revisit the practice.

The nature of this headache made it easy to transform the pain into a refreshing sensation. Once I was able to imagine the location of the pain (somewhere in the center of my brain which at the time felt pretty gigantic, ) I imagined the pain as bright light ripples from the epicenter, like the circles that form from a drop in a pond. The light was jagged, and bright yellows copper and flashes of orange. I imagined the pain disolve into the sensation of cool water. Presently, instead of a epicenter of radiating pain I experienced an outflowing of cooling water, like a fountain. I imagined I felt cool, refreshing water trickling and running down over me from the center of my crown. It worked really quickly and soon I felt relaxed, calm.

It was neat.