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PAIN
THERAPY
There
are cases in which not even self-massage can pull you out of trouble.
For example, toothache. An abscess is a mechanical process of painful
swelling caused by an infection that only an incision can solve.
If it's night, you have no painkillers or a dentist nearby, the
only thing that you can do is to bear the pain. In similar cases,
the only thing is to approach the pain in the right way. First of
all, one has to separate the pain from the fear of pain. Often,
in fact, psychological tension acts a multiplier of pain. It must
be at once stated that suffering has a physiological roof. There
isn't much difference in crushing a finger or mangling an arm. Moreover,
beyond a certain degree, the body decides that the pain is too much,
and therefore one falls into a state of mental confusion. One faints
or dies.
Therefore there is nothing to fear. Heartened by the existence
of this fantastic mechanism of pain cessation, you can therefore
confront it with calm and determination. What to do?
The strategy should aim to provoke a state of mental abandon as
soon as possible. The more you resist pain, the more you activate
the rational mind and the will, and the longer you will suffer.
On the contrary, one needs to cease every resistance. Habitually,
we tend to surround the pain with an area of contraction. Try instead
not to interfere. Let the pain expand. For an instant, the pain
will increase in intensity, until having reached its peak, something
snaps and the brain enters into a state of torpor that leads you
quickly to sleep (or in coma... but hey, let's try to be optimistic!)
Another
technique to numb oneself to pain was suggested to me by Cinzia
Lenzi. It consists in relaxing oneself by imagining that the body
expands and that the boundaries between you and the bed, the air
and the all the rest cease to exist. One night, in which a good
four wisdom teeth tormented my gums, I tried another extremely effective
figuration to KNOCK OUT the rational mind and not register the pain.
I said to myself, "O.K., I'm dying, I can't take it anymore,
I'm dying! Goodbye sunsets, fabulous women, colossal companies.
I've lived enough. I've been immensely fortunate almost everyday.
Now I die. Click". And I carried on as if I was dying. I curled
up into a ball between the sheets, and I went "click"
inside me, turning off the light and trying to accept with a half-smile
whatever happened to me.
In short, I mimed the best death that I could have imagined.
It wasn't difficult, even because I knew that one rarely dies for
something like that. In fact, I didn't die.
To make up for it, the pain became an event that I understood, but
beyond the dimension in which I lived. I don't now know to explain
it better. Then I fell asleep. The day after, the wisdom teeth finally
perforated their respective gums, and I had a very normal pain that
felt like hell.
(Continue)
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