Thinking away your pain, mind over matter Options

i'm no expert on migraine. Since i never have them.

However, pain can be ignored. If you choose not to care about it, not to let the pain get to you. If you accept the pain as a sensation, and do not think it to be a bad or good feeling. If you just experience the pain without attachement to it, no bad attachement and no good attachement. Then you will be free of the burden of pain, it will no longer annoy you.

The feeling will never go away, but the sensation of pain is no longer experienced as a bad thing.

It becomes a neutral sensation.

This sounds simple, simpleminded even, but it is not that way. This is a very hard technique to master. But very rewarding if mastered.
an exercise:
Focus on your hand, feel your hand, feel how you can feel the hot or cold sensation of the air on its skin. Touch something with your hand, feel the sensation.
Feel that this sensation is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neutral. Yet you are very much aware of it, you can feel it, yet you do not think anything of it.

Imagine how this can be the same with the sensation of pain.
The sensation of pain is the same, it can become a neutral sensation also.

I also apologise for going to far off topic in my previous posts. I was wrong to do so...

I agree. I can ignore some of my pain, like migranes and knee pains.. although I "shouldn't ignore it cuz it's bad for you" . Well, if you say "My knee is killing me can I take a break?" in gym, you just get a "SHUT UP AND SUCK IT UP!" (IMG:style_emoticons/default/huh.gif)

Ignoring pain isn't hard. sometimes though, a stabbing pain can be severe enough to cause your leg to buckle and collapse out from under you ...even if you don't care about the sensation all that much. and then, detachment or no, it's time to sit down, lay down, take a pill, whatever.

I think that generally people don't get pain which is severe enough to make them collapse though. it's generally more of an annoyance than a truly forceful thing, and annoyances can be ignored very easily.

I second that going out of body 'partially' is one way to cope with relatively severe pain. For example you can just kinda coast in a "mostly out" state. You know in the summer when you go out to your car and the steering wheel is scalding hot? and you drive, but you only put like 1 finger on the wheel? you can kinda drive your body the same way.

This post has been edited by Kath: Jun 27 2010, 02:25 AM

I ignore pain using painkillers.

Boy I love painkillers.

But more seriously, Thích Quảng Đức is one of the most impressive examples of thinking away pain. Even as he burned, his face apparently never once changed from a serene, peaceful expression. I was always more interested in Theravada Buddhism, but apparently our friend Thích was a Mahayanist (so to speak), and I am aware of no other religion - Buddhist or otherwise - whose adherents have performed such an impressive feat of self-control and, presumably, enlightenment.

This post has been edited by Vilhjalmr: Jun 27 2010, 01:34 PM