Humans are wired to respond to pain by trying to block it. We block physical pain by contracting around it, our insides often knotting up in ways that negatively impact our health. We block painful thoughts by contracting there, too, pushing away whatever triggers or frightens us. Yet, in spite of our efforts to push away what feels painful or threatening, we are as uniquely optimized to manage pain as we are to retreat from it.
But most of us don’t know that about ourselves! Nor do we know how to skillfully engage our pain and the stories that grow and metastasize around it. Indeed, most of us don’t understand that pain in all its forms actually can move through us, even transform us.
The Role of World-building
A journey practice guides you into an imaginary place where your pain shades off as you world-build. With your imagination firing, your thoughts are drawn away from pain, your attention spotlight shifting to an imaginal Now which is engaging enough to divert and occupy all your cognitive resources.
The fact that a journey practice isn’t *real* per se isn’t the point. New research confirms that from a neuroscientific perspective, the brain reads as real anything that registers strongly in the imagination. In one experiment, for example, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a Harvard neuroscientist, asked subjects to imagine playing a sequence of notes over and over on a piano keyboard. As they did so, blood flow to the part of the brain responsible for finger flexions increased, causing the neurocircuitry to begin firing, an event that confirmed what scientists who study the brain have long suspected: acts of imagination feel exactly like lived action. Amazingly, there seems to be zero difference.
If your pain takes the shape of anxiety or depression, or just lack of traction and direction, an imaginal practice like a Lotimus mind journey invites you to take a pause and travel into an elegantly crafted mindscape. As you inhabit this newly imagined version of yourself, you’ll discover that your brain reads the experience as real!
What If You Could Transmute Pain?
The strength, healing, power, and even wisdom unlocked during these journeys allow you to feel—in a highly embodied way—what it might be like to be free from the physical/emotional pain that otherwise harries you constantly.
Want to feel like an avatar in a foreign world, even as you practice the ancient art of sitting?
Listen to "Dream Catcher," an exercise, meant to help you transmute pain and step back into your power.