Can you control pain? Is it all in the mind?¹ This is the experiment I set out to run just over 4 months ago:
And today, I finally I did it.
A blue bottle wrapped itself around my right arm and upper abdomen, stinging me. I couldn’t get it off for about 5 seconds so the stinging continued but immediately after I got it off, it was a chance to test my hypothesis:
Is pain just a creation of the mind?
Straight after I got the blue bottle off, I looked at the stings and thought ‘That right there (my arm and lower torso just got stung. That did.’ (as opposed to thinking ‘I’ got stung’
I was not going to die from this, and pain is just a way of the body trying to tell your mind that this, whatever this thing that just happened is, it continues, you’re going to die. You have full control over your mind, and your mind can control how you react to what happens to your body.
But I was not going to die. And all that happened was that the arm that connects to other parts that is the vessel that holds my mind (my body) got stung. I didn’t. The vessel did. It helped. And it didn’t really hurt. And the pain’s gone now.
Is all pain an illusion?
Hmmm… This was just a blue bottle sting, but does this extend to much more severe pain?
¹ This is not to say injury and poisoning is the same thing as pain. Those are compromises of your physical body, that you have no control over.