Today I’ve been struggling with mental focus. The visualisation technique has been hard to access. I can really feel the cognitive effects of yesterday’s flare up (the mental clarity takes a couple days to come back). That’s interfering with motivation. All I want is pain relief, whereas the visualisation is not necessarily about that. The motivation is to rewire the brain. But because of pain and lack of clarity, I’m in a kind of flailing mood, where such abstract motivations don’t satisfy what feels like an impulse from my reptilian brain to “Do Something!”
Lack of clarity and that reptilian fear factor are also causing focus to fail before I’ve had time to run through the visualisation. My mind is sucked away into pain and paranoia.
I’ve found myself falling back on the “grit your teeth and bear it” approach that I used to have prior to finding this technique.
I’m annoyed and angry with myself for falling into this pattern.
On a brighter note, Section Two of Moskowitz suggests ways to disrupt the pain pathways that might be very helpful. Including a possible way to incorporate mindfulness / vipassana techniques. Although he doesn’t call them that, there is plenty of similarity between what he’s suggesting and what I have practiced in the past. I’ve missed my daily meditation, which I stopped during week one of the trial.
More on that to follow tomorrow.