Visualisation now is more refined again; colours fade gradually through all the colours of the rainbow including indigo, violet to black. I’ve two versions. One of these versions — we’ll call it the “full-cream” version — I use just for the more focussed sessions (when I stop what I’m doing and close my eyes). It has a lot more detail, eight different regions of colour fading through all colours of the rainbow and each colour in between to black. Whereas when I’m more active and moving around, I go for a more “lite” version. I mentally zoom in on just one of these regions and fade it through as many colours as I can before distraction sets in. Often that’s just red through orange to yellow. Or sometimes I start with violet and just let it fade from there to nothing.
I’m writing absent-mindedly at present because I’m visualising at the same time.
Another setback today, which I’m using as an opportunity to practice my visualising “in anger” as they say — in the extremity of a strong flare up of pain, after an awful gapping sensation in C3-C4 region on the left-hand side of my neck.
Was all chill, sitting before the fire, warm as, reached up with right hand to adjust my hairtie and turned my head as I did so to provide more leverage. As you do. Weird graunchy clunk that my son heard from across the room and zing, pain in the origin of my left-hand anterior scalene over Rib 1 and 2 and sudden body bracing from top of torso to bottom. Last night and all today — drop everything and visualise, constantly. Takes an hour to wash a small load of dishes because I keep pausing to hallucinate haha.
I’m not sure if it’s recommended to visualise so intensely as I’m doing, it takes 2-3 minutes each time I do it if I go the full version. Perhaps it’s better to have a lean, quick little visualisation more often, than less frequent visualising for a longer duration? A bit of both perhaps — I guess that’s what I’m doing with my “lite” version and my “full-cream”.
But when I do the lite version, I don’t get the same level of pain relief — often, pain is still intruding on consciousness. So by Moskowitz’s “Relentlessness” rule, I should visualise again… That kind of repeated visualising eventually uses as much time as the “full-cream” practice. But the difference is, I can get things done at the same time, albeit slowly.
I stopped for a couple of minutes for every line of the last paragraph. Just did it again.
I’ve noticed lately that there’s a rhythm that the colours emerge to — sometimes the colours cycle rapidly, other times it’s slow. Until now I’ve always tried to slow that down so I can get more high-resolution in the fades, but just now I went with the natural pacing and it felt more calm, relaxing, helped with the pain and went more quickly too. So I’ll go with the rhythm it seems to want from now on.
I just did some trigger pointing of my upper trapezius – often the only thing that gives me relief during a flare up of this magnitude. Usually when I have acute LHS neck pain they’ll be eye-watering to the touch. Today, hardly noticeable when I pincer-grip them.
Trigger points work by being adjacent to pain signalling neurons within the “body maps” of our somatosensory cortex. And they’re often firing due to neuronal spillover from the “neuroplasticity gone wild” of chronic pain. I they’re not online today, especially given how much pain I’m feeling just in general, could that indicate I am slowly shrinking the spillover?