Question of the Month: “How to Dissolve Pain and Anxiety.”
Welcome Members to our May Question of the Month. Kevin Schoeninger here.
This month, we’ve been discussing “The Open-Focus Brain” by Dr. Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins. In Week One, we learned that we have different styles of attention and that the way we use these attention styles has a profound impact on our life experience. We learned that we have a cultural bias towards narrow-objective attention. Becoming locked in this mode of attention is a leading cause of stress, anxiety, panic and other less than desirable experiences.
In Week Two, we learned about Open Focus training. By learning to incorporate more diffused and immersed attention styles in our awareness, we open the door to more present, joyful, expansive, integrated, and balanced experiences. We learned a basic Open Focus exercise to introduce us to this process.
This week, we’ll apply Open Focus training to dealing with stress, anxiety, panic, and pain. What a pleasant group that is. Nevertheless, these experiences are common in our fast-paced, high-demand culture, so it’s important that we learn how to relate to them effectively. One of our members knows a young adult who is struggling with panic attacks and asked Matt and I for advice. We both suggested the Open Focus exercises.
So how can we apply Open Focus training to experiences of stress, anxiety, panic, and pain?
We begin with a quote from Dr. Fehmi that relates to that young adults experience of panic: “Our children are awash in anxiety-producing situations they don’t understand and think they are powerless to change.” P.61
In this quote, we see the essence of stress: the feeling of powerlessness. We experience stress when we perceive that life is coming at us with more than we feel we can handle. We feel overwhelmed or even attacked from the outside. As we talked about last week, our response to this is to activate the sympathetic nervous system, our fight or flight response. This ramps us up for action.
If we continue to stay in this state of hyperactive readiness, our system gets progressively more overloaded. Depending on how we interpret this state, we may experience any number of emotions and physiological reactions, from muscle tension, to anxiety or panic, to physical pain and disease.
Our bodies attempt to process the stress, but if it becomes too much or is too prolonged, it will begin to affect our physical and emotional functioning and eventually our physiological structure as well. Our bodies become a storehouse for unresolved stress.
Open Focus training comes to our aide with a specific four-step process for dissolving the effects of stress and the resultant anxiety, panic, and pain. Whether the experience is emotional suffering or physical pain, the origin is stress and the process of resolution is the same. The first step is to find the place in your body where the emotional experience is stored.
Dr. Fehmi says that, “Common places for emotions are in the stomach, the neck, or the chest, or a whole-body generalized feeling of anxiety; but emotional pain can reside anywhere in the body. . .Finding the site or source of these feelings is an important step to their rapid dissolution.” P.80
“I ask the client to use the Open-Focus exercise to locate this feeling in the body, to feel its shape, to rate its intensity on a one-to-ten scale, and then proceed to dissolve it with Open-Focus attention techniques.” P.84
“Moving toward pain in Open Focus allows it to diffuse into a broader awareness and thus to dissipate and dissolve.” P.74
“All pain, even the most physical (for example, from tissue damage), can be eliminated—or, at the very least, greatly mitigated—by managing the way we attend to it.” P.74
“As a person includes diffuse attention, along with narrow focus on pain, his or her physiological arousal levels are lowered and a broadened awareness develops around the pain. Opening to and accepting pain, and moving even closer to it, in this broadened scope of attention, diminishes its intensity. When our pain becomes a small portion of our total broadened awareness it becomes more acceptable, less threatening, and can readily be merged with and dissolved altogether.” P.75
The Process of Dissolving Stress, Anxiety, Panic, and Pain:
O.K. so you have the basic theory behind this process. Now let’s go through the four steps so that you have a technique to apply to your specific experiences.
Here’s how Dr. Fehmi describes the process in the book:
“The client is first guided to include in his peripheral awareness a diffuse attention to all available senses in space. This is developed while attention is centered in feeling his pain and feeling the space that pervades all sensations. Keeping this diffuse attention in awareness, the second step is to narrow and objectify the pain by physically feeling its location in the body, feeling its shape, and feeling its intensity (on a zero-to-ten scale). The third step establishes a clearer, more direct objective attention to the pain with a simultaneous diffuse experience of space and sensations as a background. The fourth attention change involves creating the permissive conditions for merging one’s conscious awareness into the center or heart of the experience of pain, thus allowing it to spread, diffuse, dissipate, and dissolve over a period of one to thirty seconds.” P.78
Step One, then, is to diffuse your attention by sensing space through all your senses while at the same time being aware of the pain or anxiety.
In Step Two, keeping your diffuse attention in your awareness, you feel the location of the pain or emotion in your body along with its shape and intensity (on a scale of 1-10).
In Step Three you keep your objective awareness of the pain or anxiety and its location in your body while being more strongly aware of the space surrounding it.
And in Step Four you merge your attention or dive into the center of the pain and allow it to dissipate outward into the space surrounding it.
As Dr. Fehmi says, “The goal of this exercise is to open our awareness and dive into and through the center of the pain and then let the awareness of pain float in an open and inclusive awareness where it can dissolve.” P.95
Summarizing the whole process in one sentence, he says, “The anxiety (or pain) becomes small stuff in a large field of awareness.” P.148
Once you become adept at dissolving pain or anxiety using Open Focus you will begin to experience life differently.
“Daily life is more effortless, from waking up and getting dressed to eating, driving, working, studying, enjoying our family relationships, undertaking creative endeavors, and competing in sports. It changes the way we anticipate the future and remember the past. We become more relaxed and less anxious; we sleep better and are more loving. We allow emotions to be experienced and diffused effortlessly, instead of letting our emotions generate resistance and overreaction. Internal negative criticism gives way to a light, clear mind, an inner calm. Problems seem to present their own solutions, relationships of all kinds become more engaging, and the world becomes a friendlier place.” P.129
When we lose Open Focus and stress, tension, pain, or anxiety get hold of us, we can use these as reminders to come back to Open Focus. We can learn to live in Open Focus as a way of life. Dr. Fehmi suggests a simple technique to facilitate this experience.
“Using the following technique daily, we can learn to maintain Open Focus anywhere—whether riding on the subway or sitting at the computer—simply by admitting into consciousness the space, silence, and timelessness that pervades our experience.
Whenever you think of it, carry out your everyday tasks while at the same time being aware of infinite space, silence, and timelessness. Be aware of the three-dimensional space between, around, and through objects. Attend to all your senses: seeing, hearing, feeling, taste, smell, mental activity, and time. Include both objects and space. Imagine an awareness of space that permeates everything. Imagine feeling the background space against which everything is highlighted.”
As we’ve learned throughout our journey with SGM, any of these techniques are effective only when they become a part of our daily practice. Personally, I have integrated the Open Focus cues into my Core Energy Meditation practice and into my daily practice of the 3Rs.
Dr. Fehmi encourages us to make Open Focus an integral part of how we experience life. As he says, “Positive and permanent change comes through practice. And just as we eventually learned to walk, ride a bike, throw a ball, or play piano without thinking about it, Open-Focus skills too can become automatic in our lives.” P.137
The next time that you experience stress, anxiety, panic, or pain of any kind, try following the four-steps suggested above. I would love to hear your experiences, questions, and comments on this process in the Comments section below.
Also, mark your calendars for our Group Coaching Call next Saturday, May 24th. On this call we’ll talk more about Open Focus training and I will lead you through a complete Open Focus exercise as taught by Dr. Fehmi.
Until next time,
Happy practicing,
Kevin