Last April I was at a 1-week retreat with hot tub directly next to a cold pool. As an experiment I decided to jump into the cold pool each day. The experience of shock as I plunged into the frigid response registered as a pain response. Within the first day or two of this experiment I became aware that a subtle coupling was occurring: the sensation of contrast from hot to cold was coupled with a panic response which was associating the contrast with pain. Once this became apparent, I focused and gently decoupling the sensation from the conditioned interpretation: pain is pleasure, pain is pleasure, pain is pleasure… I would repeat before and through the experience. Over the course of the week, the space between these distinct processes grew, until the last day I was swimming laps in the cold pool, completely submerged from one end to the other. What had initially been interpreted as pain had become quite pleasurable and enlivening.
In the last fear days it occurred to me: could this process be applied to other kinds of perceived pain, anxiety, panic? I have pretty intense fear of stage fright, I find public performance to be excruciating. Could this same method of transforming pain to pleasure be applied to these other areas of visceral fear?
I’ve been playing with pain over the course of the year, inviting trusted friends to slap, hit, whip me. It’s been an interesting to feel how these sensations are inherently quite interesting, even pleasurable in a way that’s difficult to describe.
What is my interest in drinking alcohol? I associate it with relaxation of some sort, but what is the root of the relaxation? My current hypothesis is that it’s disabling my mind in a certain way, allowing me to feel my body more, with a certain kind of heady pressure, imposition. Could it be disabling panic micro-responses that are continually coming up?
If embodiment is coupled with a panic response, its inherent niceness is covered over. Terror, panic, perceived pain is aliveness with a negative lens, the valence is an imposed interpretation arising out of fear. What happens if the positive lens is applied instead? In a majority of cases there’s no reason for panic, there’s no risk of physical harm. I suspect pain is pleasure, that in each of these cases, the embodied aliveness on its own would be pleasurable, the pain is within the conditioned response of fear imposed on it.
What if every instance of visceral panic could be reframed as a source of visceral aliveness? That would be a hell of cheat code. Certainly worth experimenting with.