S E N S I N G by Nöle Giulini

A male client was referred to me by a local psychiatrist, and for the last two years we have been using iRest® every week as an adjunct to his therapy.

This client reports that he experiences every sensation as pain. Every invitation to sense and feel his body causes major anxieties because he is afraid of pain. Interpreting sensation as pain keeps him safe, he states.

Sensation that was bundled and bound into a particular interpretation, in this case "pain", can be set free by learning to distinguish and describe sensations in the body that lay underneath.

It may then be possible to untangle the threads of sensation that are caught and cauterized inside the "sleeve" called pain that fits tightly around a particular experience.

“Are you up for an experiment?” I asked him.

I invited him to hold and open little tin cans with differently textured objects in them in an attempt to widen his repertoire for sensing.

There was a significant shift of attention away from intellectually naming the object to simply experiencing it through the body.

When we liberate sensations back into awareness by describing and distinguishing them - and their opposites – we may experience ourselves in - and as - the safety – zone of witnessing presence.

Pain then could become the gateway into a colorful and ever-deepening inquiry into our True Nature.