How does pain tolerance work?

[actuallyenlightened]

While doing shadow work, I've noticed that after working through x amount of pain, my mind starts shutting down and I need a break or I'll go insane. Have any of you successfully increased your pain tolerance  (in a healthy way, without creating extra trauma for yourself) like this guy getting stung by everything and still coming back with a smile?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXjHb5QmDV0&ab_channel=BraveWilderness

[Raze]

Try “break through pain” or “break through difficult emotions” by Shinzen Young 

[actuallyenlightened]

Thanks!

[Aaron p]

Experiencing pain creates calluses  to other sources of pain in the future 

[Yarco]

There's a genetic component to it. Some people can naturally take more. But you can also increase your tolerance by gradually exposing yourself to more and more pain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_shirt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Palm

If you start doing intense weight lifting or running, at some point you'll start to embrace and even enjoy the pain. It carries over and makes you more resilient in other areas of your life. Both to physical pain, as well as increasing your patience and other mental benefits.

From a mental standpoint, I'd consider anything that you feel resistance toward as painful. Even something like writing an essay for school... if you train yourself to get into the habit of getting it done right away, you're able to endure longer periods of focused work, and prevent the lingering drawn-out pain that comes from procrastination.

Edited June 30, 2022 by Yarco

[flowboy]

On 26/06/2022 at 9:55 AM, actuallyenlightened said:

While doing shadow work, I've noticed that after working through x amount of pain, my mind starts shutting down and I need a break or I'll go insane. Have any of you successfully increased your pain tolerance  (in a healthy way, without creating extra trauma for yourself) like this guy getting stung by everything and still coming back with a smile?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXjHb5QmDV0&ab_channel=BraveWilderness

You definitely don’t want to do that, that directly negates the purpose of shadow work.

People with a high pain tolerance have a strong repression system: their endorphins are so high that their brain can pretend there’s no pain.

Repression is also what keeps unconscious parts unconscious.

Shadow integration is willingly feeling unfelt pain so that the repression system doesn’t have to work so hard, and you regain your full feeling experience, in the process becoming physically and mentally healthier.

The pain you feel during shadow work is supposed to feel painful but strangely good. It’s intense but also desirable, because the ability to feel other things like meaning comes with it. The human experience becomes richer.

Maybe I misunderstood you and you’re not trying to numb/white knuckle through the pain, but looking for ways to be able to feel it longer.

In that case my apologies and here’s my advice:

- Drink a lot of water during your sessions

- Have a clean diet

- Use emotional music to energise you and spur you on

The last tip may be the most powerful. Try it:)

 

Happy shadow working!

[flowboy]

On 26/06/2022 at 9:55 AM, actuallyenlightened said:

my mind starts shutting down and I need a break or I'll go insane

 Could you share more about that?

Perhaps it’s the beginning of a breakthrough to a deeper layer. I’ve seen it with clients that they feel like they’re going insane, seem very erratic and panicked, but then we put words to the feeling and look for the original context, which creates a breakthrough, which comes with relaxation, crying and insights.

So that would be my tip, next time you feel that.

- Upon getting that sense of going insane,

- Force yourself to put words to the feeling. Example: “They’re going to hurt me. I’m not safe”

- Then ask: “Who?” and just kind of prompt your subconscious mind with questions for more details about the situation this new feeling is about. Even though consciously you have no idea, and the story you started doing the work on is different.

Example: “My father! He’s going to hurt me. “

”What do I see”

”I see my father standing over me holding a belt! He’s going to hurt me! I’m 4 years old and my mother went away”

... et cetera

This should actually calm you down and give you lots of insights, if you make it past that point.

Ignore my last post, this is a better answer.

Happy to see someone actually doing deep work, awesome.

Edited June 30, 2022 by flowboy

[actuallyenlightened]

 

On 6/29/2022 at 8:23 PM, Yarco said:

But you can also increase your tolerance by gradually exposing yourself to more and more pain.

Yeah makes sense, just doing it enough times at manageable levels would increase the allowable amount. 

14 hours ago, flowboy said:

Shadow integration is willingly feeling unfelt pain so that the repression system doesn’t have to work so hard, and you regain your full feeling experience, in the process becoming physically and mentally healthier.

The pain you feel during shadow work is supposed to feel painful but strangely good. It’s intense but also desirable, because the ability to feel other things like meaning comes with it. The human experience becomes richer.

Yes definitely the case. It feels like a war of attrition after a certain point, very tough but rapid purification

13 hours ago, flowboy said:

looking for ways to be able to feel it longer.

^ this. Usually on LSD after a couple hours of nonstop work (root chakra blocks, what I'm focusing on now makes me feel like absolute shit with little relief on the short-medium timescale). Sober / modafinil meditation involves grinding out a good 45 min before getting exhausted and being ineffective. 

14 hours ago, flowboy said:

- Drink a lot of water during your sessions

- Have a clean diet

- Use emotional music to energise you and spur you on

The last tip may be the most powerful. Try it:)

Will def need to clean up my diet, above average but too much takeout lol. Music seems like a hit or miss for me, I generally get the best results listening to solfeggios. Music used to work better but is more distracting now. Maybe when I'm feeling really bad, turning on some good music may be helpful

14 hours ago, flowboy said:

 Could you share more about that?

The breakdown only happens on LSD (only use that rn), and generally occurs after the peak. At this point, I've been integrating for the past several hours and my mind gets ground to dust. At this point, the blocks feel much more real and there's a sense of helplessness. This really spirals out of control on mushrooms, which is why I consider them less effective for grindy type of work. The only solution found thus far is taking a break and coming back after 30+ min, during which my mind seems to work through these blocks at a much lower intensity and prepares my energetic system to purge them more effectively after resuming. 

14 hours ago, flowboy said:

- Force yourself to put words to the feeling. Example: “They’re going to hurt me. I’m not safe”

That's a very effective way of doing things. I started out doing something similar to that and after doing enough psychs developed an ability to perceive blocks very intensely and work on them directly via nothingness meditation. This involves feeling physical pain, seeing dark imagery (representations of blocks?), and finally getting a spinal adjustment (like going to the chiropractor) once the block is resolved. 

I think what I was asking about is analogous to 'how do I look at a computer screen for longer without getting a headache.'

Starting to think that the only way of developing high levels of pain tolerance would be to have little/no shadow left, which leaves me out of luck :-( But how does BraveWilderness do this, unless he's secretly a guru who doesn't mind a bit of pain, he probably never did proper shadow work in his life!

Thanks for the tips @flowboy !

[flowboy]

11 minutes ago, actuallyenlightened said:

But how does BraveWilderness do this

He's doing the exact opposite of what you are trying to do. If you look at the video around 14:14, you can see:

• Constricted breathing
• Constricted voice
• Body tension, all muscles tensing up trying to bear it

This is pain repression at its finest.

People with repressed emotional pain walk around every day with constricted breathing, constricted voice and body tension, and they're not even aware of it.

Shadow integration requires letting go of the body tension and deepening the breath, in order that the pain can be fully felt.

[flowboy]

16 minutes ago, actuallyenlightened said:

The breakdown only happens on LSD (only use that rn), and generally occurs after the peak. At this point, I've been integrating for the past several hours and my mind gets ground to dust.

I was not aware you are using psychedelics. I'd encourage you to try without, with maybe just a bit of breathwork instead to open you up.

It's not that psychedelics aren't good for this, they can be, but they can also create a big mess that's too much to deal with or contextualize at once.

It's kind of like fishing with dynamite versus with a well-targeted handheld rod with the right bait. And if you suppose that you don't have a net to catch all fish with, you must grab them by hand one by one, and leaving a dead fish would be disastrous.

They blow open the gates that block the amygdala from showing you the real pain that is attached to past experiences.

They might blow up all the gates at once, where you could also just open one through targeted inquiry.

24 minutes ago, actuallyenlightened said:

At this point, the blocks feel much more real and there's a sense of helplessness.

Focus there. That's the core of it.

• When did you feel this helplessness
• What was the situation
• Who was involved
• What need did you have to give up on ever getting met

I would recommend just grinding at those questions sober, without psychedelics to kick up so much dust.

26 minutes ago, actuallyenlightened said:

seeing dark imagery (representations of blocks?)

This is still symbolic. Integration doesn't fully happen until the symbolizing stops and you see it for what it really is.

[actuallyenlightened]

8 minutes ago, flowboy said:

He's doing the exact opposite of what you are trying to do. If you look at the video around 14:14, you can see:

• Constricted breathing
• Constricted voice
• Body tension, all muscles tensing up trying to bear it

This is pain repression at its finest.

People with repressed emotional pain walk around every day with constricted breathing, constricted voice and body tension, and they're not even aware of it.

Shadow integration requires letting go of the body tension and deepening the breath, in order that the pain can be fully felt.

Walking around everyday is definitely something to get out of your system, but getting stung by a bullet ant is a whole other level 

The mere fact that he's narrating the pain after a few seconds, puts the ant back in it's hill, and has a YouTube channel getting stung by all sorts of angry insects means that he has extreme levels of pain tolerance. If this were a normal person including myself, after 2 episodes, the trauma would make us visibly shake with our voices quivering hours before the 3rd sting. 

[flowboy]

Just now, actuallyenlightened said:

Walking around everyday is definitely something to get out of your system, but getting stung by a bullet ant is a whole other level 

The mere fact that he's narrating the pain after a few seconds, puts the ant back in it's hill, and has a YouTube channel getting stung by all sorts of angry insects means that he has extreme levels of pain tolerance. If this were a normal person including myself, after 2 episodes, the trauma would make us visibly shake with our voices quivering hours before the 3rd sting. 

Visibly shaking with voice quivering is what you should strive for when integrating the shadow, much more conducive to the process

[flowboy]

I was once in a workshop doing an exercise to open up the body and let the energy flow freely. There was one guy with a high pain tolerance. We literally had to sit on him with 5 guys, pushing our knees and elbows into his body at painful pressure points, until he "gave up" his pain tolerance and started moaning.

That "giving up" of fighting the pain is essential.

When you're tense and fighting the pain, you're blocking yourself.

When you're visibly shaking and moaning, having "given up" to fight it, surrendering to the hopelessness and helplessness... THAT's the state you want.

You can see why.

Hopelessness and helplessness are at the core of our deepest shadow.

Feeling that again, can directly transport you into the real feeling you need to heal.

[flowboy]

You are so close. You've gotten to the "helplessness". All you need now is context.

I suspect that in your perception the helplessness is a sign you should end the session.

I would say that's where it's actually beginning.

At that point you need to surrender to it. This is where when I'm guiding someone, I sharply ask situational questions to force the original context to come up, which creates the breakthrough. I suppose you can do this for yourself as well.

[actuallyenlightened]

57 minutes ago, flowboy said:

I suspect that in your perception the helplessness is a sign you should end the session.

I believe it is. I tried pushing through it only to burn myself out further and waste a normally productive portion of my trip. 

1 hour ago, flowboy said:

I was once in a workshop doing an exercise to open up the body and let the energy flow freely. There was one guy with a high pain tolerance. We literally had to sit on him with 5 guys, pushing our knees and elbows into his body at painful pressure points, until he "gave up" his pain tolerance and started moaning.

That "giving up" of fighting the pain is essential.

I definitely have 'given up', or 'given in,' when things became super painful. When I said that I felt helpless, it wasn't because things got harder than they previously were but because I depleted my stamina; and had enough willpower to sit there but only enough to haphazardly probe into more blocks, getting my ass handed to me in the process. Going further would have only resulted in falling into subconscious thought patterns and creating more blocks for myself.

So what I'm saying is that I (and I believe people in general) can only surrender to so many things before becoming ineffective and going insane; so a strategic withdrawal would be good in a situation like this so long as you intend on working on it later (no more than 1 day later). I believe that this is the reason why most people advise against using psychedelics too frequently.

 

Edited July 1, 2022 by actuallyenlightened

[flowboy]

Well as I said I'd approach it a bit differently, but whatever works for you! I support you.

Keep up the good work ?

Edited July 1, 2022 by flowboy

[actuallyenlightened]

11 hours ago, flowboy said:

Well as I said I'd approach it a bit differently, but whatever works for you! I support you.

Keep up the good work ?

No problem, at the end of the day we're talking about the same thing with minor differences in our approach. I'm likely an outlier as I haven't seen anyone do anything similar yet. 

Keep up the good work as well, you're helping a lot of people with your coaching!