Sometimes opportunities for somatic tracking come along in the course of everyday life. Somatic tracking is a mindful way of attending to sensations in the body with a sense of gentle interest which encourages our minds to let go of old associations between sensations and pain and embrace new associations between sensations and calm reflection. It is part of the process of Pain Reprocessing Therapy.

Somatic Tracking in a Social Situation

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a Quaker Meeting, settling into the physical, social and spiritual space; but I was finding this hard to do, as my body had large areas of the sensations of fibro-myalgia – in this case a prickly heat sensation quite like being stung by a nettle. I realised that I wasn’t going to get very far with my usual settling down techniques so I decided to do some somatic tracking.

Watching the Sensations with Gentle Interest

When we have unpleasant sensations in the body it is usual to worry about them. Unfortunately, worrying about the sensations causes us to hold onto them and makes them seem more dangerous. Or, we can have the tendency to ignore them, hoping they will go away; but this also has the effect of making them seem more dangerous. So, both of these approaches make our lives less calm and more unpleasant. Fortunately, there is another approach – we can let go of the sensations and watch them with a sense of gentle interest. This is possible because the sensations are generated by the subconscious mind but we let go of them and watch them with the conscious mind.

What Happens Next?

As I watched the prickly heat sensations around my body with gentle interest in the Quaker Meeting, after a while I felt a cold sensation in my toes. I realised I was sitting in a draught from the entrance doors, just behind me. As I realised this, the cold sensation spread to my feet, then spread through all the other parts of my body where before I had felt prickly heat. To my surprise, I found that my body had been sending sensations of cold to my brain, but my brain had been interpreting them as prickly heat!

And Then?

Now, I was able to settle down into the Meeting for Worship; but with my brain back in its usual default setting I was soon experiencing prickly heat again in my feet; but as soon as I realised I was experiencing this, I remembered the draught, and, pretty well instantly, the prickly heat was replaced by a feeling of cold. This process happened a few times – fibro-myalgia prickly heat; the remembrance of the draught from the entrance doors; the prickly heat turning to a sensation of cold.

It is truly extraordinary how our bodies can experience one sensation as another one entirely. What is the cause? – When my mind is full of fear, I tend to experience neutral sensations from my body as if they were dangerous (in this case, generating prickly heat); when my mind is full of the process of gentle interest, I tend to experience neutral sensations from my body as neutral.

In Pain Reprocessing Therapy, this is called a corrective experience.

The more times I experience this corrective experience, the more my brain starts to gravitate automatically away from fear and towards a sense of gentle interest; and I don’t need to worry that I will somehow miss an emergency if I am not always on high alert, because my fight/flight/freeze/submit emergency system is working just fine and will kick in in an instant when it needs to. In the meantime, it is just fine and good to be experiencing life through a lens of gentle interest.