By RedSabbath

Quite often models ask me how do I deal with pain.

First of all, let me remind that good semenawa favors the experimentation of suffering, not pain.

I’m not a masochist. Never been.

Outside a session in which I feel submitted, I hardly can manage painful stimuli.

So what are the tools, the techniques, I personally use to deal with the painful sensations, with progressive suffering, and to turn them into something I can space for?

1. Breathing
I breathe slow and deep, when possible, slow and extended, when my breathing capacity is limited from the tie. Breathing has an immediate natural effect on the perception of pain, helps me relaxing, detaching, and getting rid of negative feelings.

2. Surrendering
I do not fight and resist to the discomfort: I follow it. The moment my brain and my body let go, the bliss begins.

3. Offering
I let my brain focus on the fact that the suffering I am living is an offer to my Top/Rigger at that moment. I love managing, as I live that act like an offer to him. I give him the time to admire me in suffering.

4. Sensory splitting
I found I apply this quite often. It’s a technique that involves dividing the sensation (pain, burning, pins and needles) into separate parts. For example, when a shoulder is in pain for a hard Takate Kote, and this kind of feeling is identifiable as “hot”, I just focus just on the sensation of the heat and not on the hurting.

5. Mental analgesia
This is really nice. It works like that: you have to imagine a strong pain killer drug, like morphine, entering into the painful area. What I personally do, is imagining my brain while producing endorphins. As I know that this is happening, and that those endorphins are having effect in a short time, I just wait for them to flow.

All of them are behaviors I experimented, and studying around, I even found a word for some of them. (You can read for further reference this list of techniques used to control chronic pain)