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Visualization statements represent the specific language that your subconscious wants you to read back to it to help ease your pain. They're simple and are targeted directly at the main factors that could bring you relief.

You can obtain these statements by learning how to communicate directly with your own subconscious mind. The process is straightforward and can be done at home by working with a facilitator over the telephone. You you need no special skills and no previous experience in working with the subconscious.

Visualization statements address the pain relief factors that your subconscious believes apply in your case. These statements are printed on several pages that we call V-Sheets?, or visualization sheets.

How do they work? Three factors seem to be important.

The Importance of Repetition

Unlike the conscious mind, which becomes dull and bored with repetition, the subconscious seems to thrive on hearing the same thing over and over again. In general the more frequently it hears something, the more likely it is to believe it.

For this reason you'll read the V-Sheets to yourself the number of times per day that your subconscious has suggested--generally five to eight times. Over the four weeks of the program this provides ample repetition.

Note that the V-Sheets require no focus and thus can be read while you're in severe pain. That is, all you need to do is to pass your eyes over the written statements one line at a time, from left to right. This gives your subconscious a helpful series of repeated visual impressions.

The Importance of Mapping

Unlike other mind-body methods in use today, the visualization method used to generate V-Sheets specifically asks the subconscious to identify what it believes will ease your pain. Other methods program the subconscious based on the experience of a therapist, or some factor other than the content of the subconscious mind itself.

The one-to-one mapping of the visualization statements to the issues your subconscious wants addressed can be very powerful. For example, if it believes that a reduction in substance P or glutamate will ease the pain, and gives you the language that it thinks will accomplish that, and hears that language from you seven times a day, you may get results.

The Importance of Mode

Most of the time, but not always, the subconscious considers that some visualization statements are more important than others for relieving your pain. For example, in a list of statements about neurotransmitters it may single out one or two as being especially significant.

It's possible to identify these key statements so that you can say them from memory. This allows you to repeat them at any time of the day or night, which may give you a more direct method of imprinting the subconscious than reading--the message doesn't have to be filtered through the eyes.

The Subconscious as Partner

The use of the subconscious for pain relief may be beneficial regardless of whether you have back pain or pain in the neck or other extremities, arthritis pain, fibromyalgia pain, and neuropathic pain (nerve pain).

If you can learn to engage your subconscious as your partner in pain relief, you most likely will be able to identify the areas in which visualization statements can be helpful. You can then use those statements to give your subconscious the daily reinforcement it needs to possibly take the edge off your pain.

Ben Plumb is CEO and President of The Visualization Group, Inc. The company's service is delivered by people like himself who personally suffered from years of chronic pain, and used the visualization method described in this article to obtain relief when nothing else worked.