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As powerful as the subconscious can be in relieving pain, it has a number of limitations that you should be aware of before attempting to use it to ease your pain.

The use of the subconscious to ease pain can be not only helpful but in some cases may be the only thing that seems to produce lasting relief. But it is not a cure-all. It has some serious limitations that may prevent you from getting results. If you're familiar with its weak points, however, you have a chance to work around them and make the best use of its strengths.

Deductive Reasoning Only

The subconscious has no ability to reason inductively, meaning that it can't use reason to take specific observations (for example, "two plus two") and arrive at general conclusions about them (for example, "equals four"). This often leads it to arrive at general conclusions by blind association, causing it to believe many bizarre things.

It is able to go from the general to the specific, however, and that is enough for the purpose of creating and using visualization statements.

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.

Excessively Quiet Voice

Compared to the conscious mind, which constantly chatters away inside the head of every one of us, the subconscious is mute. To voice its opinions it needs a special tool, the Chevreul pendulum (you can make one at home in about two minutes), and even then it can only answer Yes, No, Maybe, and Don't Want to Answer.

If you can quiet your conscious mind just a little, however, you can probably induce your subconscious to talk. Limited as its four responses are, they may be enough for you to uncover information you never before knew about your pain.

No Contact With the Outside World

The subconscious knows almost nothing of the world outside your body. Therefore it should never be used to make decisions, and shouldn't be trusted for any kind of information except data relating to your health or the internal condition of your body.

Whatever it tells you is only what it believes, not necessarily fact. When asked about the outside world it will give you opinions, but they are completely unreliable. Because it controls the involuntary functions of the body, its opinions about your pain tend to be more trustworthy.

Highly Individualized Response

The subconscious has often been likened to a computer, but it's not really a machine. Instead it's a highly complex biological structure that modern science understands very little.

One thing that does seem to be accurate is that it's highly individualized. One person's subconscious can generate visualization statements that work to relieve pain while another person's subconscious can have trouble doing so. Most people do get at least some relief from their visualizations, but there's no guarantee that everyone will.

Uncertain Repair Of the Underlying Condition

If your subconscious does produce pain relief, there's no assurance that it has corrected the underlying health condition. For example, it may remove just enough pressure from a nerve to produce relief without correcting a joint deformity that is causing the pressure in the first place.

Some people do claim to feel that the underlying problem has been solved. Most others, however, find that while they get enough relief to be able to function (or in some cases get almost complete relief), they have to be careful not to overextend themselves and bring the pain back.

Deferred Responsibility for Maintaining Results

If you attain some pain relief, the subconscious takes no responsibility for keeping you in a pain-reduced state. It's up to you and your conscious mind to do that.

This point derives from the one above. If the underlying health condition is wholly or largely unchanged, the responsibility lies with you for avoiding situations that will make the chronic pain return. For example:

• If you have back pain or other extremity pain it's up to you to avoid moving furniture or otherwise over-exerting yourself, even if your pain is greatly reduced.

• If you have fibromyalgia pain it's up to you to manage your emotions and diet so that you don't trigger flare-ups of pain, even if you're feeling better than before.

• If you have arthritis pain it's up to you to avoid overusing any particular joints, even if the pain is less.

• If you have neuropathic pain (nerve pain) it's up to you to avoid highly stressful situations and anything else that might provoke your pain, even if you've gotten relief.

To maintain results, you need to own what you have obtained. You do this by having the intention and the commitment to respect your body and to act accordingly at all times.

Working With the Subconscious

The subconscious is quite powerful. When programmed through the very visualizations that it suggests, it may be able to turn episodes of uncontrolled pain into events over which you have a degree of control.

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.