the submodalities of meditation

I recently read an article by Steve Andreas on the use of submodalities in the treatment of migraines. Briefly he talks about how a coach helped his sister suffering from migraines by getting her to move the sensation of the migraine to different parts of their head, and eventually outside of their head altogether. The paradoxical sounding result was the sufferer said ‘I still had a headache, but could no longer feel it.’

This story is a little simplified, I don’t know what else went into the coaching process, apart from curiousity, but the results have apparently stood for over twenty years.

As I sat down to meditate before going to wake up my daughter this morning that story came into my mind.

In meditation many people complain that they cannot quieten their minds. As I have mentioned elsewhere meditation is more about dis-identifying with thoughts than getting rid of them. As such having thoughts continually popping up just gives something to practise with.

Equally if there are no thoughts – in the form of internal dialogue, there is less to identify with. So I decided to apply some submodality play as I sat. I moved the location of the voices to behind my head, and turned the volume down. The result some enjoyable silence.

Every now and then a thought appeared, often arising from a different location. But somehow these thoughts took less of my attention, they seemed transparent, like the form of ripples on the surface of a swimming pool on a sunny day.

It was an interesting experiment, and I think I’ll repeat it. As a child I used to love diving up coins from the bottoms of pools. So I’m also curious what is at the bottom of the pool.

If you try this out or have done similar experiments I’d love to hear about your results.