Pain pulls attention into a grip.

Pain is not a reading of how much damage there is. It is the brain's best guess about how much protection the body needs right now. And attention is part of that guess.

Notice what your attention does the moment something hurts. It collapses onto the spot. Everything else drops away. That is useful for about a second. It tells you where to look, and what to stop doing.

A signal that was meant to last a second can keep firing for weeks, or months, or years. And attention keeps collapsing onto it, every single time.

Attention has a shape, and most of us pay attention the way we would grip an object. Narrow, tight, locked on. Pain pulls attention into its narrowest shape, and a narrow grip is effortful.

The body braces. The muscles around the hurt tighten to protect it. Breathing goes shallow. The whole system leans toward alarm. On the EEG this is the fast, busy beta rhythm of strain, and the relaxed alpha rhythm drops away.

Bracing against pain tends to feed it. The tightened muscles ache. The alarm turns the volume up. The volume tightens the grip.

So what do we do? We get away from it. We distract ourselves. We push it out of mind. We take the signal and shove it to the edge. It works for a while.

But look at the shape of that attention. It is still narrow. It is locked onto not-the-pain, which keeps the pain at the centre of everything. Fehmi's observation was that the effort of avoiding pain is itself a form of narrow attention, and narrow attention is what keeps the pain loud.

You cannot push something away without holding on to it.

Les Fehmi spent decades working with people in pain, and his approach was the opposite of getting away from it. He asked people to go toward the pain, but with attention in a different shape. Not the grip. Space. He described four steps, and wrote a whole book about them, called Dissolving Pain.

First, find it. Exactly, not vaguely: where it begins and ends, what shape it is, how big, whether it is still or moves. Second, surround it with space, in front and behind, on either side, above and below, until it is a shape floating in a much bigger room. Third, imagine space inside it, as if it were porous, mist rather than stone. Fourth, let the distance between you and it close, and attend from inside it rather than at it. Then widen, until the pain, the body and the room are one continuous space, attended evenly.

The point is not to make the pain go away. The point is to change the shape of the attention that was feeding it. Whatever the pain does after that, it does on its own.

Let's try it, briefly, right now. If nothing hurts today, choose a tension, or a tired place, instead. A minute or two, with the steps said one at a time.

Nothing here asks you to push into pain, or to stop any care you are getting. If it gets louder, widen, and let it sit in the room with everything else.