Dealing with Pain - A Martial Artist's Frequent Companion - Part V

          Many years ago, my son, Dan, had a classmate over to play. They were probably in the 4^th grade at the time so they weren’t small children. When his mother dropped Louie off, I quickly gathered that she was one of those moms obsessed with her son’s wellbeing. This was the first time she had allowed him to visit a friend and play alone. Before she left, she impressed on me the need to keep a close eye on Louie to make sure nothing hurtful happened to him.

As soon as she was gone, I asked Dan to be extra careful as I didn’t want him to get hurt and have to face his mom when she returned.

The two boys went onto the front lawn to play catch. What could go wrong? It wasn’t long before I heard a dull thud outside, followed by a blood-curdling scream. I thought Louie must have been hit by a car and ran outside.

Louie lay on the sidewalk, writhing in pain, clutching his arm, and screaming. I tried to find out what was wrong with him but he wouldn’t respond. He just kept wailing as if he were dying.

I looked questioningly at my son, who shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know what was wrong with him either. I saw a large, broken, dirt clod in the street and asked Dan if they were throwing rocks at each other. He said they just threw the one. “Did you hit him with that dirt clod?” I demanded. He said they just threw it into the street to break it. Louie stopped screaming long enough to say that Dan had hit him.

I asked Louie where he had been hit. He held up his hand. “Look, blood,” he said, shaking as if in severe pain. I didn’t see any blood. He showed me the tip of his little finger. There was a tiny red speck on it where a small, dirt pebble had flown off the clod and hit him.

We had a couple of issues going on with Louie. First, he had zero pain tolerance. And second, his entire being was focused only on the pain. Concentrating on an injury can often produce a sensation of pain far out of proportion to the actual damage. Pain from even an almost microscopic injury can, under close and constant attention, become unbearable.

Stop reading and mentally scan your body. How many sources of pain can you locate, no matter how slight? You can likely locate a bunch. Now, focus only on one of them and see if it doesn’t get worse.

"Some people think only of pain," said Soke Takayuki Kubota, Instructor General of the International Karate Association and a person noted for his pain tolerance. "Everybody has pain. But if you think only of pain, you can't do anything."

I’ll have more to say on this topic soon, including more words of advice from my conversations with Benny Urquidez and Bob Halliburton. Thanks again for your support.