I have recently begun suffering from RSI-like symptoms. Wearing a wrist brace seems to help, but I cannot afford to cease all typing right now. I'm going to give this a shot, since I've been trying to develop a meditation habit for a while now anyway. It certainly can't hurt, and I'm open to the explanation that pain is (at least partially) psychosomatic.
Sorry to read about the RSI. Since you're on a hacking forum, I'm going to suggest you learn some basic pain science. It may help you understand your situation. A few pointers:
Tissue "damage" usually resolves within 6 weeks.
Pain and "damage" are not equivalent. Hence pain may occur without damage, and damage without pain.
Pain and "suffering" are not equivalent. Hence pain may occur without suffering. A handy illustration: certain folks actively seek out certain painful stimuli.
There is no such thing as a "pain nerve" or even a "pain signal". Pain or suffering emerge from your (conscious) interpretation of stimuli.
Your pain is absolutely not psychosomatic. It's real. However, consider this: every single experience you ever have, including pain and suffering, only exists in your brain. Your RSI is as real as my keyboard right now.
The useful gist of this report, if any, is as follows:
> Even though I couldn’t accept the notion that my mind’s state might be causing my symptoms, I could accept the idea that by changing the state of my mind I might be able to reduce that pain... [this] shifted my mental model of my condition from my hands are internally damaged to my nervous system and/or circulatory system is functioning in such a way that pain arises in my hands... if my mind was going to improve the circulation/nervous activity in my hands, then it first had to be intimately familiar with what was actually going on there.
> When I had developed sufficient sensitivity, I started to feel like I had the capacity to actually willfully cause the positive energy of the compassion and love to flow directly into my hands. I repurposed all of the suffering, stress and angst that had built up over the course of the condition. I used that energy to generate an intense fervor of unconditional love and a will to get better and projected that down through my arms and into my hands.
> In addition to these intensive meditation sessions, I also started a throughout-the-day practice of being sensitized to my hands. I started to notice that I was very clearly displacing mental and emotional stress down into my hands, just as some of us, when stressed, sit in hunched over postures and collect tension in the upper back and traps.
I have some very mixed feelings about seeing this described as 'hacking'. In my view, there is definitely 'hacking' of a sort going on here, but it is a narrative hacking: we watch the author change the nature of the story he is telling himself in order to compartmentalize his own inner turmoil so that it can be dealt with safely. I am not sure that this is the sort of hacking the author thinks he is discussing. It is not entirely clear what he thinks (in retrospect) was going on. One sees that he never treats his imaginings of psychic phenomena as real, per se, and that he comes to the obvious conclusions (he is directing tension into his own hands in response to emotional stress), but he doesn't entirely admit this, either — eliding, for instance, the core TMS concept of psychogenic muscular tension in favour of 'circulatory system effects' in his description — and he maintains ambiguous language, reporting that "with my new-found sensitivity, I was simply able to stop the flow of stress, just as you can stop scratching an itch after you notice that you are doing so."
I don't agree with your conclusion. It seems obvious from reading his story that he does in fact admit that it is his emotions that are causing the pain. The 'nervous system and/or circulatory system' is just the mechanism that he thinks is actually causing the pain in his hands. From my understanding of psychogenic pain, I think it's possible that it is located entirely inside the brain, although we don't really know for sure.
Also, I think "hacking" is a valid term to use here. He is making changes to his thought patterns which then result in reduced pain sensation.
Yes, of course, all sensations are actually located in the brain. That goes without saying.
However, as I understand it, with fibromyalgia there is no actual peripheral contributing factor, it is some combination of remembered pain / interpretation of touch as pain / emotional pain. Having said that, I haven't really done a great deal of research on it, and I'm not sure if science really has much of an idea of what is actually going on anyway.
> Yes, of course, all sensations are actually located in the brain. That goes without saying.
Ehm... not only is it necessary to say that sensation emerges from the brain, it actually bears repeating quite a lot :) The separation of mind and body is a highly resilient illusion. If you're in pain then that illusion is fiercely potent. If someone sticks you with a needle and asks "where is the pain", you won't say "in my brain".
> I'm not sure if science really has much of an idea of what is actually going on anyway.
The problem with unexplained pain phenomena such as "fibromyalgia" may in part be a measurement error: we simply don't currently have the technology necessary to determine peripheral contributing factors. Imagine life before MRI, before X-ray . We have increasingly tantalising glimpses into the contributing factors behind pain phenomena such as phantom limb pain, and complex regional pain syndrome. But we haven't pieced the puzzle together quite yet.
There are some known mechanisms whereby innocuous stimuli can result in the subjective experience of pain. For further reading, have a look into "central sensitisation" and "dorsal horn wind-up".
To anticipate, I'm well aware that findings on imaging can correlate poorly with subjective experiences such as pain. This is simply an analogy.
Given that narratives form the backbone of history, literature, justice, religion, science, and virtually every field of human study one could imagine - as well as one's internal conceptions of the past, present, future, and one's place within the world - wouldn't 'narrative hacking' then be close to the ultimate hack?
