Another pain coping technique is non-focused awareness. This is a little bit like meditation
but slightly different. When a woman is in labor, she is going to experience tons of
different sensations and she can allow these sensations into her consciousness and not
try to push them out, there's less room for pain. RIght now we're experiencing touch,
light, temperature, taste, sound, sight and scent. These are all happening right now to
us, right now, while you're watching this, you're experiencing all these. When you're
in labor, these are all going to be intensified. So, if we divide them up to all these things
that we're experiencing and we just let them into our being, we don't judge them, we don't
decide if we like them or not like them, they are what they are, then there's less room
right here and that means there's less room for pain. An example of this is, let's say
you're at home, you're in labor and your neighbor decides to try out the new chainsaw, he wants
to go to town and trim the trees. When you're in labor, even when you're not in labor, that
might be something that you find extremely annoying and you might be like "I can't stand
that noise, it is going to drive me crazy, I need him to turn it off," but I want you
to look at it a different way. I want you to be like "It's a noise, it's part of life,
it's there and I'm just going to let it be. Come into my life and leave my life," because
if you fight it, then, guess what, this right here for sound, that becomes pain too, so
now you've got that much more pain that you're entering into here. When you're at the hospital
there's going to be nurses coming in and out of the room, you're going to hear people in
the hall maybe talking, maybe people laughing, you're going to hear lots of beeps. When any
type of machine is running low on a medication or if the battery is running low or there's
any kind of thing that is out of the norm, you hear beeps. You hear beeps all the time
at hospitals. If that sound of beeping, if you decide "I can't stand that beeping, I
hate it every time I hear it," that means that you have more pain. In the next segment,
I'm going to show you an example of how to work through this and how to do non-focused
meditation. A pain coping technique that can be effective, but is a little difficult at
first, is non-focused awareness.