Something I know a lot about. Fascinating.
I have only once had that sort of experience/vision while in pain - and that was a migraine. Not my first intensely painful migraine, not my worst ever, nor my only or first travelling experience (my others have been during healing; I'm not yet very good at getting into that state without another healer's help). Nor my only time in intense pain, come to that. I'm not sure why it happened that time and no other. I haven't had much intense pain lately to try and harness this.
Dee Ell, my feeling is that the intensity of the pain would help, rather than the duration. Though being trapped for any length of time (under fallen rubble, say) would have its own effect.
The time it did happen during the migraine, I learnt afterwards that what happened was "psychic surgery"*. I felt myself hollowed out, my innards removed etc, and was left feeling very pure, healed, cleansed.
* I use quote marks only because I don't like labelling these things - whichever terminology you choose, you're choosing a belief system to go with it. I need to make up my own vocabulary.
My migraine history is unusual and nowadays I get the "side effects" without the headache. Mainly visual stuff, the classic aura - psychedelic zigzags etc with mood alterations - there's a fantastic website collecting lots of people's experiences of this which I'll try to find again (scotoma is the word for the blind patches, I believe). It shows art of what people see, and some of it is exactly what I get. I don't count this as visionary, though the shapes are common to trance images and some ancient cave drawings apparently - my background was entirely orthodox Western so others will know more about that side of things.
... Aha! Found the website:
Migraine Aura Foundation
I could have sworn it had a menu down the left-hand side but it's not there on the home page - it turned up on other pages, though (don't ask me how the site's structured!). However, spirituality is mentioned:
http://www.migraine-aura.com/content/e27891/e27265/e42285/e42419/index_en.html ("VS" stands for visual scotoma).
Sorry to focus so much on migraine, but it's what I know about.
A long time ago I recognised that for a Western thinker to say "This IS neurology," and to dismiss "This IS made by spirits working on you" as impossible, isn't logical. This was long before I knew spirits are to be taken seriously!
I now find it easier to work with this stuff using the metaphor of spirits than to work with the neurological framework. In other words, when I decide to interact with the spirits/presences/consciousnesses who I feel aware of, I make progress in a way I don't when I decide to study the medical side of things and think of myself as a patient.
Also, I can no longer distinguish psychological from spiritual. I think this is a step forwards, not back.
It's all just the
psyche. And that's not too separate from body, either.
Yes, the physical (neurological) signs are there (I have MRI evidence of mine), but we can't say they come before the mood/spiritual/sensory effects, causally.
In fact it was this and other (mostly emotional) traumas that led me into thinking and reading about shamanism - having never come across it in the circles I hung out with - which was the path that brought me to this forum, and to being a healer and to wherever I'll be heading next. Hmm...
And separately - I've read about the phenomenon of detaching from an experience, common among those who have undergone physical abuse over a long period (usually in childhood). On a forum I once "overheard" a conversation about it, people comparing notes on the way they put the painful experience into a box somewhere apart from the rest of themselves. They were swapping labels for this, in a supportive way (in a "Don't worry, you're normal, we all do it" way, I mean). But over the years I've moved from those labels towards other terms. Shamanism would name it soul loss, for example. Part of the person escapes the trauma by retreating to an inaccessible place.
I don't think it's always retreat, though. I think my migraine thing, and what you're describing, Milfoil, are simply accessing somewhere "else".
Mi-Shell, I know exactly what you mean about chronic pain, about people becoming their pain. I've had a chronic pain condition for years and the learning curve took me through that. It's interesting that Dorothy Rowe writes about the very same thing with regard to depression - the fear that with the suffering removed (depression in her books, physical pain in what you're referring to), if the person got to the centre of themselves, there'd turn out to be no identity there. Healing is largely about taking that risk (supporting someone else to take it), and finding there is someone in the middle after all.
Interesting too that you yourself have stayed working with regular, maybe everyday, physical pain...?!
Also PTSD, that's another label (again, I have / have had it) for soul loss and there must be names for the same thing in all languages.
I can feel a huge waffling-on approaching... so I'll stop now! The next bit is just about the value of perceiving damage (whether a sprained wrist or hurtful words spoken or whatever) as BIG, being an essential step in healing it. Hence sometimes dramatic damage is easier to recover from than what is apparently minor. But I can't quite justify how that connects with the rest of this thread so I'll save it for another context.
