This is a fascinating technique that I stumbled across a few years ago and have never really used, but I was reminded of it recently.

Serge Kahili King, a Caucasian teacher of Huna, presented it in his book Urban Shaman:

Repatterning

A long time ago, so long that I can’t remember the source, I learned that if you stub your toe, all you have to do is repeat the same action several times, without quite stubbing your toe again, and the pain will go away. I used that a lot unthinkingly, but in later years I studied the process in detail and began teaching it in my courses, suggesting that the students try out variations. The concept I developed was that by re-creating the pattern and changing the ending, you were, in effect, giving the ku [subconscious] a new memory of the event, requiring the ku to change the body state in conformity to the new version of what happened. The sooner you could do this after the event, the sooner the body would get back into harmony.

What the students did amazed and delighted me.

A man in California, one week after the training, was in his backyard building a fence. At one point he smashed his thumb hard with a hammer and then pulled the hammer back prior to dropping it and following the normal routine of jumping up and down while squeezing his thumb and cussing. At the high point of his swing away from his thumb he remembered my lesson about repeating the pattern and changing the ending, so he followed through with his swing without quite touching his thumb. He repeated that action about seventeen more times. By then his thumb barely tingled and he went on with his work. When he was through he looked at this thumb and there was neither bruising nor swelling nor pain.

A medical doctor in Texas reported that he was chopping up lettuce for salad with a knife and sliced deep into a finger. Professionally he knew it would require several stitches, but he decided to try out my crazy idea anyway. After a few repetitive passes with the knife his finger stopped bleeding and the pain went away so he forgot about it and finished the salad. Three days later he remembered the accident and looked at his finger. There was no sign it had been cut.

A woman in Minnesota burned her finger on a hot pot and quickly repeated the action with a different ending. There was no blister and no pain.

A woman in Canada slammed a car door on her fingers and, oblivious to the stares of passers-by, repeated the movement of the door toward her fingers until the pain went away. She had no bruises or cuts.

Perhaps most exciting of all, a woman in California decided to act on the assumption that the ku lives only in the present moment and doesn’t distinguish between vivid imagination and physical experience. She’d received a bad burn on her leg from a motorcycle exhaust pipe some weeks before, and it had not been healing well. Vividly re-creating the accident in her mind, she gave it an ending change that left her leg clear of the pipe. She did this in her mind about forty times. The long-standing condition which had begun to fester cleared up in three days.

The possibilities of this simple process are fantastic and boundless, especially if we can use it to help the present effects of past events. As a guideline, we’ve found that the best results come from making as small a change in the pattern as possible.

King elaborates in a later book, Instant Healing:

The Mindblower Technique

In the past I have called this the “repatterning” or “the repetition technique,” but neither of those does it justice so I changed the name to reflect its awesome power. What else would you call a technique that enables you to heal burns, cuts, bruises, and even broken bones in just a few minutes? This will probably produce more skepticism than anything else in this book, but the proof is in the practice. Several times I have said that the body has a natural inclination to heal itself. Now I’m going to rephrase that a bit. Based on empirical research I am convinced that the body has a natural inclination to heal itself instantly. Unfortunately, in the healing field it is taken for granted that the body needs time to heal. I disagree. I think that what takes time is reducing stress and redirecting energy waves so that the body can do its healing without restraint. Experience indicates that the sooner you can reduce stress and redirect energy, the more quickly the body will heal, and this technique can help people to do that with amazing speed.

When the body is injured it immediately mobilizes all of its available resources to repair itself. However, the body gets its information about current reality from three sources: immediate sensory data from the environment, its own memories of sensory data, and the mind’s imagination regarding past, present, and future sensory data. It then attempts to correlate the information from these three sources in order to respond appropriately to a given situation. Ideally, the memory data contains valuable information on how the body has coped with such situations before, and the mind’s imagination can reinforce past success, reinforce present coping strategies, and guide future progress. That’s how it could work (and even does, on rare occasions with rare individuals). Fortunately, the body usually does its part of the healing job quite well. Unfortunately, the mind seldom does. Instead of helping the body, the minds of most people hinder it. (I feel safe in saying most people. Otherwise, the state of health and healing in the world would be very different.) Most often, what happens is that while the body is busy coping, the mind is re-creating the injury in imagination, reaction with anger, and anticipating fearful results, all of which add tremendous additional stress to the situation and inhibit the healing process. As if that weren’t bad enough, the body also has to deal with memories of past mental reactions to an injury.

One solution would be to quiet the mind and put it to work at helping the body, rather than interfering with it. That’s what the mind-blower technique does. I know it doesn’t sound very mind-blowing, and the name is only valid because the effects are astounding in terms of current expectations. As more people become familiar with it and use it, I’ll have to change the name again. First I’ll tell you how it works.

When you receive an injury, what you do with your body in this technique is to, insofar as possible, relax your muscles and do a “quasi-repetition” of the action that produced the injury. A quasi-repetition is an action that almost duplicates the original action. The difference is that you complete the action by stopping short of, or bypassing, the original traumatic contact. For example, if you burnt your finger by touching something hot, you would immediately repeat the action of moving your finger toward the source of heat and stop short of touching it again by a safe distance, doing this again and again until the pain subsides, which happens in less than a minute (if you do the rest of the technique properly). If you got your fingers caught in a door, you would leave your fingers in place and repeat the movement of the door until just before it touched your fingers. If you stubbed your toe, you would repeatedly swing your foot toward whatever you stubbed it against, stopping short of contact. If you hit your finger with a hammer you would swing the hammer toward your finger in the same way without contact. If you cut yourself with a knife, you would repeat the cutting action without contact, stopping the blood flow first, if necessary. In all these cases and others, you would continue the repetitive action until the pain subsides. If, for any reason, it is impossible or inconvenient to interact with the original object that caused the injury then you can substitute a different object to represent it, such as a free hand to represent a hammer or a knife, or a glass jar to represent a hot pot. The idea behind it is to create a new experiential memory in which the injury doesn’t take place.

The mental side of the technique is really the most important because it’s the mind that causes most of the ongoing stress. This consists of two parts, to be carried out as simultaneously as possible.

One part is to bring all of your attention into the present moment in which you are repeating the alternate, noncontacting action. The success of the technique depends primarily on your ability to keep your mind on what si happening, and not on what happened when the injury occurred or what might happen as a result of it. Doing this well requires an act of will. You must choose not to think of anything other than the repetitive, noninjurious action you are currently involved in. If stray thoughts come in, don’t get upset. Just choose to bring your mind back tot he present as often as necessary.

The other mental part has to do with using words to help maintain your present-moment focus and to help your body heal itself. My students and I have experimented with a lot of word combinations, but the all-time favorite remains “Nothing happened! See! Nothing happened!” repeated over and over until the pain is gone. This was first used spontaneously by a woman whose friend was cut badly on the forehead when he fell while they were both waterskiing. In this case the man was dazed and could not do anything for himself, so the woman held him up in the water with one hand and repeatedly moved her other hand toward his head as if it were the ski that had cut him while shouting the above phrase. When they were back on shore after being picked up by a boat, the blood on the man’s forehead was wiped away and there was no sign of a cut. The fact that the man was dazed obviously contributed to the success fo the technique because his mind was not able to get in the way. Naturally, you can use any other words or phrases that work for you. The purpose of the words, remember, is to help keep you focused in the present moment and to give a clear message to your body which reinforces its healing work.

You may have noticed that several times I mentioned continuing the process until the pain subsides. In most cases, this is all you need to do because when the pain si gone the mind gets occupied with other things and the body can do the rest of the healing on its own. Often, in a very short time and ot the degree that you are able to keep your mind off of the original trauma, the redness of burns fades away and no blisters are formed, blood stops flowing from a cut and the edges mend, and bruises don’t form discoloration from broken blood vessels. The more severe the injury the longer or more often you may need to do the technique simply because it’s a lot harder to keep your mind off the event or off the possible consequences.

You may also have noticed that I haven’t mentioned the healing of broken bones yet. That’s because this use of the technique deserves special attention. I wouldn’t expect instant or even rapid results with a compound fracture (when the broken bone has pierced through the skin), and even fast results are probably unlikely in most cases because of the degree of trauma and generalized stress involved. However, I would expect that using the technique to whatever degree possible would greatly help to reduce the stress and aid the healing. The technique has been used very successfully with simple fractures of leg bones, arm bones, and finger bones. Normal medical attention, if available, is always called for in such cases, and setting the bone (if appropriate) out to be done whenever possible. Nevertheless, I’d like to share a story about myself in which this technique was all I had to work with.

The event took place on a very strenuous hiking trip up the Wailua River on Kauai. On the return near the end of the day, I decided, foolishly, to take a little-used branch of the river by myself. In this part of the river there were no trails on the banks, and it was necessary to walk in the river itself, clambering over the rocks in the stream. I was hearing hiking sandals that had already proven themselves very slippery on the stones. At one point, when I was climbing over a boulder, I stood up … and slipped off. As I came crashing down, I put out my right hand to break my fall and the first three fingers crumpled under the impact. The pain was intense and my fingers were twisted in all directions. I sat down and immediately began swinging my right hand downward to the boulder — without contact — over and over. At the same time I shouted, “Nothing happened!” at the top of my lungs and struggled to keep my mind in the present. It was a hard struggle, because images of the fall and remembrance of the impact kept trying to intrude, but I kept going for about twenty minutes. At the end of that time almost all the pain was gone and the first two fingers looked and felt normal. The third finger was straight, but swollen. I made my way home, kept up the work, and in three days my hand was completely normal. Curiously, a week after the event, I was sharing this experience with some friends when my third finger instantly became swollen. I used the technique again right then and the swelling went away. Since that time I have had to retrain my body’s response to the event so that my finger doesn’t swell up any more when I tell people about it.

A number of people have asked me whether children can learn this technique. First I say yes, and then I share this true story told to my by a Hawaiian friend. One day in a park, her seven-year-old grandson had been told to watch his baby sister while their mother went to the restroom. The baby was squirming around in her stroller and the boy’s attention was wandering. Suddenly the stroller tipped too far and the baby fell out, hitting her head on the walkway. While horrified onlookers watched, the boy immediately lifted the baby by its ankles and lowered its head up and down toward the concrete. When some people came running up to stop him he said, “It’s okay, my grandmother told me to do this!” And the baby did stop crying.

So, I had read all of this awhile ago, but what reminded me of it was a recent series of posts over at a quirky blog, wherein the author describes his experience attending a healing seminar for something called Matrix Energetics, which I had never heard of. But in the process he described using a very similar-sounding technique to heal his own hip problem. They called it the Parallel Universes method, or PU for short.

At the seminar, Bartlett introduced this PU method with his own horrific leg break experience. I’ll just tell you in my own words. See, Dr. Bartlett opens every sub-session, throughout the seminar day, with a wild set of crazy air guitar up on stage, set to the blast of 70’s classic (dinosaur) rock. He exhorts the crowd to get to their feet and clap and sway and loosen their uptight chakra’s and generally set up a Dancing in the Moonlight type of rave vibe, like the dance scene in Zion (Matrix Reloaded) or Christian tent revival or what have you. That’s alright as far as it goes, but it seems that fairly recently, maybe last year or so, he was up on stage in San Francisco, doing his thing with perhaps a bit more emotional immersion than usual when he stepped clean off the edge of the stage – four feet straight down. He landed on on leg with sort of got pile-driven into the floor and he collapsed in a heap as the rock n roll screeched pitilessly on.

He said at first he was in horrible pain. He’s a doctor, right? (Don’t answer that!) So, he uh… knew that he’d broken his leg. Not good. Because after all, Dr. Bartlett is dedicated to putting out Full Seminar Value for Full Seminar Dollar, hewing to the same stern code of Customer Care as my own Tabbic “Superprime Highend Information Teleservices” offerings. Anyway it basically looks bad. But he knew the show must go on. So he decided to heal himself on the spot, using the Parallel Universes method. (This is what we call “dogfooding” in the software industry, using the software you wrote and which you sell to customers for your own daily needs.) He said he took it as a good opportunity to try the stuff out under battlefield conditions, even though he said he really was in quite horrible pain and almost losing consciousness. Seems it was a broken tibia (which is a strong bone).

So now this pricked up my felinic ears because I’m particularly interested in alternate healing for acute conditions. You normally think of alternative healing and related practices for chronic stuff, ill defined vague things like posture and fatigue or sometimes cancer in the more dramatic testimonials, but rarely for something like an emergency situation of a broken tibia, with severe pain and possible shock and so on. I had to give Bartlett props for going at it this way. Also in martial arts injuries you have to deal with acute stuff. And if industrial civilization is really going down the toilet on us, we’ll need to replicate all the high tech ER type services using just our own bare hands and brains.

So I listened very carefully to how he proceeded. He said that he stood up on the remaining good leg and despite the inhuman pain hauled himself back up on stage using his arms. Then he stood up and while the crowd was still clapping and dancing, apparently (and mysteriously) unaware of the seriousness of his predicament, he applied the PU method to himself. He simply tried to take one actual step with the injured leg, putting a bit of weight on it. ARRRRRRGHHHHH!!! Pain. Ok, not that universe! (Pick up leg again). Mentally “choose” a different universe (he said it’s kind of like mentally flipping through an old-fashioned card Rolodex). Now this other new universe is in force, rules have changed, so take another step and try it out. In this new universe, the injury never happened. OUUUUUUUUUUUUCHHHHHH! Ack. Hurt like Hell. Alright then, this one too is not yet the right universe. Mentally choose yet another alternate universe. Try again. Keep trying til you find the true, actual, in-your-face real universe where the injury really and truly never happened. And after a few tries, he found it!

Yep, the pain vanished, the break seemed to be healed on the spot (I don’t know how he verified that on the spot though, beyond the disappearance of the pain). But point being, he was able to continue his show with no problem, striding up and down the stage in his normal tent-revival preacher style.

Well, I thought to myself, if that’s not healing I’d don’t know what is! So at the next break I decided to try this method for myself. Found some space out in the hallway. First I had to get some pain going in the my hip, to establish a baseline. My hip injury differed from Dr. Bartlett’s leg break in that it was sporadic pain triggered by certain angles. So I got into the bad angle and put some weight into it! FUCK! Hurt like a … ! Ok wrong universe. Back off! I told the universe: I want the one of you guys where my hip is fine, I know you’re out there. Put weight back. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hurrrrrrts! Ok wrong universe. Tried 4 more times, suddenly – hey no pain! Deepened the angle. Nothing. I mean totally normal. ?? Kept trying but the pain was absolutely gone.

Now, I know what yer thinking. Yer thinking oh hell this guy just had a little cramp, he just needed to shake it out a little. I’m not going into all the backstory here but just take my word for it as an experienced physical-plane feline – this was a real thing, a serious thing, a long term thing! Yuh gotta believe me! And if you say well it was all just placebo effect then I refer you here.

Not having been personally introduced to either technique other than through reading, I don’t know if they’re the same or not, or even if they work. But I do know that the next time I bash or cut myself badly enough for it to matter, I’m going to try this out!