Well, to a certain extent this ties in to the "Unpleasant Physical Sensations" technique that I teach every 4th night in the normal retreat, but I see that there's two techniques that maybe this person wants explained, so I'll try to cover both. The first technique, as I teach it, is to concentrate on the pain in a soft way. To be able to see it as "sensation," and then the thoughts of pain dissipate and go away, because we're seeing it as a sensation. We're seeing the reality of it, so we don't have aversion towards it, we don't call it pain. That's one way to work with "pain" using our concentration, observing it directly.
There's another way to use concentration with pain, and that is to concentrate strongly on something else, so that we escape the body, the physical pain. An example of this, I cut the tips off these two fingers once. It was lack of mindfulness, right? That's how we make accidents. So, I cut the tips of the fingers off, and it took four hours before I got a doctor to shoot a needle in my hand to take away the pain.
We were on our farm, we had to drive from the farm to the little town first. The ambulance guy looked at it and wrapped it up, but he's not able to use the needles and all. It takes another hour to drive to the hospital. Well, it was a Saturday, and the doctor was in an emergency, and my fingers, thankfully weren't as bad as the other person, so it was four hours before I got a needle into my hand.
Fortunately, I'm a meditator at the time (this was only a year or two before moving to Thailand). I'd practiced quite a bit. I have intense pain, and for any of you who've had this type of injury you'll know that the pain is not just in the fingers, it shoots right into the heart, there's throbbing in the heart, too. So there's quite a bit of intense pain.
During those four hours, I rotated three meditation subjects, in order to work with the pain in a skillful way. One was the Unpleasant Physical Sensations technique; I was just trying to observe it as "sensation." When I got tired of that, I would switch over into the awareness of the breathing, and try to focus very strongly on the breathing to escape the pain. I needed a rest, so I tried to escape it. When I got tired of that and got distracted again by the pain, I would switch over into Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation, for people around the world with much more than just missing the tips of their two fingers. I opened it up, I opened it up. Again, I'm getting away from the pain, but I'm actually using the D/D method as I'm working with the pain at the same time.
So, I rotated those three meditation subjects. When I got tired of one, I went to the next. For four hours I just used the three of them. After the needle was put in, I could relax. This is an example of using concentration to work with pain. One way, looking straight at it, another way, trying to escape it with another skillful technique such as the D/D Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation.