Yes, this was a real thing. Lay down on the floor with the lights off an imagine your golden boat.
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↓ Transcript
WYLONA
Now we're going to practice a pain management technique called guided imagery.
WYLONA
Imagine you're at a lake, with a golden boat. You get in, and float in the calming waters...
ROB
Don't you want to get in the boat?
KATE
If you try it during delivery, I will burn you alive.
Now we're going to practice a pain management technique called guided imagery.
WYLONA
Imagine you're at a lake, with a golden boat. You get in, and float in the calming waters...
ROB
Don't you want to get in the boat?
KATE
If you try it during delivery, I will burn you alive.
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I would ask my usual “is this a thing?” but it seems you’ve pre-emptively answered it.
This actually looks like it’s just a form of self-hypnosis which is being used as misdirection so you are not thinking about the pain. I was hypnotised once with what appears to be a similar technique. Self-hypnosis is a valid medical technique, it just looks like it’s being shrouded here in a little bit (a lot?) of mumbo-jumbo.
So it’s like biting the bullet then.
I love your skepticism on pretty much everything. And yes I too mock many exercises like this. And to be frank I’d probably go balistic if somebody tried to do this to my wife during labor.
But at the same time, various forms (but not all) of meditation have had shown to have some effectiveness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation) – as effective as the individual is willing to let it be. So while I mock little golden boats, I don’t mock meditation – and I think it might make your typically smart comic possibly appear a little less so.
Just my two cents.
I didn’t intend this comic as a comment on meditation, just my wife’s honest reaction to guided nap-time in our parenting class. I agree there are merits to meditation, but you try telling that to your pregnant wife and let me know how it goes!
This was our birthing class! We were going with a midwife and a birth center- the midwife was very down-to-earth and didn’t talk with us about ‘energies’ and things so we were comfortable trying a natural birth class. The teacher who was supposed to be teaching was another midwife and I’d heard great things about how well she prepared you for doing a center birth. The second day of class we learned it was being taken over by a ‘doula’ and we did things like draw a ‘birth labyrinth’ and ‘visualize your birth experience’. We also made a ‘birth bundle’ where we put in three items representing myself, my husband and the baby. I ended up just picking up a book.
There’s actually quite a bit that the medical community doesn’t know about pain and how the body (or brain) responds to it. There are a number of factors that seem to affect the sensation of pain, and one of them happens to be the focus that’s given to the painful stimulus. If it’s possible to focus on something aside from the pain, the sensation of pain seems to lessen. Granted, “I’m not thinking about it” isn’t the same as “it doesn’t exist,” but without the ability to compartmentalize reaction to stimuli, our species probably would have never survived the first few encounters with predators in the savannas of Africa, much less handle the stress of childbirth.
“Just float in the calming waters, Grunk”
“Thunk, this lion is chewing on the nub that used to be my left arm. I don’t see how-”
“JUST DO IT GRUNK!”
CIRCA 100,000 B.C. [(ish) (citation?)]
I use guided imagery a lot, but not for pain relief!
Is it just me or did anyone else read the line “don’t you want to get in the boat” and start thinking of the scene from Happy Gilmore where he started screaming at the golf ball about why it doesn’t want to go to its home in the hole on the green?
Hell, no, I do not want to get in the golden boat! A boat made of gold would sink like a stone!!
Not if built properly.