Thinking Away The Pain

By James Donahue

December 2005

A study at Stanford University and MRI technology company Omneuron suggests that mere thought can be used to help control pain.

The researchers asked people with chronic pain to watch a part of their brain that senses pain through an MRI machine and think of controlling that part of the brain. Initial results showed subjects could reduce their pain, some of them quite dramatically.

The report reminds me of experiments our son, Aaron C. Donahue, and I performed when he was still in high school. At the time, Aaron complained of allergic reactions to dust and other substances common to our neighborhood. He said one day that he “cured” himself my simply thinking away the allergy.

He said he made up his mind that he would not react to the allergen that was causing his head to get stuffed, his sinuses to run and all of the other symptoms he had. He said he also experimented with making headaches go away the same way and that the technique worked.

At that time, I also was suffering from allergies. My problem was so severe I was diagnosed as an asthmatic because I coughed and often awoke in the night unable to get my breath. I was seeing a specialist and getting shots regularly to relieve my symptoms. I also suffered frequently from headache.

Aaron was so enthusiastic about the success he had in eliminating his problem that I decided to try the technique on myself.

A few days later I was sitting at a meeting in a hot, stuffy room, and felt a classic headache developing right between my eyes and stretching across the top of my skull. I closed my eyes, stopped listening to the rhetoric going on around me, and concentrated on the headache, willing it away. I was quite surprised when the pain disappeared! It tried to sneak back about fifteen minutes later and I gave it another dose of thought. That time it went away for good.

With that success under my belt, I decided to go to work on my allergies. I thought that if Aaron could do this successfully, I might also be able to cure myself of asthma, or at least ease the problem to something much less than it was. I used the same thought process on my sinuses and all those nasal membranes that reacted to the allergens, and within a few days noticed an improvement.

I was so confident in the concept of using the mind to repair the body that I did not show up for my next allergy shot. I am happy to say that I never received another shot, and stopped taking allergy medicines until quite recently, when we adopted a cat.

My experience listening to tapes offered by the Monroe Institute that teach how to use hemispheric synchronization of the two halves of the brain to improve memory, heal the body, and even leave the body, supported what Aaron taught me so many years earlier.

I have always been severely allergic to cats but did quite well around this animal as long as I did not touch my eyes after petting it. Once I did that, I was in trouble until I got to a sink and washed my eyes and hands.

Since retiring and moving, the cat now shares our bed, often crawling up next to my face as I sleep. Consequently, I am back to slugging down some antihistamines once more. But an asthmatic I am not.

I have since written many stories about Aaron’s amazing fetes as a psychic, prophet, physician and a remote viewer. I believe that was the first time Aaron taught me a technique for curing myself.

It worked for him and it worked for me.

Strange that the researchers at Stanford are just discovering something we have known for years and just took for granted.