The Two Kinds of Pain in Deconditioning

My first official IHDS analysis was in January 2013. It was my third reading overall, because third time’s the charm, and the first one that went as far as my Primary Health System. The analyst who gave it to me was Kumud Kabir, and she said something I’ve been carrying ever since. I’ve never seen it written down anywhere else in quite the way she put it. She said that when deconditioning hurts, and it does hurt, there are two entirely different pains, and almost everyone mistakes one for the other.

I want to give her idea a whole article, because in my experience it is the single most useful thing you can know when the experiment starts costing you something. She lays it out herself on her own site, and I’d send you there to read her directly. What follows is what her distinction has come to mean after thirteen years of living with it. People don’t abandon deconditioning because it stops working. They abandon it at the exact moment it starts working, because it hurts and they read the hurt as a wrong turn.

The first pain: circulation coming back

Sit on your foot long enough and it goes quiet. No sensation, no complaint, no trouble at all. The trouble starts when you stand up. That awful prickling flood is not the injury. It’s the repair, and it only arrives because the blood has been let back in.

Deconditioning produces exactly this sensation in the psyche, and it is unmistakable once you’ve felt it named. It’s the flush of shame that arrives the first time you say no to something you’d have automatically said yes to, and nobody dies, and you have to sit with a rush of feeling you have no name for. It’s the strange grief that follows a correct decision. It’s the disorientation of an open Heart declining to prove itself for the first time in forty years and finding it has no idea who it is when it isn’t proving. It’s the open Root refusing to rush, and the sheer physical discomfort of unspent pressure sitting in the body with nowhere to go.

None of that is damage. That is a part of you that had been sat on for decades getting its blood back. It is loud precisely because something is returning.

The second pain: the ache you were already in

The other pain is older and much quieter, and it doesn’t feel like a crisis because it isn’t new. It’s the low-grade chafe of running a life from the mind: the endless comparison, the bracing, the stoicism, the sense that you’re managing something that never quite gets managed. The dull background of “I should be further along than this.”

Here’s the trap. That pain was there the whole time. You’d simply stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing traffic outside a window. The moment you start making decisions from your authority, the noise floor of your life drops, and the old ache becomes audible for the first time in years. It sounds brand new. It sounds like the experiment caused it.

It didn’t. You just turned the music down.

How to tell them apart

Three questions, and they’ve never failed me.

Which direction is it moving? Circulation pain moves. It flares, peaks, and resolves, and something is different on the other side of it. Conditioning pain loops. It says the same sentence it said last year, and the year before that. If you’ve heard this exact complaint from your own mind for a decade, it isn’t withdrawal. It’s the resident.

What is it asking you to do? Circulation pain asks you to wait, to feel the thing, to not rescue yourself. Conditioning pain always has a plan: fix it, prove it, hurry, get ahead of it, make someone else responsible for it. The mind’s pain always comes with an errand attached. Watch for the errand.

Did it show up after a correct decision or before one? This is the cleanest test. The ache that arrives after you followed your strategy and authority is almost always circulation. The ache that arrives before, arguing hard for the shortcut, is the not-self lobbying to keep its job.

The third pain the tests won’t catch

I’ve given you two categories, so let me be honest about a third, because I made it myself and I’d rather you didn’t.

I walked out of that January 2013 analysis holding my Primary Health System: my determination, my environment, the whole intake picture. Then I applied it like a religion. Not as an experiment. As a set of orders. Within months I had made myself genuinely, physically ill. I’ve written about that elsewhere, because it took me years to absorb what it was actually telling me.

That pain was neither circulation nor conditioning. It was the pain of forcing correct information at the wrong speed, with no support, on a body that had never been consulted. It fails all three tests above. It doesn’t move, it isn’t asking me to feel anything, and it didn’t follow a decision I’d made correctly. It just did damage.

Which is exactly why Ra didn’t want PHS given as a reading. His position was that this material isn’t information you receive. It’s process work you undertake slowly, over time, with other people around you. A single session can tell you what your body’s mechanics are. What it cannot give you is the months of trial and error and course-correction that turn those mechanics into a way of eating and living your body actually agrees with. Delivered as a one-off reading, PHS stops being an experiment and becomes a rulebook. A rulebook is the seven-centered mind’s favorite thing in the world to be handed.

It’s why I run this work in groups instead of selling a session and waving people off with their notes. Weekly meetings across about ninety days, a year of support after, and the part that does the real work: other people in the room running the same experiment. You learn as much from hearing someone describe the food experiment that flopped as you do from your own. A recording cannot give you that. And the prerequisite is deliberate. Six to twelve months of genuinely experimenting with your strategy and authority before anyone goes near your PHS. That order isn’t gatekeeping. It’s the thing that would have spared me 2013.

Stop trying to defeat the not-self

The instinct, once you can see your conditioning clearly, is to go to war with it. I understand the appeal. I’ve taught this material for years and I still catch myself talking about the not-self like an opponent.

But consider what the thing actually is. Those strategies were built by a small child in a house where nobody knew this system existed. Your open centers were absorbing and amplifying everything in the room, and your mind, with no authority to defer to and no adult to tell it there was another way, did something genuinely intelligent. It built a persona that could survive that room. The over-giving, the peacekeeping, the busyness, the proving: those were competent solutions to a real problem.

That persona is not your enemy. It’s a strategy that outlived its usefulness and was never told it could stand down.

You cannot shame a survival mechanism into retiring. You can only make it unnecessary, one correct decision at a time, and the fastest way to do that is to stop treating it as a defect. Meet it the way you’d meet the child who invented it. Not indulgence, because you still don’t hand it the wheel, but something closer to the honesty of I see why you did that, and I’ve got it from here.

Deconditioning is, in a real sense, re-parenting: giving yourself now what nobody knew to give you at four, which is permission to trust your own mechanics instead of the room’s.

What this actually asks of you

Not force. Patience, and a slightly better ear.

The nine-centered form we’re all living in has only been around since 1781, which is a blink, and the seven-centered strategic mind we inherited hasn’t got the memo. It still believes it’s supposed to be running things. That belief is the loudest voice in most people’s heads, and it will not go quiet on command. It goes quiet when it is repeatedly, demonstrably, unnecessary.

So when the next wave of discomfort arrives, don’t ask whether it hurts. It will. Ask which pain it is. If it’s moving, if it’s asking you to feel rather than fix, if it showed up in the wake of a decision you actually made correctly, you are not off course. That’s circulation. Stay in it.

If you don’t yet know which strategy and authority you’re meant to experiment with, that’s the first thing, and it’s free: run your chart. And if you’re deep enough in this that you can’t tell your own patterns apart anymore, which happens to nearly everyone somewhere in the middle years, that’s precisely what a reading is for. Someone who can look at your open centers and tell you, plainly, which of those two pains you’ve been living in.