I soil myself at the site of a needle but was happily set on fire in a monkey suit on the 2005 British television show Balls of Steel. It was an easy £1500 until a flying bike smashed my cage, trapping me in an inferno. Escaping it took up all of my allotted burn time. The flames were out of control; the pain was intense, and worst of all, my face mask was covering my eyes. I couldn't find the extinguishing pool and ran straight toward a screaming London studio audience already on edge from the July 7 terror attacks. It took a timely rugby tackle from the stunt co-ordinator to get me into the water before I cooked.
I still have scars from the incident, but like many Kiwis, I would take life as a burning ape over a single needle in the arm—anything but an injection. If giving blood involved rolling up your sleeve and getting punched in the side of the face by a nurse, we'd be in every week. I'd pay for it.
In his life-changing book Four Thousand Hours, Oliver Burkeman outlines Shinzen
Young's experience with pain. The monk to be was assigned a 100-day solo retreat. He was to live in a tiny, unheated ice shack, dousing himself with gallons of bone-chilling melted snow several times a day.
Shinzen describes it as "horrific ... The water freezes the moment it touches the floor, your towel freezes in your hand. You're sliding around barefoot on ice, trying to dry your body with a frozen hand towel."
At first, he recoiled from the pain, but over time realised, the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonising he found them – if his "attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable".
Zoning in entirely on the experience made it better.
Distracting yourself when faced with physical distress seems commonsensical. If you are scared of needles, you will look anywhere in the examination room except at the injection. But just as Jaws is scarier because we hardly see him in the movie, the jab monster grows more powerful if you don't face him.
As Burkeman writes of Shinzen, "The more intensely he held his attention on the experience, the clearer it became that the real problem wasn't the activity but his resistance to experiencing it. When he stopped blocking out those sensations and attended to them instead, the discomfort evaporated'.
And so, in that imposing Mt Eden clinic, determined to conquer my fear, I channelled Shinzen Young and focused my attention entirely on the needle piercing my flesh. Every fibre of me screamed, "look away", but I did not. I held my nerve as the blood flowed,
and another extraction tube was fitted.
When it was over, like magic, my dread of injections disappeared. I had stared that little metal dragon in the eye and told him, 'I see you for what you are monster, and you are nothing but a little prick'.
*The Scared of Hypodermic Needles, Blood Tests and More Community.
