(Long Music) Focus on my voice Let me bore your pain away #42 Jason Newland 22nd October 2025

Hello, hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com My name is Jason Newland. This is Let Me Bore Your Pain Away. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes.

Also, make sure you know the cause of your pain and make sure that you have permission from your doctor before you listen to this recording. So thank you for joining me. This is going to be really simple.

Not that any of my recordings are complicated but all I'm going to ask you to do throughout this recording is just focus on my voice. There may be other sounds in the background. I've got Vinnie, my co-presenter, on the floor having a little nibble on some food and jumping on and off of the sofa.

I'm still going to ask you to just focus on my voice. And allow my voice to move into that part of your body. The part of your body that was causing you discomfort before you decided to listen to this.

And just imagine that actually it's almost like my voice is replacing that area filling that up. So maybe you can even get a sense of my voice vibrating in that particular part of your body. Of course I don't know which part of your body you're focusing on.

So I will try and make this as vague as possible. So I won't be talking about any particular part of the body. And Vinnie will continue to give himself a bed bath.

Which he seems to do when I make a recording for some reason. Weird because he doesn't like having real baths. You know, whenever I give him a bath, when I let him get out, I dry him off, but he's never like completely dry.

He runs into the bedroom and he dries himself off on my pillow. We've both got a pillow each. He shares my bed, I've got a double bed.

He sleeps on one side, I sleep on the other. He's got his pillow and I've got my pillow and we do not share pillows. But when he's had a bath, all those rules go out of the window.

Just like when I'm making a recording, any kind of rules about keeping quiet are completely forgotten. Bless him. So my voice, just focusing.

I mean you could focus on the words that I'm saying. You could focus on the pitch. I don't know what pitch I am.

You might think I've got a high pitched voice or medium, low, I'm not sure. However your ears perceive my voice. And just imagine the energy moving through the airwaves into that part of your body.

And it's not that you're trying to create a physical sensation that feels more relaxing now in that part of your body. It's not that you're trying to feel calmer or looser. It's not even necessarily about trying to give you a distraction so that you're focusing on my voice instead of perhaps what you were focusing on before.

It's just a continuous focus and the reason I keep bringing you back to that focus is because you may drift off and think about other things. Because apparently, apparently I haven't got the most interesting voice. Apparently.

Hence why I call this let me bore your pain away. And this has come out of nearly two decades of making recordings for chronic pain, relaxation, insomnia, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of maybe different recordings. And in 2018 I started doing let me bore you to sleep, which was more of a chatty recording as opposed to a particularly focused experience.

And this is, I guess, kind of a mixture. Mixture of both loose, easy flowing, and focused, but at the same time, just being yourself, letting go. So taking some time for you to feel good or to feel a bit more peaceful.

This is the old cliche and I know it's an old cliche, but it's true. When your mind relaxes, it causes your body to relax. And when your body relaxes, it causes your mind to relax.

It's just one of those natural things that happen. It's a little bit like when you're trying to force yourself to fall asleep. It's not going to happen, probably, unless you're completely knackered.

But if you were completely knackered, you wouldn't have to try and force yourself to sleep. But if you try and keep awake, if you lie in bed, I know it kind of goes against logic. But if you want to go to sleep, what you do is you try and stay awake.

That's a surefire way to fall asleep. Put all your effort in staying awake, laying in bed, staying awake, really works. In the same way, something I discovered, wow, I think it's 2004.

I realized that when it comes to a physical discomfort of some kind, and I was having, I think it was my knee, I had a problem with my knee. I couldn't figure out what it was. In retrospect, I think it was because I was trying to meditate sitting on cushions, and it was never going to work for me.

I've never had that flexibility. My body's just not made like that. I was born to sit in a chair, not to sit on a cushion.

Yeah, my sitting on the floor days are all well and truly over. If I sit down, I need help to get up. I sound really bad tonight.

It's not comfortable. Besides, I'm actually such a big bum, I'm actually taller when I sit down than I am when I'm standing up. If I sit down, I bang my head on the ceiling.

It's almost like I'm stuck, I can't get out. But if I'm standing up, I'm about three foot from the ceiling. But anyway, that's enough about me.

I've been told that it's quite difficult to listen to me talking without drifting, without your mind kind of losing interest a little bit. I personally, I think I've got a very interesting voice, but not everyone agrees with that. So just a reminder to focus on my voice.

Of course, you know, you don't have to focus on my voice, but that is kind of the prerequisite of listening to this particular recording. But then you may find that your mind drifts. And the more your mind drifts, the more relaxed you get, the more relaxed you get, the better you feel, etc, etc.

And I remember back in 2004, I had this, my knee was just hurting. And I was sitting on a cushion and my knee was hurting. It was like, ah, really pretty bad.

And I decided, I was on my lunch break, actually, because I used to work downstairs in the gift shop. So I was on my lunch break and I was meditating upstairs. So I decided, I started thinking to myself, where is this feeling? Where is that feeling? And I know some people might say, we're singing in here, of course, isn't it? So I thought to myself, let's look for it.

Let's search for it. You know, it's in my knee, but where is it? I mean, where is it coming from? Where does it start in my knee? Where's the precise place? So I started focusing, I guess a little bit like focusing on my voice. It changes something when you focus on just one thing, even though there's other stuff going on, which is still going to hear naturally.

But when you focus and you zone in just on my voice. Now I was focusing on my knee. So I had my eyes closed and I was sitting there on the cushion.

I said it was about six cushions, actually, but, you know, I'm trying to kind of find a way to be comfortable. It got to the point where I was using so many cushions that no one else could meditate. So they just suggested maybe I sit in a chair.

And a funny thing happened. This is true, my friend was meditating and he was about six foot, about six, six, very tall. So he had, in order for him to be off the floor with his legs, he had about three cushions underneath each leg and two or three underneath his bum and a couple underneath his feet because he was, you know, really long legs and he fell asleep and he fell off, he fell over and he couldn't stop laughing and I couldn't stop laughing.

Everyone else was being all serious and pretending not to notice. So we had to walk out, we had to leave the room because so that we didn't disrupt everyone else. It's just funny the way everyone was pretending that like they hadn't noticed and it was a heck of a bang as well because I said he was a big lad.

Vinny, can you make a bit more noise, please? Thanks, baby. And yeah, so it was, it was like a big bang and then burst. I think it started off with snoring and then a big, like as he fell over, a big crash and then a big, a big laughter from him.

And then as soon as I heard the, or I might have actually opened my eyes when I heard him snoring and I looked over and because he was sitting next to me, I was just, and then I started laughing, but yeah. So, if you can just keep, you know, trying to focus on my voice. So, back in 2004, I'm sitting there, I'm on my own in the room and my, my work colleagues are downstairs in the shop doing what they did.

And I was kind of just taking some time off, you know, just having my hourly lunch break and just trying to calm myself. You know, when you just want to just, sometimes it's nice to just let your mind naturally slow down. Do you know what I mean? Just allow it naturally.

Just let it, I think it's sometimes if you, if you just leave it to do what it wants to do. It will just calm down, slow down, be still. Because you're no longer asking it to do stuff.

You're no longer asking your mind to think about things or asking your brain to be concerned about things or to remember things. And when it doesn't need to do anything, it can just chill out and have its own lunch break, as it were. I used to think, you know, when it comes to things like any kind of physical issue, whether it be stress, whether it be, you know, physical discomfort, whatever, any kind, I think of it as being a little bit like a sink or a bath, let's say, a bath that's overflowing.

I've got itchy leg there. Oh, that's better. A bath that's overflowing.

The thing is, if you've got an overflow in the bath, the bath can't overflow. So even if the taps are still running, so the taps can still be running, but it's always emptying. A bit like a toilet, a toilet generally will not overflow because it's overflow.

I didn't know I was going to say the word overflow quite as often as I have today. And having that overflow in your mind, in a sense, allows the stuff that you don't really need to focus on to just be released. It's a bit like another analogy.

I'm enjoying my analogies today. Like with my knee, for example, it was almost like I was, you know, if you stand on a hose pipe and the tap is just dripping, you can stand there for a half an hour, an hour, maybe three hours, and no water will come out of it. You'll stand on it, take your foot off, nothing.

But if you stand on it long enough, the pressure will build, the water will fill the hose pipe, and the pressure will be more and more and more and more to the point of when, I mean, you might not even be able to hold your foot on it anymore. Very likely it will fall off of the attachment with the tap because the pressure will just push it off. But ultimately, when you take your foot off, the hose pipe will spray water, so much water, and such a high velocity, fast, everywhere.

It'll just really be like full on, like a rocket. But if you just take your foot off and leave it, all you're going to get is a drip, drip, drip, no blockage, no pressure, drip. And I think sometimes, especially with things like stress and tension, and there's that whole kind of, by preventing ourselves from feeling something, it gets to the point when we're holding the door, and the more we hold it, the more pressure is being pushed against the door from the other side.

But actually, when you let go of the door, the pressure stops. And if you didn't hold the door to start with, just left the door open, you wouldn't even notice it. I was going to say that's why trees have roots, which made sense before I said it, but now I've said it, I'm not sure if it does.

Maybe this is not going to be the masterpiece I once thought it would be. I hope you're still focusing on my voice. So going back to 2004, so I'm there focusing on my knee, and I start thinking, hmm, because I've spent the last year and a half trying to meditate on cushions, you know, sometimes a few times a week, every day sometimes.

And every time it was, it was uncomfortable. But now it's getting worse. It's like, okay, I've got to do something about this.

So I'm focusing and I'm looking in a very kind of body scan manner. So for those that don't know what a body scan is, in a sense of meditation, it really is just focusing on the different parts of your body, and just observing them. Without judgment, without trying to change how you feel, but just acceptance.

So I'd already done that with the rest of my body. And then I went back to my knee. And my knee did feel more relaxed after I'd focused on the rest of my body.

Sometimes just the idea of focusing on each individual part of your body and give you that sense of comfort, which leads to relaxation of the part of your body that perhaps you need it the most. So I was, I was focusing like you are on my voice, I was focusing on my knee. And I was trying to pinpoint where the, where it was, where was that feeling in my knee.

And every time I found it, and what every time I thought I found it, I'd go a little bit deeper, like, okay, so where is it? Where does it originate? It's almost with the idea of, if it's a real thing, then I should be able to hold it in my hand. I should be able to feel it, I should be able to see it, I should be able to, you know, not necessarily taste it or hear it or touch it, but just, it should be something that I can actually locate. The more I looked for it, the more I searched, or focused, two things happened.

It started moving. It's almost like it was running away from me, which is weird. I'm like running after it, come on, I just want to be friends.

You know, you're my knee, I've known you for years, let's just, can't we just get on? And I'd follow it, sort of move to a different part of my knee. And then I'd follow it, and it's almost like it was going deeper, and I'd follow it deeper. And I'd keep following it, keep searching, keep focusing.

And something happened that I was very surprised about. I got to a point where I was searching, and it wasn't there anymore. It just wasn't there.

The thing that I thought was a thing wasn't a thing, and the feeling wasn't a feeling anymore. It was as if it just vanished. And what you find in that situation is that your mind changes, something in your mind, your brain chemistry even, whether you call it neuroplasticity, because our brains are always changing.

And when we learn new things or forget old things, and something changed. And because it felt different, I almost, a weird thing about it, I started looking for it. Although I was already looking for it before, I started moving it around thinking, oh, come on, where's it gone? Not in a disappointed way, but it still sounds a bit strange, the idea of it, sort of looking for something that I didn't want to be there in the first place.

And it was a strange sensation. I'd be still focusing on my voice, if I can say the word focusing without stuttering. So from then on, I started thinking, hmm, I'm going to start testing this.

At the time, I was doing Wing Chun Kung Fu, not at the time, not in that moment. I wasn't meditating and doing Wing Chun Kung Fu, and also focusing on, you know, I wasn't doing, I'm not that much of a juggler in real life. But I was getting injuries and stuff, just standards, like doing martial arts.

So I started over the next couple of years, really, maybe two or three years, but definitely the next couple of years, like 2004, 2005, focusing on using that same technique, that same process with different situations. And I was getting the same results. And it just, it was, it kind of surprised me.

I thought about calling it, like giving it a new, like term, fine focus therapy or something like that. That one actually was the name I was going to give it. But it kind of just reminds me a little bit, like I said, when you try and stay awake, you fall asleep.

It's something that is like the opposite. It's not logical. But something else happens.

And you when you try to really, really focus on a feeling that let's face it, you don't really want to focus on. Not really. I mean, in reality, I didn't really want to be focusing on my knee.

But I was intrigued. I was interested. And for the next couple of years, I played around with the idea.

Yeah. So I think we're coming to the end of another Let Me Pull Your Pain Away. Maybe you can focus and notice how you feel now.

And if this recording and listening to my voice has been beneficial, useful in some way, maybe let me know. Leave a comment. Thank you for listening.

Remember to be kind to yourself, because you do deserve to be happy. Be gentle with yourself. You deserve to feel safe.

Lots of love. Bye.