New to me, Ashley, but I have done guided imagery for psych reasons. Got me over a nasty phobia. I'll be interested to hear what others say, as well. I've done meditations for relaation but never specifically for pain, other than breathing to relax!

I've also done guided imagery for psych reasons and tried it for pain, but if the pain is bad enough for me to start throwing things at it, it's also bad enough to distract me from any kind of meditation or guided imagery.

Research shows people in pain often lose the ability to identify left or right images of their painful body part(s) (i.e. when viewing pictures of body parts they are slower and/or less accurate than somebody without pain at determining whether the image is a Left or Right).

This ability appears to be important for normal recovery from pain. The good news is that the brain is plastic and changeable, if given the right training for long enough. So with the appropriate tools, a bit of work, patience and persistence, it is possible to improve the ability (speed and accuracy) to discriminate between Left and Right body parts and movements.

Explicit motor imagery

Explicit motor imagery is essentially thinking about moving without actually moving. Imagined movements can actually be hard work if you are in pain. This is most likely because 25 percent of the neurones in your brain are 'mirror neurones' and start firing when you think of moving or even watch someone else move (this is why you can feel exhausted after watching an action movie).

By imagining movements, you use similar brain areas as you would when you actually move. This is why sports people imagine an activity before they do it. It's exercising the brain before the rest of the body which is what you will be trying to do with the explicit motor imagery part of the GMI process.

There are many ways to go through this process but the most common way used in GMI is to imagine yourself moving rather than watching or imagining other people moving.