I’ve always lived with a certain amount of pain. When I was a kid, everyday activities like hopscotch, jumping rope, and volleyball made me wince. But I was a tomboy, and I just figured pain was the price you had to pay to be an exceptional athlete.

When the throbbing in my knees, hips, and elbows worsened, everyone attributed it to adolescent growing pains. But at age 15, I went to volleyball camp to pursue my life’s passion, and found I was unable to walk across the cafeteria, much less dart across a court to set the ball.

The doctors finally diagnosed a serious form of arthritis and cautioned me to move to the sideline. I cocooned myself in my bedroom, trying not to cry, but feeling like my world had burst open. I ignored my homework and spent my time writing poetry about loneliness and mortality. Medication did little to ease my pain, so I tried biofeedback. The technician told me I was holding onto my pain, and needed to learn to let go of it.

She taught me how to breathe from my diaphragm, dissolve tension, and elevate the temperature in a specific part of the body. One day, I was suffering from inflammation in my jaw and we used a technique called Glove Anesthesia. The technician had me close my eyes, release the tension in my body, visualize a table in front of me and put on top of it a bucket… an oaken bucket, a champagne bucket, any kind of bucket as long as it was big and tall. She told me to imagine that in the bucket was the most powerful anaesthetic known to man, and to put my hand in the bucket and swirl my fingers until they felt heavy and wooden. Then I placed my hand on the painful jaw and let the hand absorb the pain. When my hand was full of that pain, I put it back in the bucket until it became wooden again. I absorbed the pain and dipped into the imaginary bucket over and over until I was able to leave the office without any pain.

I have found other uses for my biofeedback tools besides pain relief. Before a recent physics final, I took five deep breaths from the diaphragm and then scored an A. Maybe I’ll teach that technique to my brother – a Little Leaguer – whose fastball and slider I now have the flexibility to catch in the backyard.

Barring the discovery of a wonder drug, I know I face a lifelong struggle with my disease. But now, I have powerful weapon against the pain – my own vivid imagination.

By Stephanie Takemoto