@dabertime that is so interesting. I lived with extreme chronic pain a while & healed almost entirely. And one of the things that clicked for me was how I saw pain as stored in memory. Kind of like Lycra where it snaps back to the strongest sharpest memory. Whether that’s guarding muscles, etc. During sleep it kind of goes away, then returns.
I think of pain as ‘sharp & sticky’ in memory, signals on a loop repeating, but you can learn to break the cycle too. Like stopping hiccups just by focus.