Vipassana Meditation

"I know there's a word for this." There was a song with that line years ago.

I am looking for the word to describe my special skill, the thing that I'm good at. There are a couple of words or concepts referring to this. There are two main things I'm looking up: 1. being able to observe tiny physical sensations in and on the body, and 2. the belief or philosophy that says it's okay to use whatever works, instead of doing a double-blind placebo-controlled test.

I found something which came from googling 'sensation observation.' Vipassana Meditation resembles the thing that I do. I am not observing 'thoughts,' 'feelings,' 'beliefs,' or anything like that. I am observing the tiniest perceptions of my senses, in the skin, and inside my body, anywhere in and on the body.

I don't just observe them on purpose because I want to. I notice these things whether I want to notice them or not. They are disturbing and distracting enough to interfere with other things that I try to do. Everyone is able to do this to some extent, but some people have the 'volume' turned up really high on their physical sensations. It's not only that I'm able to feel things, but that I care about it and think it's important.

I'm also looking for a word that describes this: your sensory data are just as valid, or more valid, than a scientific study. You can use your own observations of your health symptoms and troubleshoot your own illnesses, the old-fashioned way, back before we had laboratories and the government and the FDA. I feel pain; something is wrong; what do I do about it? When you walk, your foot touches the ground and feels your weight pressing down on it. You then control the way you're leaning so that you don't fall over. You can observe every detail of any sensory feeling inside and outside your body, and try to understand what caused it.

I know when I've touched a transdermal drug, because I feel a tickling sensation in my skin, which I have learned to recognize. I know when I've been zapped by whatever-it-is, radio waves or sound waves, because I feel burning, stinging sensations in my skin. Other people might experience these things, but either they don't really notice it, don't really care about it, don't think it's important, or aren't very distracted by it. I am interested in and preoccupied with these things, when other people aren't.

'Psychophysics' is another word similar to what I'm doing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychophysics

'Psychophysiology' is also relevant.

Here is a good example. Can you describe what it feels like to be 'tired?' What does it mean to be tired? For me, it's a sensation of pain in several different places in my body, usually the shoulders, the upper back, and the upper arms, but that's not all of what it means to be tired. It's also, usually, a burning sensation over large areas of my skin. Fatigue and tiredness are my most important health problems that I've always been trying to fix. So I pay a lot of attention to the exact details of what it feels like to be 'tired.' And I observe what I did to cause the pain.

I was told about the Feingold Diet years ago, because I was one of the LUCKY ones - as a hyperactive child in the 1970s, I was lucky enough to have parents that saw a particular episode of the TV show 'Donahue' or something like that - I forget which show it was - but they talked about the Feingold Diet being used for hyperactive kids, and my parents decided to try it. It worked very well, but we only used it for a few years, and they gradually put me back onto a 'normal' diet. But I grew up hearing about it and was always aware that foods can cause illnesses and psychological problems, bad moods, and behavior problems. So I have always known that you can observe a connection between something you did, something you ate, or whatever, and the symptoms you feel.

That is what I should have been doing, all this time, but instead they made me do useless, time-wasting things, like fantasizing about a conversation I might have with an attractive guy in the future. Every time you try to do something useful, they make you wander off into some fantasy rehearsal to try to get you to talk to some guy or that kind of thing, instead of whatever you were really doing. And it's days and days, or weeks, before you will actually see that person - there's no hurry to plan out what you will say right this very instant.

http://www.traumahealing.com/somatic-experiencing/index.html

'Somatic Experiencing' - I quickly glanced at that web page but didn't read much of it yet.  It resembles the type of thing that I do.

I still didn't find exactly the phrase I was looking for.  'The value of anecdotal evidence' got some results, but that's not quite it either.  I can't believe another hour has passed and I'm going to get kicked off the internet in a couple minutes... so I'll post this.