An excellent way to rise above physical pain is to divert your mind to something else. I’ve found, for example, when sitting in a dentist’s chair (I haven’t taken Novocain in years), that mentally composing music, or working out some passage in a book I was writing, helped greatly. The dentist’s activities then became hardly noticeable (though often I’ve heard afterward that the dentist himself was perspiring with sympathetic pain!).
