A psychotherapist’s practical method for mastering pain through relaxed concentration
What the Work Is
Grasping the Nettle is a book by Ursula Fleming, an English psychotherapist, Lay Dominican, and author who was regarded as an expert in her field. First published in 1990, the work is presented as a positive approach to pain. Fleming developed her techniques initially out of a personal need: wanting to become a concert pianist, she sought a way to steady her nerves and control her unsteady hands, and the method she arrived at eventually became the basis for treating thousands of patients and for a career in alternative medicine. The book belongs to the literature of pain control and is designed to help health care professionals teach pain control techniques to patients.
What the Book Is About
The book sets out Fleming’s approach to managing pain, built on a technique known as the Fleming Method. At its core, the method relies on relaxed concentration as a means of overcoming pain. Rather than framing pain solely as something to be eliminated by external means, the book offers a positive approach — a way of working with pain through the disciplined use of relaxation and focused attention. The aim is practical: to give both practitioners and patients a teachable technique for gaining control over pain.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central concept of the book is the Fleming Method, which combines relaxation with concentration. The two are treated as a single, unified capacity: a state of relaxed concentration that the patient can learn to enter and use to overcome pain. This distinguishes the approach from techniques that depend on tension, distraction, or purely pharmacological relief. Because the method was developed by Fleming herself and used in her clinical work, the book presents it as a hands-on technique rather than a purely theoretical account.
A second theme is teachability. The book is explicitly designed to help health care professionals pass the technique on to patients, meaning the method is presented as something that can be instructed, practiced, and transferred rather than as an innate talent or a private remedy. This practical orientation shapes the book’s purpose: it is a manual for transmitting a skill.
The book also reflects Fleming’s conviction, rooted in her own experience, that unsteady nerves and physical distress can be addressed through trained inner control — an idea that began with her attempts to steady her hands for the piano and grew into a therapeutic method applied to a wide range of patients.
Significance and Influence
Fleming’s broader work in pain control has had a substantial impact. According to The Eckhart Society, which she co-founded in 1987, there is now a considerable body of publications about Eckhart, and interest in him has continued to grow. Grasping the Nettle itself has been translated into Russian and was being translated into Czech. Alongside her other well-known book, Fleming Method of Relaxation for Concentration, Stress Management and Pain Control, it stands as one of her two most notable works on pain control.
Ursula Fleming was born in Liverpool in 1930 and died in London in 1992. She was educated at Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, in south west Scotland. She was married to the English tennis player Jack Darkins.
Fleming dreamed of opening a training center where she could pass on her knowledge to others, but was unable to fulfill this goal because she died of leukemia.
She wrote five books in total and featured in another. The Eckhart Society, which she co-founded in 1987, aims to promote the views of the medieval theologian Meister Eckhart. According to the society’s website, Dag Hammarskjöld, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, always had Eckhart’s works by his bedside. The Meister Eckhart Gesellschaft was established in Germany in 2004, and each year many doctoral theses are published on Eckhart in different languages.
