Meditation and Chronic Pain
A new friend has pointed me to a conversation on his blog about meditation and chronic pain. He invited me to comment since he knows I’ve got some experience with the topic.
The original questioner asks:
How do you deal with Chronic Severe Pain? It takes energy to have patience, and long term agonizing pain disrupts the spirit, makes meditation impossible, sends shock waves through the whole body constantly, relaxation cannot happen. Enlighten me.
For help in this area, I highly recommend the book Break Through Pain by Shinzen Young. It is the best book I’ve read on the subject.
I can relate to all these frustrations. My own pain, however, has not been severe. I have had chronic low-grade facial pain (3 on a 10 scale, normally) since I was a child.
Still, I have a couple suggestions that might be relevant.
Regarding what the Buddha said, what comes to mind is a teaching that goes something like this: “Ordinary people have an arrow in the mind and an arrow in the body. The enlightened person has only the arrow in the body.”
So, the idea is that, through mindfulness practice, you can remove the sources of pain that originate in the mind.
A logical next question is: Which of our pains originate in the mind and which originate in the body?
My own experience suggests that more of our pain originates in the mind than we realize. In its purest essence, most physical pain is like a grain of sand in an oyster, a small thing unto itself.
But through our reaction to the pain, its becomes bigger, more imposing, more painful. We react to the pain, often at an unconscious level, and our painful reaction adds to the pain rather than reducing it.
Through careful meditation, we can learn to tease apart these two things, our pain and our reaction to the pain. Once we clearly see the reaction, we can begin to reduce it, by relaxing our mind and body, and thus enjoy the benefits of reduced pain.
I would think that the more challenging the pain, the more challenging this task. Since I don’t know what severe long-term pain feels like, I’ll leave that discussion to someone else.
First, though, I’ll point out some useful leads for anyone with an interest in the topic. Several people have written capably on this topic. The two with which I am most familiar are Jon Kabat-Zinn and Eckhart Tolle.
Jon Kabat-Zinn has created pain management programs for people with a wide range of incurable health problems. He describes his program in the book Full Catastrophe Living, which many people have found helpful.
Courses based on his teachings are offered around the country. They’re geared toward people who have little or no experience with meditation, but who typically have exhausted their options from western medicine, and are willing to try anything that might improve their quality of life.
Kabat-Zinn’s courses have helped many people, and even form the basis for much of the research on the healthful benefits of mindfulness meditation. (For information about this research, see Ruth Baer’s excellent meta-analysis of all the studies published up through 2003.)
In my own path, I’ve found Eckhart Tolle’s teachings very helpful. Tolle has an idea that you can transform yourself through pain, by going deeply into the pain and allowing it to “burn up” unhealthy states of mind that cause you to suffer more than you need to suffer.
A good place to begin exploring Eckhart Tolle’s teachings is his book The Power of Now. I also recommend his subsequent books Stillness Speaks and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. I encourage people to buy his audio books first, as the sound of his voice can be very instructive itself.
Finally, Shinzen Young (who I mentioned at the beginning) has written very capably on the topic of acute chronic pain. Last year I looked through his book Break Through Pain: A Step-by-Step Mindfulness Meditation Program for Transforming Chronic and Acute Pain, and it was absolutely terrific.
Shinzen Young is one of the rare people who has first-hand experience with using meditation to dissolve even acute chronic pain. His story is powerful and inspiring, and his insights into the healing process are without peer, in my experience. (I actually meant to order a copy of his book last year for myself. Just ordered it now.)
I hope this bread crumb trail is useful for others who have run into chronic pain and are seeking ways to help themselves.
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