Meditation For Pain Relief
This article is intended to explain how meditation is an amazing tool to heal chronic physical or emotional pain.
In my other article ‘How Do I Meditate’, I explain how to practice mindfulness meditation. Now I’ll link mindfulness meditation with proven pain science, to show you why meditation is incredibly important to any chronic pain sufferer.
If you haven’t read ‘How Do I Meditate’ yet, I urge you to do so. As it will explain the four subtitles below, which are the focal points of a mindfulness meditation. Otherwise read on.
BREATH - Calms down the nervous system
Breath awareness is central to most meditation practices, and for good reason. Physiologically it calms down the autonomic nervous system, dialling down any stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol.
Chronic pain sufferers tend to exist in some sort of stress. Either physical, emotional, mental or spiritual stress.
Physical stress is exercising too much or too little, poor diet and not getting enough sleep.
Emotional stress is chronic burying of emotions.
Mental stress is the inability to cope with life's challenges.
Spiritual stress is not enjoying life, putting off creative outlets and neglecting time with loved ones.
When we’re in any kind of stress, physical, emotional, mental or spiritual, our breathing becomes dysregulated. When the breath becomes dysregulated this sends danger signals to the brain. We know from functional MRI scans (brain scans), that any danger signals in the brain can create real physical problems around the body.
Contrary to popular belief, pain is 100% created in the brain and maintained throughout the body through the autonomic nervous system. In this way, chronic pain is more of a neurological problem than a structural one.
This does NOT mean that pain is being ‘made up’ in your head, pain is 100% created in the brain even when we sustain a real physical injury. But sometimes the brain gets stuck on autopilot creating pain in the body for other emotional reasons, which we’ll get into later.
For now, the lesson here is that regular conscious breathing teaches the autonomic nervous system that there isn’t any danger. Therefore reduces the likelihood of pain being sent round the body.
BODY - Finding safety in the body
The second important focal point in mindfulness is becoming aware of the body. Whether the body is feeling relaxed, or not so relaxed, the objective is to stay focused on the body. This presents a real challenge for chronic pain sufferers, as their pain has meant that they regularly disassociate from their bodies. It’s also typical for sufferers to be fearful or get frustrated at their bodies.
Unfortunately, any chronic negative associations with the body only perpetuates the cycle of pain. So at some point in order to heal, sufferers must feel safe focusing on the body again. And mindfulness of the body is the perfect way to gently start to do so.
Any valuable trauma healing therapy entails some form of slow re-exposure to the trauma. The intention of re-exposing someone to their trauma, is to repurpose the negative association with the trauma into a safer context. Once the trauma feels safer for the person, the brain no longer needs to create disharmony round the body.
For many newcomers to meditation, mindfulness of the body is the hardest focal point to attend to. The brain may try anything it can to get us to focus away from the body, including creating common obstacles during the meditation. Read my article ‘5 Hindrances To Meditation’, if you’d like to learn more about how the brain tries to distract us. I’m certain you will relate to one or more of the hindrances.
EMOTIONS - Becoming aware of the emotions we resist
Mindfulness of emotions tends to be taught at an intermediate stage of meditation, as mindfulness of the breath and body take time to get used to. However when it comes to chronic pain recovery, emotional intelligence is a vital component.
The primary goal of mindfulness of emotions, is five fold:
The ability to identify and name an arising emotion
Noticing how the emotion makes the body feel
Assessing whether or not you’re allowing or resisting that emotion
If allowing the emotion, waiting for the next emotion to arise
If resisting the emotion, go back to stage 1 and name the emotion of ‘resistance’
That whole 5 part process can take 2 seconds or 2 minutes, it completely depends on how strong the emotion is. This form of emotional consciousness immediately sheds light on which emotions you’re allowing and which emotions you’re resisting.
Understanding how you compartmentalise emotions is important because one of the prime reasons for chronic pain is resistance to emotions. Everyone unconsciously places emotions into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ piles. The good pile has emotions which we’re happy to feel, whereas the bad pile has emotions which we don’t want to feel.
Every time an emotion from the good pile arises, the brain feels safe. However when we feel an emotion from the bad pile, the brain interprets it as dangerous. As you learnt above any type of stress, physical, emotional, mental or spiritual, will create danger signals in the brain. Emotional stress is burying an emotion which we don’t want to feel, or in the words above an emotion in the ‘bad’ pile.
So the stages are as follows:
Emotion arises we don’t want to feel
We resist feeling that emotion
Brain creates danger signals
Pain gets sent round the body
This whole process largely happens unconsciously and fairly quickly, unless you begin to practice emotional awareness. The 5 hindrances to meditation are all based on ‘negative states of mind’, all of which create emotions which most people are conditioned to resist. Restlessness creates anxiety and fear, lethargy creates boredom, ill will creates anger and resentment, sensual desire creates craving and finally doubt creates insecurity.
The antidote to all of the hindrances is to learn how to acknowledge and allow its presence, long enough so that it passes. From an emotional context, this means learning how to acknowledge and allow emotions which you usually would resist.
The more you can practise allowing emotions to be there in meditation, the more you’ll do so outside of meditation. Then there’s no longer any need for pain to be created in the body by the brain.
SOUNDS - Sensory observations
One of the primary goals of meditation is to learn how to be more present during the ordinary moments of our life. We experience the world through our five senses, so the more we can practice how to be present with our senses in meditation the more we’ll be able to be present with them in life.
Mindfulness of sounds helps to understand how the focal points interact with each other. When we become mindful of sounds during a meditation, we notice that sometimes sounds are relaxing and calm, but sometimes they’re loud and distracting. A good question to ask when becoming mindful of sounds, is what effect noticing the sounds has on the breath, body and emotions.
In this way you’ll bring the world of meditation closer to your everyday experiences of life. Do calm sounds make your breath, body and emotions feel relaxed? Or do they irritate you? Do loud sounds make you feel afraid and tight in the body?
Mindfulness of sounds is the gateway between your meditation practice and your life. So when you experience chronic physical or emotional pain during an ordinary moment of life, you’ll be in a much better position to slow down the habitual panic responses. Instead you’ll learn how to focus on your senses and how it's affecting your breathing, body and emotions.
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Follow the links below if you’d like to know more about meditation: