How Meditating Helps in Dealing with Pain
Unfortunately, Meditation is not a form of magic that can deliver you from pain at once. Meditation often alters the way people experience pain. Meditators have an experience of thousands of years of dealing with pain. Sitting up straight for prolonged periods of time often results in aches. The sharpened awareness and the heightened presence cause people to experience things, including acute pains. Pain caused by injuries and other aches can strongly influence the Meditation and make it very hard to meditate well. Meditators are used to dealing with these pains while meditating and in the course of thousands of years, they have developed techniques that can help us all. If we want to be relaxed, alert, present both now and in the future, we must be able to deal with pain and to accept pain. On the other hand: Meditation as a method to relax can be very effective in improving our blood supply, the relaxation of our muscles, and the way we interrupt stress reactions. Other Benefits of Meditation include reducing the degree to which we feel pain and tackling the possible mental causes of pain. On this page, you can read more about dealing with pain with the help of Meditation.
Scientific Research: Meditation and Pain
Before we start talking about dealing with pain through Meditation, we should first have a look at the scientific foundation of our ideas regarding this subject. We have put some results of scientific research together:
- Relaxation techniques like Meditation help to reduce the heart beat and the blood pressure. They help to relax the muscles. All these factors help people to reduce their pain awareness. This was discovered by Julius Richmond, M.D., professor at Harvard's Department of Social Medicine.
- Research done by Kabat-Zinn, MD (the founder of the stress reduction clinic of Massachusetts University where more than 14,000 people attended the stress reduction programme) shows a significant reduction of pain sensations, negative views of one's body, pain symptoms, the inability to engage in activities, negative moods, and stress caused by his stress reduction programme that is principally based on Meditation Techniques. Of the patients with a pain history of 6 to 7 years, 30 to 55% report a great improvement in the way they experience their pain. Likewise, 60 to 70% experienced a considerable improvement. These improvements lasted for at least four years after the course. Control groups of similar patients showed no improvements.
- Herbert Benson, MD, at Harvard University, who brought about a breakthrough in Meditation research in the seventies, has demonstrated that chronic pain patients who took part in his "behavioural medicine program" of which meditating is an important aspect visited the pain clinic of the hospital 36% less often during the first two years after finishing the programme.
- Many forms of research have shown that people who practice Meditation usually use far less pain-killing medication.
Using Meditation to Deal with Pain
During Meditations, we deal with Meditation in the same way as we deal with pain. Observing, accepting, and letting go are the keywords here and with the help of these, we become more and more an observer instead of a victim of our discomfort. Just like we do during Insight Meditations, we sometimes look for the pain and make the pain our object of Meditation. By means of Meditation, we can learn to observe the pain without being affected by the emotional side of it. We direct our attention to the awareness of the discomfort and try to welcome the discomfort as a challenge instead of something unpleasant. This gives us a chance to observe our automatic reactions and the process of losing our concentration and getting irritated. Observe how our body and our mind react to each other. Learn to accept the discomfort and learn to stay calm and relaxed at times when you feel it. When you accept the pain, its character and its intensity change. The emotional side disappears into the background and what remains is the physical pain. The sensation of the pain itself is often a lot easier to bear than all possible doom visions, emotional pains, fears, and frustrations that are caused by our thoughts. In Meditations that are meant to combat pain, the pain itself becomes the object of Meditation. Instead of suppressing the pain or fighting it, you try to welcome the pain and to accept it. All your attention is focused on the pain and you try to examine the pain area as a researcher. Kabat Zinn advises you to ask yourself, at the moment when you are in the centre of the pain, how bad the pain really is. According to him you will often discover that it is quite bearable.
TIP: Read more about using Meditation to deal with pain in John Kabat Zinn's Handbook Meditative Relaxation.
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