Pain Meditation
"Meditating on pain is like kissing a frog. When you accept it, it changes". Eric Harrison
| Pain Meditation |
| Kind of Meditation |
insight/goal-directed |
| Degree of difficulty |
more advanced students |
| Advised duration |
5 to 15 minutes |
| Posture |
Lying or Sitting |
| Advantages |
+ you learn to accept
+ letting go of the emotional side of the pain
+ it changes the character of the pain
+ often is also reduces the pain after some time
|
| Remarks |
A very beautiful and effective exercise that is rather difficult and teaches you how to deal with pain. |
By means of Meditation, we can learn to observe the pain without getting influenced by its emotional aspects. We direct our attention to the experience of discomfort and try to welcome this as a challenge instead of something painful. This gives us a chance to observe our automatic reactions and the process of losing our concentration and getting irritated. Observe how body and mind react to each other. Learn to accept the discomforts and learn to remain relaxed while experiencing them. When you accept the pain, its character and its intensity change. The emotional side disappears into the background and the physical pain remains. The sensation of the pain itself is often much easier to accept than all possible thoughts of doom, emotional pains, fears, and frustrations that are caused by our brain. In Meditations, 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 goes to your pain and you try to research the area of pain like an investigator. Kabat Zinn advises you to ask yourself, when you are in the centre of the pain, how bad the pain really is. In many cases, according to him, you will discover that it is quite bearable. As is the case with any Meditation, we try not to judge, we try not to get angry with ourselves when things do not go so well, and we try not to be too goal-oriented. Let us begin!
Pain Meditation Exercise
- Sit down, close your eyes, and focus all your concentration on your breathing.
- Be aware of every breathing in and every breathing out.
- Let your breathing be something automatic. Do not try to steer it.
- If you feel a little nervous, first do a normal Concentration Meditation.
- When you are relaxed enough, you can start the Pain Meditation.
- Try to investigate, to feel, and to experience the pain area.
- Use your breathing to relax the area.
- Play with the pain by means of concentration and curiosity.
- Go further and further to the centre of the pain. When the discomfort becomes bigger, take more distance and vice versa.
- Keep your breathing loose and free. Do not be achievement-oriented or tense as if you are at the dentist's.
- Pay attention to what goes through your mind when you concentrate on your pain.
- Let the pain be as it is.
- Before you stop, it is advisable to continue with the Meditation with which you had started the Pain Meditation to get relaxed.
- Then slowly take your attention back to the rest of your body and the sounds in the room. Move a little, stretch your muscles, and open your eyes.
- Finished!
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Basics & Backgrounds
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