Articles

Coping with Pain Mindfully by Steven Flowers, M.F.T.

Pain is our most immediate experience at birth and accompanies us through life in its many forms and expressions. We all respond as best as we can and learn many ways to cope, but if physical pain remains chronic and intractable even though we are doing all we can and receiving the best medical interventions available, we may still be able to help ourselves more than anyone else can by practicing mindfulness.

The practice of Mindfulness Meditation is based on observing rather than controlling and this applies to how we cope with pain as well as all other things. You might say its showing up for whatever is happening. As pain is a part of living we do what we can to relate to it with as much awareness and skill as possible, observing it with as little judgment and with as much curiosity as we can. In practice this involves opening up to the raw sensations themselves, whatever they might be. The instruction is to distinguish what are bare sensations and what is the reactive-ness of the mind. You can become aware of thoughts and feelings you are having about the sensations and discover that you are talking about them to yourself with words like pain or misery. These are just thoughts. Words. They are not the experience itself although we may come to think of them as the experience itself.

When you really pay attention to whats going on inside your head you discover all sorts of thoughts and feelings besides your immediate sensations. Its like there is an internal commentator that is somewhat of a mischief-maker that chatters on and on about whats happening and spews out self-talk like, This is killing me, or I cant handle this any longer. All of these comments are extra. None of them are the pain itself and many of these comments are just plain untrue. They reflect our natural resistance to what we dont want to accept. I read once that {suffering = resistance x pain}. When we resist the sensations we have labeled pain we increase our suffering. You dont have to resist pain. You dont have to suffer.
In mindfulness we see that our awareness of sensations, thoughts and feelings is different from the sensations, thoughts and feelings themselves - that with pain, the part of you that is aware is not itself in pain or ruled by these thoughts and feelings at all. It knows them but is it itself is free of them. This is a state of awareness that can be characterized as a witnessing perspective. It is a kind of stillness and being with things in an inclusive way, attentive to but not entranced by the stories we tell ourselves.
Through mindfulness we can realize a kind of knowing or sense of being that eludes us when we are striving or grasping for any kind of goal. This is why mindfulness is characterized as non-striving. Its the state of consciousness we enter into when all the questions have stopped, when all the efforts to get somewhere other than where we are have dropped. Mindfulness is a kind of meditation that involves not doing anything at all but being here, awake and attentive. Mindfulness is called beginners mind because we are always forgetting all this and having to reorient to the only moment there is, the present moment, and begin again. It is practiced as a way of life, a way of being here and now in a state of relaxed alertness.

Its really quite novel to be free from goal orientation. Getting to some goal or another fills most of the waking moments of our lives from a very early age. Its how weve all been trained. Using the skills of mindfulness, you can learn to be with pain or any kind of stress in an active way. As the pain is now. As you are now. Not as you once were or would be but as you are now. Allowing the sensation youve labeled pain to just be there and being with it deliberately, as a kind of curious thing to be investigated.

Sit on the edge of it and feel into it. Just as you might rest into the edge of a yoga posture, waiting for a release. Investigate it. See if you can relate to it in another way. Open to it in a way that will help you know it. Sit with it. Dont oppose it. Dont create resistance to it. As you open into the reality of things as they are you may find that it has been your own way of looking at things that is your greatest trouble maker and the one thing that you really can do for yourself is soften and reorient your own perspective, your own way of relating to this condition which is actually the only life you have right now.

There is a range of response available to you from the hard fist of resistance on one end to the open hand of allowance on the other. On the knotted end you can investigate how you resist things and get a closer look at the process through which you exacerbate pain by becoming more mindful of your own internal dialogue and beliefs and how they affect what you do with your body. Some thoughts create an immediate contracting, others, an immediate release. Like entrapping your fingers even more in Chinese handcuffs by the very struggle to get out of them or discovering that you can free your fingers by actually going towards that which you have been avoiding. Sometimes the harder you struggle to get somewhere the more stuck you get.

As you learn to observe your own way of resisting things you may see how you sometimes bring upon yourself the very things you are trying to avoid. You may discover how your way of thinking may exacerbate the condition you are trying to escape from. You can learn to recognize those thoughts that just keep you stuck and learn to disentangle yourself from their habitual patterns. You might actually get off your old train of thought and discover that it had a lot to do with the very pain experience you were running away from which somehow subsided as you stepped off the train. Obviously, it is clear from the dramatic differences in the ways that people experience pain that it is strongly mediated by our consciousness, by how we look at it. The experience of pain by a Native American who is engaged in the Sacred Sun Dance ritual will be dramatically different from a person who was subjected to the same physical trauma by way of an assault or traumatic accident or torture. The battlefield injury that represents a ticket home will hurt less than a very similar injury that represents the end of a beloved career or livelihood.
Pain is not just pain. What the pain means to you will influence the nature of the pain. The body makes specific chemicals in response to thoughts and feelings. Deepak Chropra expressed this phenomenon as wherever a thought goes a chemical goes. Some thoughts and perspectives release natural painkillers, while others release chemicals and hormones that actually exacerbate the experience of pain. To even notice how our thoughts are affecting us we have to find some way to observe what we are thinking and unless we have a mindfulness practice we rarely observe our own internal dialog with any detachment. In fact we are usually completely identified with our thoughts and other mental and emotional formations and rarely step aside to look at them as an object of awareness.

Its clear to me - what a person can do depends on their beliefs about what they can do. Your life is going to take the shape of just what you think life is. If you are looking for whats wrong with you thats exactly what youll find. If you are looking for whats right with you, thats what fills up your life. Your attitude powerfully affects your actual experience. In fact it may well be that the distress of any given experience consists of 10% of what is happening and 90% our way of looking at it. We may create our lives as the poet Rumi says, by watering the fruit trees, not the thorns. Our way of employing awareness, our way of attending to the world is in a very large measure creative and if we bring the fullness of our attention into being the most we can be in whatever the circumstances of our lives, we may in fact heal our lives no matter what is our condition. The author and teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn coined one of my favorite definitions of the word heal as coming to terms with things as they are. Surely this is one of the most powerful contributions that mindfulness practice can make to the painful experiences of our lives, whether they are bodily conditions or the myriad other ways that we encounter and face the inevitable pains of living. We dont have to suffer. We can at least acknowledge things as they are and let them be and perhaps, in time come to realize the gifts of acceptance and letting go.