How
Meditation Releases and Relieves Pain
Meditation can help you
face pain—without fixating on it.
At some point in their treatment, most chronic pain
sufferers are told they will have to learn to "live
with their pain," and meditation gives them the
skills to do just that. A relaxation technique that
involves focusing on your breath or a mantra to calm
your body and your mind, meditation can help someone
who suffers from pain to control and lessen it.
Meditation cultivates an
"awareness that develops when you're paying attention,
on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment,"
says Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, former executive director
of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care,
and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical
School, in Worcester, Mass. The idea is if you can calm
and focus your mind and your body you may be able to
control your pain and the degree to which you feel it.
Facing the pain
and releasing it
It's important to face your pain and the muscle tension,
sweating, and irritability that goes along with it,
explains Robert Bonakdar, MD, director of pain management
at the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine in San
Diego. The idea is to relax your body and to become
aware of your pain without judging it or fixating on
it. "Pain patients want to run away from it, but
mindfulness allows patients to go back into this dark
hole, coming to terms with the pain, and addressing
and controlling it," explains Dr. Bonakdar.
Taking the focus
away from pain
"You cannot experience pain unless you focus on
it," says Gabriel Tan, PhD, a pain psychologist
at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center,
in Houston. "Let's say you're focusing on your
pain and then the next moment a person comes into the
room with a gun and threatens to kill you; you won't
feel pain because you'll be focusing on the man with
the gun. Meditation helps you shift your focus in somewhat
the same way," explains Tan.
Mindfulness-based stress
reduction is one way of teaching meditation for chronic
pain. "The first thing we do is get you lying down
on the floor, because for patients in pain sitting can
make things worse," explains Kabat-Zinn. "For
the next 45 minutes, people do what's called a body
scan focusing on their breathing and how their body
feels in the present moment from the bottom of the foot
up the leg, through the trunk, and up to the head,"
says Kabat-Zinn. A 2007 study at the University of Basel
Hospital, in Switzerland, found that mindfulness-based
stress reduction helped fibromyalgia patients in several
ways, including coping with pain, anxiety, and depression.
A three-year follow-up found that patients who continued
to use some form of mindfulness meditation kept seeing
the benefits.
A Practical Guide
to Meditation
Meditation is the practice of focusing your attention
to help you feel calm and give you a clear awareness
about your life. Eastern philosophies have recognized
the health benefits of meditation for thousands of years.
Meditation is now widely practiced in the West, with
the belief that it has positive effects on health.
Two meditation techniques
are most commonly used: concentrative and mindful.
Concentrative meditation, such as transcendental meditation
(TM), focuses on a single image, sound, or mantra (words
spoken or sung in a pattern), or on your own breathing.
Mindful meditation, such
as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), does not
focus on a single purpose; rather, you are aware of
all thoughts, feelings, sounds, or images that pass
through your mind.
Meditation usually involves
slow, regular breathing and sitting quietly for at least
15 to 20 minutes.
What is meditation
used for?
