After some severe flare-ups of pain, and with medication failing me, I’ve had to figure out another way to manage things. I found this Tara Brach video to be surprisingly helpful, so I’ve summarized her salient points below. What I like about her technique is that unlike other meditative practices for pain, she recognizes the fact that “being with the pain” can be dangerously exhausting for most people.
Common Unskillful Responses to Pain
- Making the pain an enemy (this is bad, it’s unfair, it shouldn’t be happening)
- Dissociating (distracting yourself and escaping into the mind)
- Running stories (What else will go wrong? How long will it last? How will it affect my life? How will it get worse? How can I steel myself for what’s around the corner?)
- Obsessing over relief strategies
- Self-blame (I always overdo things, I can’t take care of myself)
- Blaming others (another dissociation method)
I can only speak for myself, but these methods are the bread and butter of my instinctive response to pain. I can’t count the number of hours spent mentally cycling through each of these, with unsurprisingly poor results.
Symptoms of pain being made an enemy
- Exhaustion; it takes a lot of energy to wall off pain so you get tired more often
- Tense; contracting in response to pain causes more tension in the body
- Apprehension; pushing away everything in your life as it all seems ‘too much’
- Alienation; pulling away from the natural experience of pain makes us lose connection to our friends, families, communities and become smaller
- Fixation; pain tends to shrink our consciousness to just the parts of ourselves that are hurting
Although resistance to pain is the normal reaction, the first step involves forgiving yourself for resisting the pain, as the counter-reaction to resistance is blaming ourselves for resisting (the untrained mind’s a real piece of work, ain’t it).
Skillful Ways to Respond to Pain
- Notice & forgive resistance
- Become interested (What is this constellation of sensation like? How is it changing? Where is it? What is it communicating?)
- Friendliness (see how kind you can be to your body & yourself)
- Sense the space (try to find something in your consciousness beyond the fixated sensation of pain)
She goes on to expand on the last point into a technique that I can vouch has helped with a significant reduction in subjective misery, namely that of pendulating.
There are two components to pendulating, zone 1 and zone 2.
Zone 1 is noticing and labeling the pain.
Zone 2 is meant to find more space and freedom from fixation on pain by finding parts of consciousness that have either neutral or pleasant sensations. She brings up her hands as an example of something that tends to be reliably neutral, but for people with arthritis or whose bodies are minefields of pain, she mentions the possibility of using both sounds and colours at hand.
The idea is to find your second zone and stay with it as long as you can, until you feel brave enough to dip back in to the first zone where your pain predominates your consciousness. The more you practice, the closer you can get to feeling the space as well as the contact with the painful sensation, without struggle or a back & forth.
As a final reminder, when pain is really intense, being with it is not always the best way. At times, it’s wise to take a break and go into a different world; watching a movie, listening to music, spending time with loved ones. We can become exhausted by staying with pain. But remember that extended periods of staying away from your own body means continued self-alienation.
Remember that it’s always possible to find a larger space beyond the narrow confines of pain; she ends with this beautiful poem by Rumi called Wean Yourself:
little by little wean yourself.
this is the gist of what i have to say.from an embryo, whose nourishment comes in blood
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food, to a searcher for wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
you might say, the world outside is vast and intricate.
there are wheat fields and mountain passes
and orchards in bloom.at night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.you ask the embryo, why stay cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed?listen to the answer:
there is no “other world.”
i only know what i have experienced.
you must be hallucinating.
