Tag: dealing with pain

Happiness Through Mindfulness

Shinzen Young, an internationally renowned meditation teacher, identified multiple ways that mindfulness meditation can contribute to our experience of happiness. In one of his videos – titled Why Meditate? – he identifies five specific aspects contributing to happiness that are enhanced by meditation. I will discuss these aspects below.

Five ways meditation contributes to happiness

  1. Managing pain – neuroscience research strongly supports the view that meditation can reduce the suffering experienced by people in chronic pain. Jon Kabat-Zinn, through his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program, has shown that meditation can provide genuine pain relief. Diana Winston highlights the fact that pain is an inevitable part of human existence, but we have the choice through meditation of reducing our sense of pain (which is often exacerbated by the stories we tell ourselves and others about being-in-pain). She offers a meditation practice for dealing with pain.
  2. Heightened fulfillment – a sense of satisfaction from doing what you set out to do or realising some aspects of what you see as your real purpose in life. Stephen Cope explains how meditation can assist us to progress along the four-stage path to realising and actioning our true purpose.
  3. Understanding our self – Shinzen maintains that meditation leads to a deep level of self-understanding, learning who we really are. This self-awareness develops through meditation as we progressively challenge our self-stories and negative self-evaluation.
  4. Improvements in behaviour – through meditation we can identify our reactivity and the inappropriate ways we behave. We can also develop the intention to change our behaviour, the motivation to realise this change and the reinforcement of the change through savouring achievements in desired behavioural change.
  5. Contribution through selfless service – a spirit of serving the needs of others and helping them to realise happiness in their lives. This sense of service brings its own personal rewards and, according to Richard Barrett, represents the highest level of psychosocial development. Shinzen argues that this level of achievement is the natural outcome from realising the other four aspects of happiness mentioned above.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation we can suffer less from our pain, experience fulfillment in our life, develop a deeper self-understanding, achieve desired behavioural changes and be in a good place personally to contribute to the service of others and their achievement of happiness. In turn, we will enhance our own experience of happiness and the equanimity of a life well-lived.

____________________________________________


Image by Shahid Shafiq from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Mindfulness and Dealing with Pain

Diana Winston in her meditation podcast, Working with Pain, offers some suggestions on how meditation can be used to alleviate and/or manage pain better.  She highlights the fact that along with pain are the stories that we tell ourselves about the pain we are experiencing, e.g. “This pain will never go way.”, This is ruining my life.”, “I cannot cope with this pain.”  Diana suggests that the stories aggravate the suffering we experience with pain and only serve to amplify the pain through their negativity.

Pain and suffering are part of being human as we are reminded by the Buddhist tradition.  Diana quotes the often repeated saying, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”, to remind us that we have choices in how we deal with pain.  So, we are left with the challenge of managing the pain that occurs at different points of our life, whether the pain of loss or physical pain in some part or all of our body.   Dealing with chronic pain through mindfulness has been the focus of a lot of the pioneering work of Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Meditation for working with pain

Diana provides a meditation exercise for working with pain in her podcast mentioned above.  The meditation practice involves several discrete steps and is about 20 minutes in length:

1. Grounding – feet on the ground, arms relaxed on your lap or beside you (h0wever is comfortable), eyes closed or looking downwards, a few deep breaths to relax your body.

2. Focus on your breathing – focus your attention on wherever you can feel your breathing in your body (nose, mouth, chest, stomach). Don’t try to control you breathing but just notice it, e.g. the undulations of your stomach.  Get in touch with your in-breath and out-breath and the space between.  You can rest in the space.

3. Body scan – explore your body with your attention, noting as you progress from your head to your toes any points of tightness, tingling or other sensation.  Just notice as your attention moves over your body and let go as you experience the sensation. (The art of noticing is integral to mindfulness practice.)

4. Refocus on your breathing – now return to mindful breathing (3 above).  Spend a reasonable amount of time resting in this focus – about 10 minutes say.

5. Focus on a relaxed part of your body – the aim is to locate in your body a part (e.g. arm, leg, chest) that feels secure, relaxed, at peace and pain-free.  Rest for a time in this relaxed part of your body to enable the sensation of peace and calm to spread through your body.

6. Focus on your pain – now focus on that part of your body where you are experiencing the ongoing pain.  Feel the sensation of the pain and describe the sensation to yourself.  Now focus on the stories you have developed around the pain and let them go – they are fabrications created by your fight/flight response.  If you can, bring your focus to a point outside the area of pain as a prelude to completing the next step.

7. Re-focus on the relaxed part of your body – experience the restfulness here.

8. Re-focus on your breathing – gradually bring your attention back to your breathing.  After a time of mindful breathing, resume your daily activity.

As we grow in mindfulness though meditation, we can learn ways to reduce pain or better manage pain so that we can function normally.  It is important to master our stories that aggravate our suffering from pain.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of dimitrisvetsikas1969 on Pixabay

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.