Mind over Matter: How to Overcome Pain through Meditation
A lot has appeared in media about the role of meditation in combating many types of illnesses, from physical to emotional pain. But often, when the media gets hold of the topic, they overestimate or underestimate what meditation really is and what it can do for us. So today, we will discuss, in detail, the science of meditation. We will also focus on how this ancient practise could benefit people who are suffering from pain, particularly those who are treatment-resistant. And finally, we will give you some techniques to use meditation in dealing with pain.
When we say pain, we don’t just refer to physical pain but also to the emotional burnout that gives us an enormous degree of discomfort such as stress, anxiety and even depression. Whilst meditation may not be the magic ‘pill’ to human illnesses, a great deal of research suggests that it does have the ability to protect us from different illnesses and enable us to fight them by strengthening our mind, body and spirit.
Pain as the Body’s Defence Mechanism
Pain might sound painful but it’s actually one of the body’s best defence mechanisms against potential threats because it teaches us not to do things that harm our body. For instance, if you’ve injured yourself after a sport activity, the pain you feel stimulates your mind to think about the circumstances that have caused you to get injured, warning you to be extra careful next time. The actual feeling of pain comes from nerve endings in your body that send signals to the brain alerting it of a trauma. Over time though, as your body repairs itself, the pain intensity becomes lower and lower until you no longer feel anything at all.
Pain also signals you that something is wrong and needs to be corrected. Imagine yourself suffering from a bone fracture or an internal bleeding. Without pain, you won’t recognise that something is wrong inside your body and you won’t feel the urge to see a doctor.
In some cases however, pain is not easily managed. Chronic pain issues like those that come with depression, for instance, can last for months, years, and even a lifetime. Although we don’t often categorise it as such, treatment-resistant depression is a chronic illness that sometimes involves disabling pain on a daily basis.
The Gate Control Theory
The human body is such a precious creation. Most of the time, it fixes issues without the help of drugs or any other treatments. For example, we have kidneys to filter our blood and keep it clean, and we have liver to keep those disease-causing toxins away.
But how does the body fight pain? This can be explained by the Gate Control Theory. This theory is based on the idea that pain signals from nerve endings are blocked by a “gate” in the spinal cord to inhibit pain. These signals are prevented from reaching higher levels in our central nervous system. Here’s how it works: Our spinal cord serves as a courier or ‘information highway’. Messages from the body are sent up the spinal cord to the brain, and vice versa. When pain signals are being sent to the brain, synapses in the spinal cord either block messages or allow them to pass through based on which are deemed immediately important. The “gate” either opens to let certain messages pass through or closes to keep too many from reaching the brain. This is how the central nervous system prioritises information, preventing the brain from becoming overloaded with messages from the body, and thus, making it possible for the brain to effectively deal with our immediate needs.
The essence of the Gate Control Theory is that if you shift your attention from pain, the transfer of pain signals slows or stops, thus, lowering the intensity of pain you experience. On the other hand, the more attention you give to it, the more the brain finds those pain signals to be important. As a result, your pain gets worse.
Meditating to Overcome Pain
So that’s where meditation comes in. Meditation serves as a way to focus our mind on something else rather than pain, plus, it shuts down our stress response so the intensity of pain decreases. But the question is – to where does meditation lead our mind?
Most experienced meditators agree that the purpose of meditation is to find happiness and well-being within – independent of the body or other things going on outside. When you meditate, your aim is to find something solid you can depend on no matter what happens to the body.
Therefore, in examining how meditation can help us, we should focus on how it can help us maintain peace of mind in the verge of pain, illness, or even death for these things are bound to happen no matter what. Actually, they are normal part of life, even though we have come to view them as ‘abnormalities’. Pain for instance, is inevitable. And only when we accept that we can’t completely and totally escape from pain do we begin to deal with it effectively.
So to make meditation work, you’ve got to accept that pain exists and it is there. The initial step to transcend pain is first to understand it, and then get acquainted with. Yes, this means enduring it. But take note that meditation serves as a way from detaching yourself from pain even though it doesn’t leave your body. So over time, even though it is still there, your body doesn’t have to suffer.
A Simple Meditation Exercise for Pain
One of the most powerful meditation techniques is the so-called ‘mindful breathing’. Breath meditation is ideal for everyone because we all do it every day. This technique didn’t come from Christianity or Buddhism, or anyone at all. Breathing is a natural gift – a special capability of our precious body. Among the meditation topics there are, it is probably the most beneficial to our body. That’s because when we’re dealing with the breath, we don’t just focus on the air coming in and out of our lungs, but also on the feelings of energy that course throughout our body with each breath. By practising meditation regularly, you can learn to become more sensitive to these feelings, you can help the body function more easily, and allow your mind to handle pain more efficiently.
But meditation, to be complete, involves three major steps. The first one is the ‘mindful relaxation’. As the term implies, it requires you to be mindful – or to be aware with the present. That’s because the purpose of meditation, which is happiness, can only be found in the present, for the past is gone and your memory of it is undependable whilst the future is blank and uncertain. In the mindful relaxation phase, you have to be truly aware of what you’re doing and whether your mind is drifting away from the present, or is drifting to sleep. If you simply relax and drift off, that’s not meditation, and you’re less likely to deal with pain through it. But if you are able to retain awareness and breathing, you are headed to the next step, which is gaining strength. It happens when all the scattered fragments of your attention – worrying about this and that, remembering what, anticipating what, etc – come together. At this point, your mind takes on a sense of wholeness and unification. This gives your mind a sense of power – the ability to take control of things, especially your emotions and responses to almost everything. As you become more and more single-minded in protecting this sense of wholeness, and become more and more sensitive to your feelings, you gain a deeper level of understanding on things that can knock it off balance. For instance, you will notice how negative emotions like fear and delusion can make your pain worse. And then, you begin to think of ways to reduce the power that these things have over your mind, until such time that you have built a level of awareness that is unaffected by these things.
Once you have mastered the technique of focusing on the breath and adjusting it so that it’s comfortable, you’ll find it easier where to focus your awareness in your body. You can direct your mind to focus solely on the pain. You can acknowledge the pain and accept that it’s happening, but not necessarily happening to you.
As your powers of concentration grow larger, you can begin to analyse the pain. The first step is to divide it into its physical and mental components. That is, distinguishing physical from mental pain – the fear that the pain won’t go away or get worse, the feeling of being persecuted, the feeling that life is being unfair to you, and so on. By being able to detach yourself from the idea that the pain is yours or is happening to you, your meditation undergoes a breakthrough. Try to see your body, pain and awareness as three separate things – like three pieces of strings that have been tied together, which you can untie. That’s the time you will realise there’s no pain you can’t endure.
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