For this meditation on working with pain.
The invitation is to choose a meditative position that allows you to be alert and relaxed,
And also allows you to feel some of the pain that you may be experiencing.
Not so much that you feel overwhelmed,
But definitely present in your awareness.
Please know that the purpose of this meditation is to work with our relationship with the pain,
But not in any way to feel overwhelmed by it.
If at any point it begins to feel like the pain is overwhelming,
Please feel free to make adjustments as necessary,
Or even to come out of the meditation.
So we'll begin by bringing awareness to the breath.
Just simply feeling the breath coming in and out of the body,
Sensing the whole body expanding with each in-breath,
And contracting with each out-breath.
Simply resting in the breath,
While also aware of whatever pain may be here.
We might do some brief body scans.
So I'll invite you to bring your attention to your feet,
And then imagine that your attention can just sweep up your body from your feet,
Through your legs,
Through your torso,
And at the same time the hands and arms,
Through the shoulders and neck,
And right up to the top of the head,
Perhaps even right outside the top of the head,
And then sweeping back down,
Back from the head down to the feet.
As you allow your attention to sweep through the body,
You will pass over parts of the body that may be experiencing pain.
Just simply notice what happens as you allow the attention to simply go by,
Noticing the places where there's pain,
But also noticing the places in the body that may be pleasant.
Seeing if we can begin to come to some degree of ease or relaxation,
Even in the presence of pain.
And now choosing a place of pain to bring your attention to.
Bringing it lightly,
Not an intense attention,
But rather a gentle attention,
Just kind of lighting on the place of pain,
Much like a butterfly would light on a flower.
And beginning to notice if there's any judgment that's here,
Any part of you that's pushing the pain away,
Perhaps even calling it a name such as pain or bad.
If you're aware of such an experience,
Noticing how that judgment affects the pain and affects the rest of the body.
We might begin to play with the possibility of letting the judgment go.
To beginning to just get a sense that these are just sensations,
And while they may be unpleasant,
They're just sensations.
In this moment,
They have no particular meaning.
Can we let the sensations just be?
It might be helpful to imagine that you can breathe through the sensations,
Directing the breath right through the experience,
Again in a light way,
So that we don't make the experience too intense.
We might notice too if there is any tension or holding or armoring of the rest of the body because of judgment or fear.
And if we find such sensations,
Maybe a tightening in the belly or the chest,
We might breathe through those sensations too,
Bringing a softening,
A warming,
A releasing,
A letting go.
You might bring yourself some compassion for the experience of the pain.
You might start by putting an open hand over your chest and letting the warmth of that hand just sink into the body,
Receiving it,
Receiving a tenderness and a kindness.
You might also tell yourself some phrases,
Some phrases of compassion,
Such as,
I'm sorry,
I'm sorry,
You have to have this experience,
And I love you,
Or this is hard,
Or many people experience this,
It's not just me,
Or maybe it's like this,
This experience is just like this,
Can I be with it without pushing it away?
You might have some other phrases for yourself,
And offering those to yourself that will allow you to begin to come to greater ease in the presence of the pain.
And now we can experiment with widening the awareness,
So that while the pain is present,
We can open our awareness really wide,
As big as the room,
Or even bigger,
Letting your mind be like the sky,
A wide open awareness,
And noticing how your relationship to the pain changes under this circumstance.
Whenever the pain seems to be getting too intense,
One of the ways that you can work with that is to let your mind expand,
Let your awareness open up as wide as it needs to be,
So that the pain becomes just a small part of your overall experience.
You can do this at any time.
And now bringing your attention back to the region of pain,
Bringing your attention to your breath,
Having a good sense of feeling the breath,
Coming in and out,
And really just resting in the experience of breath,
And then beginning to examine the area where the pain is occurring,
Using your mind to be really curious about your experience.
You might choose,
For instance,
To go deep into the pain and to begin to explore various parts of the pain,
Noticing how it shifts and changes over space and time,
And with bringing attention.
You might notice what makes it calmer and what makes it more intense,
Just becoming really curious about it,
And knowing that if it starts to get too intense,
You can always back off.
You can make your attention less intense.
You can move your attention to another part of the body that's not in pain.
You can open your awareness wide and then come back again when you're ready.
As we explore,
We want to get to know the pain.
It's part of us.
It's part of our makeup at this point in time,
And we want to begin to really understand it at a deeper and deeper level.
We also might notice over time that our relationship to the pain changes as we keep bringing attention to it.
We might find,
For instance,
That at some point,
If we bring attention long enough,
That it actually stops drawing our attention.
Sometimes the pain itself disappears.
Sometimes it just falls to the background and ceases to bring our attention.
And so we'll spend the last few minutes of this meditation in an open awareness.
So I invite you to bring your attention to the breath,
The entire breath,
And the entire breath and the body together,
So that your body is like a bellows.
With each in-breath,
The body expands.
With each out-breath,
The body contracts.
And we simply rest in this experience of breath and body.
And from here,
We simply open our awareness to whatever shows up,
Letting emotions or body sensations or thoughts or sounds rise in our consciousness.
Stay a while and go.
If we notice any experience that we start to cling to it or want to push it away,
We see if we can relax that.
Relax the experience of clinging.
Relax the experience of pushing away.
And simply letting the phenomena come,
Stay a while,
And go.
The awareness of the pain may be here,
But we leave it in a peripheral awareness,
Just in the background.
As we let any phenomena show up,
We watch it and let it go.
