Mindful Of Painful Experience: A Path To Freedom

Mindfulness can free us from the suffering that attaches to painful experiences. Non-judgmental attention to the actual experience of pain quiets the resistance to what is happening and allows us to be with whatever is happening.

Transcript

One thing you might try to see if you can treat yourself,

A friend who would say,

Meditation,

Yourself with,

Begin by just feeling into the body and sensing how you can bring it into alignment for the meditation,

Checking for how you're sitting,

Seeing if you can sit in an alert way,

Unforced feet on the ground,

Hands resting gently,

Back straight,

Head upright,

Closing your eyes if you feel comfortable doing so,

And relaxing into the gentle rhythm of the breath,

Recognizing the motion of the in-breath,

Motion of the out-breath,

Natural calming effect,

The breath on the body and the mind,

Unhooking from thought,

Focusing for now just on the rising and falling of the chest,

Flow of the breath as it enters the body and then leaves,

There's no need to do anything,

Can simply ride the flow of the breath,

Expansion on the in-breath and the release on the out-breath.

Now you can bring to your attention some disturbance you identify in your life,

Something that preoccupies you,

Some suffering,

Physical pain,

Stress,

Worry,

Hurt,

Nothing overwhelming or traumatic for this exercise,

But just something that you are aware of where you feel that ouch,

Something you'd like to bring into this exercise.

So just call to your attention that either sensation or that memory or that feeling as experienced in the body or mind,

Pause and recognize for yourself that simply this is hard right now or I'm struggling now for where you feel it in the body,

Tightness in the belly or in the throat,

Pressure in your chest.

The teacher Jonathan Fowle says,

Our issues are in our tissues,

Sense where it's felt right now and see if you can get close to that or be intimate with that.

Next,

Recognize the simple truth that some suffering is a part of life,

Part of being human.

All human beings share the experience of some difficulty or struggle.

There's nothing wrong with you when this happens,

Part of what's normal for human experience.

Last,

Ask yourself,

How can I be kind to myself in this moment?

Might silently say to yourself,

May I be kind to myself,

Meet whatever is here,

Kindness and with care and connecting directly with whatever that stress or worry or pain is connecting with it,

With kindness and acceptance.

Try the phrases,

May I be kind to myself,

May I accept everything about myself,

Even this difficulty,

Feel safe in this space to open fully to the experience,

However difficult,

Setting the intention to cultivate kindness,

Including with this question from Thich Nhat Hanh,

Today,

Do you want to water the seeds of suffering or the seeds of joy?

In your own time,

You can come gently back,

Open your eyes,

If you wish for the talk,

You can turn on your camera,

Please enjoy seeing people during the talk.

In the 1970s,

A young professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School started going on meditation retreats.

And one day while he was working at the hospital,

He asked a doctor there,

What was the percentage of patients that the doctor actually cured?

And the doctor responded,

It was less than half.

And so the professor asked,

Well,

What happens to all those people that you don't cure?

And the doctor said,

I don't know,

We never see them again.

So this professor decided that he wanted to try to start teaching meditation to those with chronic conditions,

Particularly chronic pain,

Or sometimes people who had as a secondary condition or secondary diagnosis,

Anxiety or panic attacks.

With two interests in mind,

He wanted to treat the patients who were otherwise untreatable,

But also he was interested in studying scientifically the effect of mindfulness.

So the course that he established was eight weeks,

It was two and a half hours a session once a week,

And each person was asked to commit to meditate 45 minutes a day.

They interviewed them later and they found out actually it was more like 30 minutes that they actually meditated.

And then they had a day at the end.

So eight weeks in all.

He decided to call it mindfulness-based stress reduction,

MBSR,

Without mentioning meditation,

Because most of the people he was working with in the 70s,

Meditation was a foreign concept for some other way,

Described the experience.

The studies that he did have been replicated many times since,

And I'll just quote from one.

It said that MBSR has shown to diminish the habitual tendencies to emotionally react and ruminate about transitory thoughts and about physical sensations,

Reduce stress,

Depression,

Anxiety symptoms,

Amplify immune functioning,

Enhance behavior self-regulation.

And later MRI studies showed that this eight-week course actually changed the structure of brains of the participants.

And that further studies showed the effects persisted after three or four years of this eight-week course.

The young professor,

Some of you may know,

Was John Kabat-Zinn.

And this MBSR is now taught in thousands of medical facilities around the country.

So what is it that mindfulness has to offer when we experience pain,

Whether that's physical pain or emotional pain?

And I'd like to start just with a clarification that for anyone who is in pain,

The first thing is to try to treat it however possible medically.

So we're not looking for pain.

We're talking about pain,

Emotional or physical,

That persists even after we've done whatever we can do otherwise.

There's three guideposts I just wanna call out for you during this talk to answer this question about what is mindfulness of pain.

The first is,

And probably the most important lesson that mindfulness can teach is summed up in a phrase,

Which I think exists outside of this context,

Which is,

The only way out is in.

The only way out is in.

And you remember the sessions that we had on mindfulness of feeling tone,

Where three things happen very quickly.

And the idea in mindfulness is actually to slow it down a little bit and to see if we can identify each one separately.

The first is,

Whatever the sensation is,

You experience contact with that,

Direct contact for pain or for anything else.

The second is this natural sorting mechanism that the mind provides between unpleasant sensations,

Pleasant sensations and ones that are really neither,

Just neutral.

So for pain,

Obviously,

The light goes on immediately,

Unpleasant.

And then the third thing,

Which happens very quickly,

Is that for unpleasant,

Our natural reaction is to resist and to push away anything that's unpleasant.

And I think we all learn from experience that there are two fundamental disadvantages to this resistance reaction.

One is,

It doesn't make the pain go away.

It usually,

It somehow promises to us that it's gonna have some effect,

But the resistance itself does not decrease the pain.

And furthermore,

It adds often a layer of judgment on top of the pain about the experience,

That this is unfair,

Or this is never gonna end,

Or I can't live with this.

And those judgments can be the most painful thing about the whole experience.

So what began as a bodily sensation or emotional reaction could end with this feeling of distress or hopelessness,

Or even kind of catastrophizing to feeling like,

Well,

This is it,

My life is over.

The simple equation that's sometimes mentioned in these discussions,

Which is pain,

It's the initial reaction,

The initial contact,

The sensation,

Pain times resistance equals suffering.

Pain times resistance equals suffering.

So to the degree to which we resist the pain itself,

Then that,

Instead of diminishing,

Will actually increase the suffering.

Or there's another saying that goes to the same point,

Which is pain is inevitable,

Suffering is optional.

Pain is inevitable,

Suffering.

And these studies with the MBSR patients identified that for many,

The actual suffering,

The experience of suffering,

Was decreased dramatically through mindfulness,

Sometimes by more than half the suffering itself.

So the inquiry then is whether we can drop the resistance and shift attention to the pain itself and experience just that,

Rather than what's layered on top.

There's an old joke about the therapist who tells her client that she should go on a long meditation retreat because it will help her feel better.

So she goes for a few days and gets there,

High expectations.

And,

But immediately she starts getting frustrated because she can't meditate right.

And she starts to feel upset about that.

And then she starts to feel angry at her father.

She starts to think about who used to criticize her and on and on it goes,

Just one bad experience after another.

As she gets back finally to talk to the therapist and complains and said,

Well,

You know,

You were wrong.

I don't feel better at all.

In fact,

Quite the reverse and explains the experience and the therapist responds,

Oh no,

It sounds like it actually worked perfectly.

You were able to feel the frustration better.

You were able to feel the anger better and so forth and so on.

This from the poet,

Dana Fields,

Resists and the tides will sweep you off your feet.

Grace will carry you to higher ground.

We begin with the nonjudgmental awareness,

Which is precisely what mindfulness is.

Nonjudgmental awareness of this contact with the pain,

The distress,

What's happening.

Is it pressure?

Is it throbbing?

Is it aching?

What is it?

And for the first time,

Find out what the pain is.

And this shift allows us to feel it in an unguarded way,

To be alone with it,

To feel actually that you don't need protection from it,

That you can be with it.

This essence of mindfulness,

Which is really the ability to be with ourselves without needing to look for something else in this moment.

If pain is particularly intense,

Then the teaching is to be careful,

To titrate,

You might say,

To take the pain as much as you can,

But then if it feels like it's too much to pull back,

And if you then feel like it's safe to go back again to do so.

And I think the experience for many people is that in doing this,

The pain will often shift or change or even diminish as you focus simply this nonjudgmental awareness on the experience itself.

And if the mind responds by saying,

I just can't do this,

Or I can't live with this,

You can ask,

Well,

Can you be with it for just this one moment,

And then this moment,

And then the next moment,

Not focusing on a forever,

But just what's here right now.

The next guidepost is something I mentioned in the meditation,

Which is to recall that all humanity experiences pain and difficulty of some type,

That it's not personal in that way,

Or not ultimately about me or you.

We don't need to look for someone to blame or to live life as the Buddha said,

Is to experience the 10,

000 joys and the 10,

000 sorrows.

Or this from Joseph Campbell,

We must let go of the life we have planned so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

And the last guidepost is also what I mentioned in the meditation,

Kindness.

You might say that the experience of pain is a cry for attention from the body or mind.

And when we start to explore the pain itself,

The sensations,

You can ask,

What do you want from me?

You're calling out to me,

What do you want from me?

The answer is often,

I'm looking for kindness.

Can we treat ourselves with kindness instead of self-judgment?

Can we substitute self-kindness?

And can then we feel the difference between treating ourselves with self-judgment versus self-kindness?

And you can do this in a formal way with these phrases,

May you be well,

Or may you be at ease.

Or you can also just sometimes mentally whisper to yourself,

It's all right,

Dear,

The way a friend would.

Or you can with touch,

Place a hand on the heart,

And she,

Or two hands on both cheeks,

And just feel that touch.

Another teacher said,

We can control very little in life,

But the one thing we can control is how we treat ourselves.

So maybe we'll conclude with another brief meditation,

If you like.

Again,

Go back inside,

Close your eyes if you feel comfortable.

So,

And just reconnect for a moment,

Some kind of physical or emotional pain or distress that you may experience.

And you can slow things down,

Focus just on the unpleasantness of the experience itself,

And what it feels like dropping into the sensations in the body connected with the experience,

And their location,

Their intensity,

Contour.

For this moment,

See whether you can drop any resistance and be with whatever is here,

Just as it is,

As it like to be with it,

Just for this brief time,

Getting to know it,

Welcoming it,

Making friends with it,

Treating it with kindness.

Just stay right here.

And closing this experience with a few rounds,

Deep cleansing breaths,

And gently back as we conclude with these words,

Jennifer Wellwood,

Poem called,

Unconditional.

Willing to experience aloneness,

I discover connection everywhere.

Opening to my loss,

I gain the embrace of the universe.

Surrendering into emptiness,

I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me.

Each condition I welcome transforms me.

Reviews

This session was so good that I had to take notes in hope that I do not forget😊