Pain While Meditating? Here Is What To Do.

In this session we discuss what to do when pan arises during meditation. Chances are that we are aiming for an ongoing practice that we can do daily. Pushing though significant pain will not be conducive and may cause us to stop. I suggest that you explore the pain when it is tolerable/small, but if it becomes overwhelming move the body mindfully and continue meditating. It is okay to shift and adjust when needed!

Transcript

When meditating on pain, Are there times where the pain or the tension is too much? Should I continue with the practice for longer or shorter? Or just be okay with what the experience was? So pain is interesting. My first answer is that our goal with our meditation practice is to continue practicing ideally daily, Maybe more times than once a day, Right? Is to bring mindfulness into our life. So whatever answer you give has to serve that more global purpose. If you find that in a meditation, You're gritting and bearing through pain, And that makes you not want to practice anymore, You need to change how you're dealing with pain. That's the first caveat. And then the second caveat is, Is that if the pain becomes unbearable, Right, We can mindfully focus on a little bit of pain. If you were to, You know, Pinch your arm, There's a little bit of pain there, Right? But it's a level of pain that is tolerable. We don't like it. Pain is adversive. We want to push away from it. We want to stop pinching our own arm. But it's small relative to pain we could experience. If the pain is tolerable, If it's manageable, If you can deal with it, So to speak, Comfortably, And I say comfortably in quotations, For the duration of the session, Sit with it. Okay? Look at it, Explore it, Treat it like another stimulus that you're just getting curious about, And you'll find that you're able to dissect the component parts and go deep. And there's a lot of insight to be found there, And I strongly encourage you to do so. However, Sometimes pain is really intense, Or the pain comes in waves. If you find during a session that it is simply too much, That you're doing the mindful focus, And it's just there's an intensity, It is too much for you in this moment. Give yourself a tiny little pause where you pay attention mindfully to that intensity, So you're still experiencing it, And then shift, Then move, Then end the session. So you're still attempting to feel it, Still attempting to mindfully observe it. And if that doesn't shift it or change it in a way that is tolerable, Stop the session, Move the body, Focus somewhere else. Right? And then you can come back to it. Vipassana, Which is like an extension of mindfulness basically, Involves you, They get you breathing and focusing on the breath at the nose, Then they get you scanning the body. You scan each part of the body in turn, Part by part, Piece by piece, Or just as almost like a flow. And as you sit there, They have you sitting there for an hour in something they call strong determination, And the goal is not to move. I discovered this when I was doing a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat. And in that experience, It's like you are basically training as a monk, You are going deep. So they said, Do not move, Like really feel through the pain, Go deep. And this was after, Say, Four days of 10 hours a day meditation where we could shift and move, And then like on the fourth day, For one hour in the morning, One hour in the afternoon, One hour at night, You don't move. For that hour, You stay there and you feel through it. And it was very challenging. But there was something that happened. I was feeling and there was a point of pain in my back, And it felt more intense than anything I've felt before, Like I was getting stabbed with fire, Like incredible amounts of pain, But I sat with it and felt it. And eventually, As I was feeling the component parts and doing the mindfulness on it and just there, Eventually it just disappeared. It just left. And in that space was this peace and mental like, It's sort of beyond expression. It disappeared. And there was this peace that lasted, I couldn't tell you, Somewhere from five to 15 minutes. And then the body came back and then kept going with the process. Because even that experience was pleasurable. They're like, Just feel that and move on, Move past it. Keep just feeling what's arising. The point I'm saying is, Is that you can work with deep pain, But it requires a level of practice and depth that goes well beyond a short session like we'll do here. But it can be done. But in general practice, Small amounts, Feel it, Big amounts, Shift and be okay. The best meditation is the ones that you have. Yeah.