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Pain and Meditation
by Mark Wolynn (The General Practitioner,
The Official Publication of The Pennsylvania Academy of General
Dentistry, Winter 2002)
I work with pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, psychosomatic pain. It’s what I do. I’m a Medical Hypnotherapist and a Meditation Instructor. I teach clients to really feel their pain. But not in the way you might think.
For the purposes of this article, I need your arm. And all you have to do is use your imagination.
So now, if you don’t mind, give me your arm. Or, at least, imagine giving it to me. Roll up your sleeve. I want you to feel as I press my index finger stiffly into a trigger point in your upper arm. Just imagine this. I’m going to press firmly until you wince. Here we go.
Feel or imagine your whole body tightening against the pain as I press, your shoulders, chest, abdomen, even your legs pulling inward. I’m now going to press even harder. Really try to feel it. What’s happening in your body, the tightening, is an unconscious reaction to the pain. It’s as though by contracting in on itself, your body somehow believes it’s able to buffer against the pain. Yet, it doesn’t work that way.
OK. Uncle. You can breathe now. I’ll let you off the hook.
However, I’m not so easy with my meditation students. In many of my classes, I go around the room pressing into each student’s arm so that each student personally has the experience of pain, and how he or she compounds the pain experience by meeting pain with inner resistance.
Let’s face it. In life, pain happens. And when it happens, we don’t want to feel it. That’s the obvious response, right? So what do we do? We brace against it. Much of that bracing is automatic and unconscious. Yet, rigidifying, as we find out, only makes it worse. Resistance seems not only to “lock in” the pain pattern, but also seems to intensify the pain experience. By tightening, either consciously or unconsciously, our bodies lock up, which in turn affects the muscles, connective tissues, nerves and organs. Circulation, our ability to transport oxygen to the areas that need it the most, becomes mired.
At this point in the demonstration, I continue to press into the students’ arms, and ask them to “allow” the pain while they direct some awareness into their bellies, focusing more on their breathing. With each exhale they’re asked to feel the belly softening, the tight abdominal muscles melting with the breath, the constant flowing in and flowing out of the breath. All the while, I’m pressing even harder into the arm. They’re astonished at the results. The pain practically disappears. By merely allowing the pain, diverting attention away from it as the primary focus, and directing some awareness into a belly softening with breath, the pain actually disintegrates. Pain, minus the resistance, is still experienced, but merely as a mild annoyance.
The practice is similar for drawing attention away from an anxious thought or nervousness felt in the body. By allowing the thought or nervous sensation to be there, by not trying to push it away, we not only begin to see the transient nature of our thoughts and emotions as impermanent and ever changing, but the painful thoughts and emotions themselves begin to take more of a back seat in our lives. Attempting to resist thoughts and feelings actually energizes them; they become more dogged.
Anxious thoughts and feelings have their physical correlatives--chemical reactions released and felt inside the body. In this practice, we place our attention on feeling those body sensations, feeling their energy moving inside us, and just allowing those sensations to be there. Body sensations continuously take place in the “now” of the present moment. By focusing on what’s happening in the body, we become rooted in the present moment. In the present moment, physical sensations are brought to awareness and allowed to find a natural release. The physical experience then has a chance to move or shift.
As we learn to engage the present moment, we begin to uncover our true nature. We become peaceful and centered. In that peacefulness, we find that we’re not so identified with our thoughts or emotions, or even our physical symptoms. We learn to choose instead the stillness that resides inside us. Through continued practice, we find the ability to stay in the present moment through body sensation awareness becomes more or less automatic, a natural default, so to speak. As Dudjom Rinpoche would say, “even though the meditator may leave the meditation, the meditation does not leave the meditator.”
Mark Wolynn is a Certified Medical Hypnotherapist, Clinical Hypnotherapist and Meditation Instructor in Pittsburgh, specializing in the treatment of depression, anxiety, fears, phobias, chronic pain and other medical conditions unresponsive to conventional treatment. He can be reached at (412) 422-1955 or online at www.Wolynn.com.
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