Can mindfulness help with pain?

In a short video, Zen teacher Hogen Bays suggests that the experience of pain lies beyond our ‘little mind’: he instructs us to “completely entrust [our] being into the great mystery, the source of which it came.” It is in “this place of entrustment that liberation [from suffering] is to be found.”

Had I heard this a few years ago, I would have — along with you, perhaps — dismissed it as so much gobbledygook. “Nice for you to say, being a monk and all, doing little but meditate for hours on end,” I’d have complained, “but I’m in pain here: day in and out all over my body, it hurts when I sit or walk, even lying down is agony. My doctor calls it neuropathic pain and has me on super-strength meds, all to little effect. A CAT scan requested as “urgent” has now been scheduled for — would you believe — January of next year? Till then we won’t even know the reason for this pain. I’m even taking cannabis capsules, although no one seems to know the proper dosage. So, pardon me for being sceptical about the great mystery.”

Well, that used be my reaction — but, hurray, no more! By approaching physical discomfort with mindfulness I exercise the option of seeing pain for what it is: a coming and going of undesirable senations. True, it occasionally forces me to crawl up stairs on all fours (face to face with my perplexed Dachshund), but I no longer take it personally. Turns out that I am not my pain. It doesn’t define how or what I am. I no longer resist its presence. (I even welcome it — but more about that in the next post.)

In closing, I offer this guided meditation (20 min). You may have to adjust the volume.

Spoiler alert: Mindfulness changes my attitude towards the experience of pain. It does not, however, do away with pain itself.