Living With Physical and Emotional Pain + 17-Minute Meditation
Two approaches: find refuge, or go deeper
For this week’s guided meditation, scroll to end of post
Hey friends –
Lots going on in the world. More on that below. I’m behind on my “Hey Jeff” column, where you send me specific questions or curiosities or challenges, and I make a meditation for it. Your questions have been received and they’re piling up. I’ll try to get better at releasing one every six weeks or so. I do think this column needs a new name, though: how about “Real People, Real Practice”? Not that the other practices I guide are any less real! If you have a better name, let me know in the comments.
For this one, my friend Andrea asks how meditation might support her mother, who is dealing with awful chronic pain. Meditation does have much to potentially contribute here, including helping us get clearer about which other non-meditation interventions might also help.
A meditation on pain is relevant for this moment. Pain is pain, and that includes emotional pain. Many of us have witnessed with horror the state violence that’s unfolded in Minnesota over the past few weeks. Our pain makes sense. It’s the social organism responding intelligently to serious injury. We need to feel this pain so that we can respond.
Meditation can help pain be less overwhelming. It can also help us get clearer around the different impulses coming up and through us when faced with a crisis. I made a meditation specifically about this a couple years ago, as the bombing in Gaza continued to spiral into a brutal – and immoral – humanitarian catastrophe. When faced with this kind of violence, do we react from our own trauma – wanting to hurt back, or to disassociate? Or can we respond from our compassion and wisdom? A compassionate response can be extremely fierce and angry and decisive. Meditation isn’t about passivity. It’s about availability.
So, let’s work with pain. Below is a shortened version of my correspondence with Andrea – shared with her permission. I’ve added some additional thoughts and resources at the end, because, as many humans can attest to, pain can also be a vehicle for profound transformation. I hope this practice can be a support for you and your loved ones in this time of intensity and change. Practice, in my view, has never been more indispensable.
Love,
Jeff
Andrea:
My 83-year-old mom has had Parkinson’s for over 15 years. Deep brain stimulation made a huge difference to her symptoms. I think of her as having had a do-over— she got many years of extra time living pretty well. She even climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for Parkinson’s research. But now the effects are wearing off (as they do with DBS) and she’s struggling both physically and mentally. She was a psychotherapist and the most positive person I knew—she actually introduced me to meditation back when I was in my 20s. She even made me my own meditation cassette! But now when I listen to her talk about how she is feeling, I think a renewed meditation practice might really help her. She is focused on her aches and pains in a way that makes sense, given what she’s dealing with, but it also possibly contributes to her suffering. I wonder if you have a meditation that might speak to that experience so many of us have when we are unwell of sitting inside our pain in a way that only magnifies it.
Jeff
I would love to try to make something to help her, I just need to talk through a bit more with you. One focus can be self-compassion, always. In terms of over-focusing on the pain, that can mean over-focusing on the pain sensations themselves, so that our attention and our resistance to what we’re experiencing get all bound up together. It can also mean over-focusing on our secondary suffering: the narratives about our pain, visuals, long-term prognosis, sorrow etc. Getting clear about the bare sensations themselves can help with both, as can naming what else may be happening, so it’s no longer unconsciously contributing to the situation.
In terms of general meditation strategies for pain, there are at least two broad groupings: focus away, and focus towards. Focus away is common sense and totally okay. In a meditation that means finding places of refuge inside our sensorium, from active compassion practices, to directions in experience (sights, sounds, other parts of the body) that may be neutral or even soothing. Focus away also includes all the other things we do to distract ourselves and/or manage our pain. When I shared your mom’s situation with my friend Sebene Selassie – a meditator and teacher who’s lived with the pain of bone cancer for twenty-plus years, she wrote:
“Whatever works! Rocking crying swaying laying down standing up heat cold sleep more crying … also allowing yourself some compassion and comfort acknowledging how hard it is. And yes, also feeling what’s happening and noticing sensation.
Sebene points to the other big strategy: focus towards the pain. That is, go deeper into it, with delicacy and curiosity. This takes longer to get a handle on, and can sometimes make the pain (temporarily) worse. On the other hand, as a serious meditation strategy, it can transform our relationship to pain at the very root. I usually recommend gently moving back and forth – pendulating – between both options, and seeing what happens.
Additional Jeff Note
I’ll say a bit more about focusing into pain, via the wisdom of my great teacher Shinzen Young, because it gets to the heart of meditation’s transformative magic. And not just meditation – any spiritual ordeal.
