Massage and bodywork are excellent avenues to turn to when needing to address pain but meditation is a tool that can be used without an appointment. If you’re anything like me, the idea of structured meditation can be more than a little daunting. For me mediation is a concept that I only seemed to really grasp when I least thought about it. Perhaps it is because I didn’t have an easy to follow guide. Until now.

Following is an easy to follow guide on seated meditation to address pain, as written in an article by Barry Kapke for Massage and Bodywork magazine (originally published April/May 2000). Check out an excerpt below:

Sitting Meditation
In sitting meditation, one sits, unmoving, for extended periods of time, focused on some meditation object — the breath, sensations, inner sounds, mental processes. Often, pain arises. Sometimes it may seem unbearable. When pain arises, we can use our awareness skillfully to make the pain our meditation object. Shifting our attention to the general area of uncomfortable sensation, we let the mind relax, accepting the feeling, letting it be, observing the physical sensations. The pain is still there, but our relationship to it has now changed. We can intensify our looking, noticing the various qualities of this sensation we label “pain.” The more the mind examines what actually is being felt, the more concentrated the mind becomes. Next, we can try to locate exactly where the pain is most intense. As the mind focuses there, often it will seem that somewhere else is more intense, so you move your mind to that place. Sometimes the pain will appear in a completely different part of the body. Sometimes it will simply disappear.

“You’ll find a sense of peace and calm by accepting the pain that you have and letting go of it, the relief comes not by rejecting the pain, but by allowing it to be the way it is.”6

Occasionally during meditation you’ll find that pain seems unbearable and you simply must move. Move. We are not sitting to create more suffering, but to find the end of suffering. Asked what to do when pain seems intolerable, Ajahn Amaro, a Theravadin monk, replied that he would shift his position to alleviate the unbearable feeling, but that he would do so out of kindness to the body, not out of aversion to the pain.


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