How Meditation Helps to Manage and Heal Chronic Pain

One of life's greatest stressors is chronic pain. The suffering that many people experience in dealing with pain has two aspects: primary and secondary suffering. Primary suffering involves the sometimes unavoidable physical discomfort from pain. Medical therapies like medication, acupuncture, and chiropractic are often used to alleviate this kind of suffering. Secondary suffering involves emotions, like anxiety, fear, despair, and depression that are stirred up in reaction to primary suffering. This type of suffering is most closely associated with chronic pain. Thus it is easy to see why the reactivity of secondary suffering can make a person miserable, and exhausted. As a stress buster, the regular practice of meditation is very helpful in the management and healing of pain, including both primary and secondary suffering (please see links on my blog to online reports about the scientific research behind this claim).

How does meditation help to manage and/or heal the suffering from pain? There are four primary ways.

1. The cultivation of present moment awareness, through regular meditation, lessens reactivity to pain.


Present moment awareness allows a person in pain to come back to the actual sensations of the present moment rather than getting lost in thoughts and reactions, which keeps the person in depression or sadness over the past and fear, anxiety and/or despair about the future. When a person is more grounded in the present, they are better able to have a creative response to their suffering.

2. There is a shift in awareness, through regular meditation, from the constricted experience of pain to the more expanded awareness of the soul.


When we are focused on what we do not want, and we are in a cycle of reactivity, our awareness is actually excluding many things which could bring us comfort and a better quality of life. Present moment awareness and the awareness of the soul is expanded awareness. This level of consciousness may include awareness of discomfort, but it also includes things like pleasure, peace, laughter, wisdom, love, and the experience of bliss.

Expanded awareness makes us more lighthearted because it helps us to reconcile the opposing qualities of life. It makes us whole. So we feel less need to expend precious energy fighting or resisting pain.

3. According to some mind/body experts, repressed emotions and stress are often the true cause of pain in some cases. Through regular meditation, repressed emotions and stored stress can be released.


Some doctors and mind/body experts are convinced that, at least in some cases, the brain actually creates pain as a distraction from suppressed emotions like rage. According to Dr. John Sarno, author of The MindBody Prescription, and Healing Back Pain, the brain can create a distraction to our awareness of threatening emotions by creating pain in parts of the body. Sarno cites research which indicates that the brain initiates a process whereby blood circulation is reduced to a local area of the body, thus leading to mild oxygen deprivation in the area, hence pain.

When we meditate, we release accumulated stresses, and become a witness to our thoughts and injuries to our ego. If we receive proper meditation instruction, and are taught how to gently let repressed emotions go, we can remove the need for the pain in cases like this.

4. Regular meditation cultivates gentleness and compassion, lessening feelings of isolation and victimization, and improving our ability to care for ourself and to receive care from others.


When we approach meditation practice, we do so with an attitude of non-judgement and gentility toward the thoughts that we begin to observe in our mind. This attitude carries over into our life. We become more patient and understanding with ourselves as well as with others. From a place of greater calm and present moment awareness, we can feel more connected to others, thus opening up avenues of compassion and sharing which are comforting and healing.


If you are interested in learning how to meditate through the effortless technique, and personalized instruction of Primordial Sound Meditation, please contact David Blake Jones, certified Chopra Center for Wellbeing instructor, at (404) 784- 7789, or email him at davidblakejones@gmail.com.
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