Meditation for Pain

Please allow me to share with you the meditation techniques I have used to help with chronic pain and generalized anxiety and panic disorder. This shit works.

Beginner

Once or twice a day, check in with your self with a guided meditation. A short five minute video can help you practice and get in the practice of entering a meditative state. You will feel benefits pretty immediately.

You will probably only need to listen to a video or guided meditation a few times before you basically have it memorized and your body is learning the muscle memory of the exercise. I like videos because I know how much time I am putting into my practice.

A Focus On Pain

After you are in a meditative state, you can find the pain in your body. Visualize the pain. Give it a size, shape, texture, and volume.

Now focus on the rest of your body, or specifically something that is not in pain. I usually wiggle my toes or thumbs to connect more firmly to this larger, non-pain body. My non-pain body surrounds and envelops my pain.

Shift your focus back to your pain and experience it as long as you can handle without getting overwhelmed. Then focus back on your fingers or toes. Switching your focus like this plays into somatic theories of pendulation and titration.

Like a pendulum, you are passing back and forth between a manageable and an unmanageable sensation. This helps you break up feelings of being out of control with feelings of comfort control and normalcy.

Titration is about slowly increasing your tolerance to unmanageable sensations. We start slow, and just dip our toe in. Eventually that sensation becomes manageable, and we can lean further into experiencing this unmanageable sensation.

Blur the Edges of Acute Pain

Once I have located and visualized the pain in my body, and I have felt the non-pain body around and containing my pain, I spread out my non-pain body to allow the pain more room.

I relax the boundary or the edges of my acute pain by visualizing the shape of my pain getting blurry. The pain is blurring into my non-pain body. As it spreads, it may feel less acute or less restricted. Continue this visualization with deep breath, expanding your non-pain body as you breathe.