Being in pain can make doing the things we need to do feel almost impossible. When we're in pain, we're not thinking clearly. We are fixated on the pain and we are often mad that we are not feeling well. This is why meditation is most important when we are in physical pain. So how do we meditate in pain?
Recent scientific studies have shown that meditation can actually lesson our experience of pain! And so often, it is our resistance, fear and mental turmoil that is often worse than the physical pain itself. And this mental distress can also make the pain feel amplified. In this episode, I'll share how to meditate when we're in pain, why the clarity that comes from meditation can lesson our pain, and how meditation can even help the body heal faster!
Please enjoy other episodes where Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date.
If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.
Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/ToddPerel
*****
If you ever feel like my words brought a change in your life, and want to show your SUPPORT for what I am doing, click here.
Find all of my BOOKS for wherever you are on your spiritual journey: https://www.eastwesticism.org/spiritual-meditation-books/
Want to gift a book to a prisoner? Go here.
Being in pain can make doing the things we need to do feel almost impossible. When we're in pain, we're not thinking clearly. We are fixated on the pain and we are often mad that we are not feeling well. This is why meditation is most important when we are in physical pain. So how do we meditate in pain?
Recent scientific studies have shown that meditation can actually lesson our experience of pain! And so often, it is our resistance, fear and mental turmoil that is often worse than the physical pain itself. And this mental distress can also make the pain feel amplified. In this episode, I'll share how to meditate when we're in pain, why the clarity that comes from meditation can lesson our pain, and how meditation can even help the body heal faster!
Please enjoy other episodes where Todd shares meditation techniques, tips and spiritual lessons from around the world for peaceful and stress-free living. Remember to subscribe to stay up-to-date.
If you have enjoyed listening to the podcast, please share a review. It will help many others find their Path to Peace as well.
Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/ToddPerel
*****
If you ever feel like my words brought a change in your life, and want to show your SUPPORT for what I am doing, click here.
Find all of my BOOKS for wherever you are on your spiritual journey: https://www.eastwesticism.org/spiritual-meditation-books/
Want to gift a book to a prisoner? Go here.
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Welcome to path to peace with Todd Perelmuter where he shares the lessons he's learned. spending nine years living with gurus, monks, and shamans across 35 countries and five continents.
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Join in the journey as he brings some healing wisdom for living your best life.
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The path to peace, love, health, and happiness starts here
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Hello, and welcome to path to peace with Todd Perelmuter. I'm your host Todd PErelmuter.
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And today I'm going to talk about how to meditate when we're in physical pain. And there's really two answers to this question. One is in dealing with the pain, and the other is in dealing with mind made pain. And that isn't to say imagined pain. But that is to say that there is a great amount of chronic pain, some doctors estimate 97% of pain is stress and tension created.
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When our body tenses up, we breathe much more shallow, and much less, and our muscles are being deprived of oxygen. And this deprivation can cause all kinds of physical pain. When our muscles and our body tenses up, our blood vessels constrict, and not enough oxygen rich blood can get to all of our body. This can create all kinds of hip, knee, back neck, shoulder pain, when we feel like we're very easy to pull something in our sleep if we sleep wrong.
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Or if we're very prone to injury, this can often be a reason why. So we'll talk about that later. But first, we'll talk about people who are in real physical pain, which again, is everybody who's experiencing pain, because it's always physical. Anyone who's experiencing pain, and wanting to meditate is, first of all, an amazing choice, because it's not easy. But science has shown us that meditation can lower our experience of pain. So it's really important more than ever to do this.
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And I would simply encourage anyone who's in this situation, to most importantly, be comfortable. If that's lying down with a couple pillows, propping your head up, if it's lying flat.
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If it's in your favorite chair, whatever is comfortable for you, and can alleviate your pain the most. Because we're always sitting standing or lying down anyway. So we might as well get in the position that brings us the most relief to get started.
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Once you've done that, and you begin your meditation, put all of your focus on to the spot where you're feeling pain.
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It sounds counterproductive. Our first instinct is to look away. We don't want to face the pain. We want to ignore it. We want to fight through it.
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Anything but look at it. You know we often even close our eyes when when we're in such immense pain because it's the body literally trying to avoid looking at the source of pain in the body.
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But when we look away, we let fear take over. And it's that fear of pain or that anger towards our pain that is almost always worse than the pain itself. And when we can look at this region of our body that is creating pain.
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We can discover that it's really not so unbearable.
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That our mind made it into something bigger.
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That we can look at it and bring peace and calm to our body.
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And in eliminating this mental turmoil, we lower what is a vast majority of what our pain experience really is.
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When you put all of your attention to your pain, you're also signaling to your body, that this is the area that needs attention. And you are telling your body to focus on this region and work its wisdom and magic.
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On this area, you are putting so much energy into this one spot that we've been ignoring for so long, because we don't want to look at the pain that actually can help us heal faster. And you can do this simply by putting all your attention in that area.
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And you may feel very common experience tingling, you may feel that energy, rush to that area. Because when you put all of your focus there, that is what you're doing, you are sending a signal throughout every cell of your body to work on this spot to stay with this spot to focus on this spot.
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And you are going to bring your body's natural healing processes to this spot.
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We want the healing to always take place automatically, while we're not paying attention to that area. But we need to heal the area with intention. This will help the healing process speed up. This isn't some make believe thing, this is truly the way the body works.
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By bringing that conscious awareness to that area, which you've held tension, emotional and mental tension. Because of the pain, this is what constricts the blood flow.
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And by bringing our conscious awareness to this space, we can see intuitively, the tension there. And as soon as we bring awareness to it, the tension dissolves. There's nothing more to resist or fear.
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And that oxygen can get flowing, that blood can get rushing.
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And all of those knots or tenderness in that region can become strong and healthy.
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Which brings me to part two, there is an incredible amount of medical research that has been done on the mind body connection, and how our mind impacts our body.
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Most notably, when it comes to chronic pain, and it can be in joints, me and anywhere we hold tension often back, shoulders, neck.
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Anywhere, that the body can induce pain, due to stress, that the mind can trick us into assuming that it's not mental that it's physical, because the mind doesn't want to be blamed. It doesn't want to have to change. So it will trick us into thinking that all our stress is actually joint pain, back pain, shoulder pain.
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And it does this because it's very clever, and very self preserving.
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And so what happens is when we are stressed, but more specifically when we are tense, which is the symptom of stress. This tension finds its way into our body by constricting the blood flow, shortening our breath and starving our muscles and joints of oxygen.
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There's one doctor out there named Dr. John Sarno, who treats people's chronic pain simply by explaining to them how it is mind related and simply that awareness and understanding that arises from his detailed explanation of how the mind body connection works. people's backs or wherever their chronic pain is, disappears. He has shown that unless you've had such a traumatic injury that required surgery nearly all Chronic Pain is from tension.
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He shows this by pointing out how people may have pain in different parts of their body, or how it may be in one spot, or maybe in another spot later. And it can jump around and move around proving that it's not physical. It's something more.
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And I'll just give you one other great example of how we can know this is true. So many times in our office desk chairs, we want an ergonomic chair with lumbar support and an ergonomic desk or a standing desk, all these things to alleviate our pain.
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But as soon as we take a vacation, as soon as we go to the beach, we don't care if our beach chair has lumbar support, or is ergonomic. And they're almost never are because nobody has pain. While they're at the beach. There is no stress there. And so there's no pain there.
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It only happens in stressful situations because we're not managing our stress properly. And I'll give one more example.
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When I first started meditating a lot at a very strict monastery in India, I was begging the meditation instructor to let me sit in a chair and settle on the floor because of how immense my back pain was. And he asked me Have I been in an accident? Have I had surgery? And I said, No. But you know, my chiropractor and my massage therapist and my acupuncturist. They all point out that I have a desk job, that's not great. I've been in a bike accident. When I was younger, I used to play football. And they call that the trifecta of back pain, and I just have this back pain and I really need to sit in a chair can't sit on the floor.
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And he said no, very strict. And a few days later, my back was really in way more pain. And then the next day, no pain ever again, for the rest of my life. Because those first several days, I hated meditation, it was so difficult. I was like, What is the point there is no point. This is terrible. I am so bored, every negative story so much stress. And then by day six or seven, I was in a meditative state for the first time, and all the pain disappeared, all the stress disappeared.
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And so sometimes, pain in our meditation can be a teacher of what's going on in our mind.
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And I'm not saying you have to sit on the floor.
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I'm just saying that it's amazing to be mindful of this fact that our physical pain can teach us about our mental condition.
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And sometimes, we just need to look deeper at the pain look deeper into our mind and become aware more deeply of any stress and tension going on within us and how it may be manifesting in our body. I'll just share two other things that I thought it really brilliant that John Sarno discovered in his research. And he's treated 1000s of people from celebrities like Howard Stern and Larry David, who just meeting with him once or twice, cured their chronic pain forever.
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So he's points out that the mind is so clever, that let's say you had a car accident when you were younger, that kind of hurt your back or your elbow, your mind knows to put all of your attention related pain into either your back or your elbow wherever the spot of the injury was. Because you're more likely to not connect the pain to your mind, which is the whole defense mechanism of this process. It's very unlikely that an accident will lead to pain for the rest of your life. The body has mechanisms for healing that, but the mind will use it as an opportunity to put pain there specifically.
14:50
So oftentimes, we'll have an injury and we'll just feel like it won't go away. But frequently, if we take a look at In our mental state, our breathing rate, if we remember to breathe properly, deep, slow, long, calm, peaceful breaths, then rather quickly, that tension related pain can disappear, because the mind can no longer get away with it. Once we become aware that it's coming from the mind.
15:26
And the second thing he points out, is that there are many chiropractors and medical experts out there who will take an x ray of someone's back, or shoulders or neck and say, Yes, this is why you have pain, you know, there's less cartilage between your vertebrae, or there's this deformation.
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And what he showed was, if you actually take X rays of people who have no back pain, many of them have the same deformities, or the same less cartilage, proving that is actually not physical, but psychological.
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And what he proves time and, again, is that all of these doctors and experts who show why we're in pain, what that is really doing is reaffirming the minds ability to keep us in pain.
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And there's even a placebo effect where we, as soon as we hear that we are physically deformed, or, you know, our vertebrae are misaligned, or we have a herniated disc, we actually have more pain than before, we're told, because the mind just hears, yes, I can go there, and no one will ever know. But at the end of the day, we're living in this tense, inner environment
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that can affect our not just our mood, or our physical pain, but can lead to hypertension, heart disease, even cancers. And so whether we're in pain or even not, it's so important that we release the stress that we meditate, that we breathe into our pain, that we put our full attention there.
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We allow it without resistance or fear. And we remove all of that emotional stress and fear so that the pain itself is nothing that we can't bear. Thank you so much for listening. Hope that helps. Peace and love.
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Peace and Love