Feeling Pain, Healing Pain

If you are feeling pain, whether physical or emotional, meditation can help. They say it works better than morphine and it’s less addictive.  If you are drawn to pain, meditation is the perfect antidote. If you are feeling the urge to hurt yourself in any way, use meditation.  Meditation can be very painful. If you have a craving for something, that craving is pain. If, instead of giving into the craving, you sit in meditation, you will be sitting with the pain of the craving. As you sit with that pain, your instinct will be to get up and satisfy the craving. Not satisfying the craving will intensify the pain.  In meditation you focus on that feeling of pain. Focus intensely on the pain.  Breathe, feel the pain, breathe. If you sit long enough, your legs and back may also start to hurt.  You can either continue to focus on the pain or focus on your breath.  With enough focus on either, the pain will ease.  Meditation can replace any addiction. It does not have the intrigue of self-destruction, except that if you meditate enough, you may come to doubt the existence of your self. In that way, it is the ultimate self-destructive practice.

If you do not have an affiliation to pain, but have an aversion to pain, meditation still works to ease pain. If you try to sit in meditation with your emotional pain, you confront your habit of trying to avoid that pain. As you sit with a dignified posture and breathe comfortably, you can focus your attention on the physical feeling of your emotional pain. Emotional pain will express itself somewhere in your body. As you meditate and focus on that sensation, without judging it, willing it to stay or go, or feeding it with your stream of thoughts, the pain will begin to move.  It will ease. It will either become bearable or leave entirely.  The pain may come back again and again, but if you learn to sit with it, it won’t drive you mad.

Meditating on pain can help you face your pain and transform it.  By using your focused attention to feel your pain, you can heal your pain.


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