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Transforming Pain Into Fuel For Healing (Video Commentary & Guided Meditations)


Use The Power Of Your Own Attention To Free Yourself From Pain

The Price Of Freedom

Pain... Physical pain, mental/emotional pain, existential pain... There's a lot of pain going around these days. When we get overwhelmed by pain, we get desperate. When we get desperate, life sucks. But we don't have to be overwhelmed by pain and it doesn't have to drive us to suffering. It's possible to achieve freedom from pain. When I say freedom from pain, I don't necessarily mean that the pain goes away, though it can mean that, as well, and often does. When I say freedom from pain, I mean freedom in the sense that the pain ceases to be a problem; the suffering part of pain goes away. When the suffering part of pain is not present, it means that our happiness and our relief from the pain is not contingent on the absence of the pain. This is powerful because the nature of reality is such that pain will come and go--and for some people, pain comes and it sticks around. There is a price we must pay, however, to achieving this kind of freedom from pain. We must "pay" attention.

Resistance Is Futile

When I tell people who are in pain that the solution is to give the pain their attention, they often say, "Oh, trust me, it's got my attention," by which I think they mean, "I've just realized that this pain is demanding more of my attention than I'm willing to give." There's resistance there, and it's the resistance that makes the pain suck. It's also the resistance that drives us to form a lot of bad habits in an attempt to disassociate from the pain. An unconscious desire to avoid pain is probably at the source of every problem with drugs, alcohol or cigarettes. All of our human brilliance only acts to complicate our disassociation from pain as we can also co-opt sex, work, entertainment, food, exercise and even meditation to help us avoid uncomfortable feelings, depleting the deep satisfaction that we could otherwise derive from these normally healthy, productive and pleasurable activities. When we continue to resist feeling the pain, our bodies and lives just turn up the volume. So when our habits lose their power to distract, our mainstream health-care culture will support us to hire professionals to help us avoid pain. We can get pain killers and anti-depressant medication, or we can have them remove the offending parts all together. My fiancé is a hospice chaplain, and her countless stories of the suffering that a lot of people endure in their last hours confirm that, unless life suddenly lets us off the hook when we get hit by a bus or when our parachute fails to open, we're going to have to surrender to the truth that resistance to pain only begets more pain.

Resistance Is Innocent

It would be nice, then, if we could just drop the resistance, but it's not quite that easy. There are many subtle layers of resistance embedded in the nooks and crannies of our primitive brain programming. The primitive part of our brain is conditioned by the environmental vibe, and that of those around us, to resist feeling from the second that it comes into contact with this world. For this reason, it's pointless to feel any regret over this resistance, though it may have caused us and others a lot of suffering. It's not like we had a choice. Our nervous systems simply adopted the resistance in the moment because that's what was modeled to it as a normal way of being by everything and everyone it came into contact with. So the resistance is an integral part of ourselves, and the way to neutralize it is to accept it as such.

True Understanding Can Only Be Obtained Through Direct Experience

You can see that this whole freeing-yourself-from-pain thing is a bit tricky. Turn towards the pain?! Accept the parts of us that we love to hate?!" It's radical, but I'm reminded of a common idiom that I often heard when watching after school television when I was a kid: "It's so crazy it just might work." After all, it's the only solution that most of us haven't tried. Nonetheless, only direct experience will be convincing. That's why I held a mindfulness meditation workshop a couple of weekends ago, the theme of which was, "Using The Power Of Attention To Turn Pain Into Fuel For Your Awakening." The following videos are from that workshop. There are two commentary videos, one on pain in general and then another on using gratitude to work with pain. Then the other four videos are guided meditations that you can use to begin to achieve freedom from pain. Three of them outline specific methods for working with the different aspects that tend to be wrapped up in the pain: the physical sensations, the mental activity and emotional energy. The fourth guided meditation is based on my own discovery about the power of gratitude to transmute pain. Below each video you'll find a summary of the video's content.

Let The Network Life Center Help You Transform Your Pain

I hold a mindfulness meditation workshop on different themes once every other month. If you're interested in attending, sign up for our email list and you will be notified when these workshops come around or take a look at upcoming events right now.

If you'd like more direct and in-depth help with pain through the gentle, chiropractic work (known as Network Spinal Analysis or Network Care) that we do at the Network Life Center, click here and follow the instructions to get started.

Part 1

Commentary On Pain

When we turn our attention toward the pain, it starts to unravel. When it unravels we find out that pain is made up of different things. It's made up of physical sensations, emotional energy and thoughts. We can then further use our attention to concentrate on these parts separately. On an individual basis these parts are much easier to deal with than when they were all tangled up and stuck together. These are very good skills to learn because 1) pain is inevitable. When it comes around, which it will, it would be nice to have some skills for meeting it. 2) Learning to feel through uncomfortable things is tantamount to furthering your personal evolution, that is, if you're into that sort of thing.

Part 2

Guided Meditation: Exploring States Of Ease (about 35 min)

One strategy for working with pain involves soaking into the naturally occurring ease in our bodies. When we pay attention to the ease in our bodies it sensitizes us to the potential space that exists around, and even within the pain. When we're aware of the space around and/or within the pain, it gives the pain room to breathe, so to speak, and can lead to the pain moving or changing or breaking up all together. Even if it doesn't go away, we can have a hopeful realization that pain doesn't need to be as solid or as all consuming as we had previously thought.

Part 3

Guided Meditation: Exploring Physical Sensations (about 35 min)

By training ourselves to tune into certain aspects of the pain and ignoring others, we can start to deconstruct the pain. One aspect of pain is the pure physical sensation that goes along with it. This is a 35 minute meditation on how to work with the physical sensations that are involved in pain.

Part 4

Guided Meditation: Exploring The Internal World Of Thoughts & Emotions (about 9 min)

Another aspect of pain is the internal world of thoughts and emotions that accompany it. This internal thought-and-emotion space is where resistance shows up in the form of the "I can't," the "It's too much," the "I'm not good enough," etc..., the mental images that might go along with those thoughts, as well as all of the uncomfortable emotions that we may have been avoiding. This is a 35 minute meditation on how to work with the internal space of thoughts and emotions.

Part 5

Commentary: Using Gratitude To Work With Pain

All of the previous exercises involved strengthening our ability to be aware of what is arising. It's also possible to work with pain by taking a more active role. Once we've done enough work in becoming aware of what's arising, it becomes possible to generate emotional states. In this case we'll be working with gratitude. When we see pain through the lens of gratitude it opens our heart to it and speeds the digestion of it.

Part 6

Guided Meditation: Using Gratitude To Transmute Pain (about 12 min)

This video is a 12 minute, guided meditation on using gratitude to work with pain.

Let The Network Life Center Help You Transform Your Pain

I hold a mindfulness meditation workshop on different themes once every other month. If you're interested in attending, sign up for our email list and you will be notified when these workshops come around or take a look at upcoming events right now.

If you'd like more personalized and direct help with pain through the gentle, chiropractic work (known as Network Spinal Analysis or Network Care) that we do at the Network Life Center, click here and follow the instructions.

Special Thanks To Shinzen Young

The foundation for these guided meditations are concepts and techniques developed by a brilliant mindfulness meditation instructor names Shinzen Young. He does regular phone based retreats which I highly recommend for anyone. They are an easy way to learn some powerful meditation techniques from the comfort and privacy of your own home, while simultaneously having the benefit of a group setting.

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