How, if at all, does mindfulness transform our experience of pain? How might many years of practice change your brain and body’s relationship to these signals from the nervous system? The best current answer to these questions may be offered by a series of experiments conducted by the team led by the neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin.
The team designed experiments to track the effects of Buddhist meditation on the brain’s pain receptors. The participants included people brand-new to mindfulness, people with some experience meditating, and master meditators, most notably the Buddhist teacher, monk and author Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
The participants were wired up so that researchers could observe the activity in their pain receptors over a 30-second period, broken into three 10-second intervals involving the anticipation, direct experience and recollection of pain.
At the beginning (second zero), the person was instructed that a painful burning sensation would begin soon. During only the middle 10 seconds, the person was given a direct sensation of almost excruciating heat (safely designed not to cause permanent damage to the skin, even if it hurt like hell while it was happening). After the sensation ceased, the subject’s pain receptors were monitored for 10 more seconds.
In people with little experience of mindfulness, the entire 30 seconds were rough. The 10 seconds of anticipation led to anxiety and bracing against the pain (What’s about to happen to me?), which activated their pain receptors prematurely, and the 10 seconds of reflection afterward involved reliving the experience (That was so not cool! ). For this group, actual administration of the heat was only slightly more painful than the anticipation and reflection.
Rinpoche’s experience
At a lecture where both were present, I heard Richie Davidson speak about Mingyur Rinpoche’s experience with this experiment. Dr. Davidson described himself as initially surprised by the results. Since then, I’ve talked to a lot of people about this experiment, because it’s so related to our understanding of how mindfulness does and doesn’t transform our lived experience. How do you think the master meditator responded to the pain?
Most people aren’t surprised to hear that Mingyur Rinpoche’s pain receptors were practically inactive for the 10 seconds of anticipation. He simply didn’t brace against a hypothetical future experience the way the control group did, and the way most of us do. Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, his pain receptor activity was very low in the 10 seconds after the sensation ceased. He didn’t ruminate on the event much at all. Score two big points for meditation practice. But how did this Jedi of Mindfulness experience pain during the painful sensation itself?
For the 10 seconds of actual pain, Mingyur Rinpoche’s pain receptors spiked higher than the control group of non-meditators. You read that right: higher. When it was time to feel pain, his tens of thousands of hours of practice led him to feel pain even more than other participants did.
“I should’ve known that would happen,” Dr. Davidson remarked, “because his sense gates are so open.” The phrase sense gates alludes to classic Buddhist cognitive philosophies that liken the mind to a house, and the five sense perceptions to either windows or doorways between our inner experience and the perceived world “out there.”
If mindfulness practice results in a heightened experience of pain, maybe that’s why so many new meditation apps and influencers say things that are slightly misleading about the benefits of meditation. “Feel pain more!” just isn’t the slogan a modern-day Don Draper might dream up to sell subscriptions to the Calm app. But this indeed is what happens when you practice mindfulness.
When the winds of pain blew through his nervous system, Mingyur Rinpoche really felt the lived experience. He was awake, and he was alive. He took his seat and held it. And holding his seat meant letting the winds of pain blow through him fully, instead of numbing out or running away, instead of treating the sensation as some punitive weakness or pretending there was no wind at all.
Coke-aine and smartphones
Here’s a memory that will always be with me on my path. I was in my early twenties, sharing a ride home from my first month-long meditation retreat, after living at a meditation centre for seven months. I’d done shorter retreats before, but this was a month. I was leaving retreat, and I was leaving the practice centre after living and working there for so long.
What was it like to meditate for a month? It was painful, it was pleasant, it was insightful, it was boring, I had a crush, I got over that crush, I wrote entire volumes of poetry scrawled on summer clouds floating in the northern New England air. I was living my best life, inhabiting a platformed tent on a frequently muddy hill, reading myself to sleep by the light of a kerosene lantern. The retreat ended in the first week of September 2001, and now I was headed home to New York City.
My ride stopped at a gas station in Vermont. I decided to buy a Coke to celebrate my return to the “real world.” When I was a kid, a classmate had convinced me that Coke and cocaine came from the same plant, and sometimes cocaine ended up in Coke bottles by mistake. If you drank Coke, you had to be careful if you didn’t want to get arrested, and also if you didn’t want to die. Maybe this kid was in your class, too.
After a month of drinking water and coffee and the occasional yummy (but low-sugar) baked goods that the retreat centre’s kitchen prepared for us, this playground myth seemed to come alive in my body. A few sips into the half-litre bottle of Coke, dopamine cascaded through my brain. I felt higher than I’d ever been on those Ecstasy pills I took in college.
The Coke was too overwhelming even to register as a pleasant experience. It was aggressive. I remember thinking to myself, as we made our way down I-91, as I fell in love again with the lushness of a summer’s end in New England: Everything in this world is four times brighter, louder, faster, sweeter than it needs to be because they’re only expecting us to pay one-quarter the attention.
It bears repeating that neither pleasure nor pain is inherently bad or good. We all need pleasure to appreciate our humanity. And there is no “grin and bear it” teaching about pain in Buddhism. If pain becomes a medical concern—especially if it becomes chronic—we need to take the steps at our disposal to relieve the pain and return the body to a state of workability.
I’m certainly not the one to lecture anyone on pleasure seeking, as long as you’re not harming yourself or others. But how do our brains and minds relate to pleasure and pain? How does addiction begin?
Pleasure, pain and the human nervous system
The human nervous system was slowly molded by evolution to become efficient at spotting threats to our survival in highly dangerous environments. It wasn’t designed to be chill. As Rick Hanson notes in his foundational book Buddha’s Brain, the signals of pleasure and pain are the result of the nervous system trying to get us to quickly either engage in experiences that may aid survival or avoid situations that might be life-threatening. Therefore our brains are wired to exaggerate the significance of momentary pleasure and pain. And that is the basis of the hope and fear contained in pleasure and pain.
Pleasure is falsely experienced as a sense of lasting safety. And it really does feel that way when I crave a sweet thing: if I can just have this one cookie, I might reach the promised land. Conversely, each sensation of pain is interpreted by the brain as a potential threat to survival. In a world where direct and immediate threats to survival occur less frequently (for most of us who are privileged, they are rare), a world with rapidly accelerating technology and the profit motive of capitalism on steroids, these nervous system functions are fertile ground for addictions of all kinds.
If our brains aren’t outright lying to us about the meaning of pleasure and pain, they’re at least exaggerating what’s at stake. Anyone who has felt an itch during a meditation session knows how this works. An itch is unpleasant by evolutionary design. I remember—as a reasonable grown-up—having this thought during meditation: If I don’t scratch this itch, I’m definitely gonna die. But I chose not to listen to the message, because I had trained enough to cultivate a disbelief in the perceived urgency of passing reactions.
I knew my meditation practice was the place to practice holding my seat when these momentary signals of minor pleasure and pain blew through me. And behold! A few minutes later, the itch had completely abated. It turned out my brain was misleading me, not about the fact that my body was having an unpleasant experience (it most definitely was), but about how much existential meaning could be attached to that particular sensation. We aren’t misperceiving pleasure and pain. They’re real human experiences. What we often do is misperceive their significance.
Evolutionary ancestry
For a person with trauma, what gets stored in the nervous system isn’t just evolutionary history, but personal and intergenerational histories of threat response as well. In his groundbreaking book on racialized trauma, My Grandmother’s Hands, the counselor Resmaa Menakem looks at how trauma lives in the body, especially the bodies of Black and white Americans affected by hundreds of years of racial brutality and systemic white supremacy.
Regarding the traumatized body’s tendency to provoke an overreaction to a perceived threat, Menakem writes: “Such overreactions are the body’s attempt to complete a protective action that got thwarted or overridden during a traumatic situation….It then develops strategies around this ‘stuckness,’ including extreme reactions, compulsions, strange likes and dislikes, seemingly irrational fears, and unusual avoidance strategies. When these strategies are repeated and passed on over generations, they can become the standard responses in families, communities, and cultures.”
Intergenerational and racial trauma don’t affect us all in nearly the same way, but we each carry the coding of both our inherited and our evolutionary responses to pleasure and pain. The past has gifted us with habitual reactions to pleasure and pain that we have no choice but to experience directly.
Now, when I meditate, I’m able to develop compassion for the source of this crazy thought about my itchy nose. Somewhere in my evolutionary ancestry—I imagine—a being related to me had an itch that wouldn’t go away, an itch that persisted and could not be dismissed. Perhaps this itch came from an infection, or a snake bite, or whatever prehistoric mosquitoes did when they came upon the fresh meat of the early humans from which I’m descended.
Perhaps this itch led to a close call with mortality, or even a premature death in my ancestor’s group, and that tragic information was stored and passed down in the bodies of my predecessors, all the way down to me.
When I feel my nose itching, I can acknowledge every ancestor who came and survived—and didn’t survive—before me. Those who survived did so, in part, because they were hypervigilant and overly neurotic about the existential meaning of an itchy nose. I can also have a tender sense of humour about the absurd thought that this itch might kill me.
After all, it seems credible, from the perspective of evolutionary biology, that the ancestors who survived to pass their systems along to me were generally the more nervous ones. They were the most bracing, the most defensive—the ones who scratched all the itches and overprotected their interests, even if it meant they could never find any rest or experience true vulnerability.
So that I could be here, my ancestors grew fearful and defensive toward the meaning of momentary discomfort. Self-compassion begins with the full acknowledgment of your inheritance.
Meditation and our relationship with pain
Meditation can be a great way to work with the winds of pleasure and pain precisely because we practice in a setting and posture where it’s generally safe. When our bodies are secure and grounded and we’re still getting strong physical signals of threat, unease and agitation, we can see the brain’s inherited trickery at play.
In meditation, the mind rattles off threats and escapist fantasies in a seemingly endless supply. If there’s no obvious threat, what grabs our attention are the minor itches and aches and ouches, along with the possibility of bigger ouches that might come along.
Most meditation sessions are a seesaw back and forth between itches and ouches and fantasies, alongside an entire social media feed of existential observations to fill the vast space of awareness, smattered with forgotten items on the to-do list, speckled with all the unfinished business that wasn’t pressing before we sat down but now somehow assumes life-or-death importance. When we slow down, we can see that many of the observations we attach to raw experiences don’t mean what we thought they did.
Ethan Nichtern is the author of Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds and several other titles, including the widely acclaimed The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path. A renowned contemporary Buddhist teacher and the host of The Road Home Podcast, Nichtern has offered meditation and Buddhist psychology classes at conferences, meditation centres, Yoga studios and universities, including Brown, Yale and more. Visit him online at www.EthanNichtern.com.
Excerpted from the book Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds ©2024 by Ethan Nichtern. Printed with permission from New World Library—www.newworldlibrary.com.
images: Depositphotos