{"id":17783,"date":"2024-06-11T18:58:18","date_gmt":"2024-06-11T18:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shop-cili.com\/?p=17783"},"modified":"2024-06-11T18:58:18","modified_gmt":"2024-06-11T18:58:18","slug":"how-does-meditation-transform-our-relationship-with-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/?p=17783","title":{"rendered":"How Does Meditation Transform Our Relationship With Pain?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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How, if at all, does mindfulness transform our experience of pain? How might many years of practice change your brain and body\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

The team designed experiments to track the effects of Buddhist meditation on the brain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s pain receptors were monitored for 10 more seconds.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s about to happen to me<\/em>?), which activated their pain receptors prematurely, and the 10 seconds of reflection afterward involved reliving the experience (That was so not cool!\u200a<\/em>\u200a). For this group, actual administration of the heat was only slightly more painful than the anticipation and reflection.<\/p>\n

Rinpoche\u2019s experience<\/h3>\n

At a lecture where both were present, I heard Richie Davidson speak about Mingyur Rinpoche\u2019s experience with this experiment. Dr. Davidson described himself as initially surprised by the results. Since then, I\u2019ve talked to a lot of people about this experiment, because it\u2019s so related to our understanding of how mindfulness does and doesn\u2019t transform our lived experience. How do you think the master meditator responded to the pain?<\/p>\n

Most people aren\u2019t surprised to hear that Mingyur Rinpoche\u2019s pain receptors were practically inactive for the 10 seconds of anticipation. He simply didn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n

For the 10 seconds of actual pain, Mingyur Rinpoche\u2019s pain receptors spiked higher than the control group of non-meditators. You read that right: higher<\/em>. 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cI should\u2019ve known that would happen,\u201d Dr. Davidson remarked, \u201cbecause his sense gates are so open.\u201d 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 \u201cout there.\u201d<\/p>\n

If mindfulness practice results in a heightened experience of pain, maybe that\u2019s why so many new meditation apps and influencers say things that are slightly misleading about the benefits of meditation. \u201cFeel pain more!\u201d just isn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Coke-aine and smartphones<\/h2>\n
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