Pain and mindfulness
The February 2013 issue of the Integrating Awareness Newsletter explores chronic pain and mindfulness practice for managing chronic pain, with two new articles that you may want to read;
- Meeting pain with mindfulness – what’s the point of that?!;
- Mindfulness and Chronic Pain; research findings
Killer Pain
Pain is the most common complaint in primary health care. Most patients who suffer from pain obviously recover and return to normal life, but some will end up with chronic pain and long-lasting disabilities. Nothing new in that. But did you know that chronic pain can actually kill you?
This is what a study indicates which was conducted over a time period of ten years in the UK that involved almost seven thousand people. What the researchers discovered was that people who suffered from chronic pain were much more likely than average to have died in those ten years. And this was after adjusting the data for confounding factors, such as demographics and effects of long-term illness. It was found that people who suffered from severe chronic pain were almost fifty percent more likely to have died in the ten years than people of similar circumstances who did not suffer from chronic pain.
Pain Killer
Over the last thirty years mindfulness meditation practice has become recognised for its capacity to alleviate pain and the suffering that pain can cause. This does not mean that the pain “is all in your mind.” At least not in the sense that it is “just imagination”. There is another relationship between alleviation of pain and mindfulness practice however; by learning mindfulness practices people can change their relationship to the pain, in such a way that the intensity and unpleasantness of pain decrease. They can learn to accept their pain and observe it with openness, curiosity and interest, and this shift in how they relate to their pain can make the difference between endless suffering and freedom from suffering.
There is now a lot of scientific proof for these effects, but the actual mechanisms in the brain that cause such effects are still being investigated. A lot of research is taking place to determine exactly what goes on in the brain during mindfulness practice, but a lot still remains to be discovered. You can read more about this in the articles below.
Articles about pain and mindfulness
Other than the two articles mentioned below, if you are interested in reading more articles about mindfulness or about any other subject relating to the work that I do, you can find a quite a number of them in the article section of my website.
Meeting pain with mindfulness
The degree of suffering that pain causes is largely determined by how you relate to it. Through mindfulness practice you can learn to deconstruct pain into its primary constituents – sensations and energy – and transform the relationship with pain to one where pain, while still unpleasant, is no longer a problem; where pain no longer equals suffering. Read more…
Mindfulness and Chronic Pain; research findings
Over the last thirty years mindfulness practices have become recognised for their capacity to help manage chronic pain. This article provides summaries of some of the related scientific research findings. Read more…
Social media
Please, consider connecting, following and engaging with Integrating Awareness on Facebook, on YouTube, on Google+, and/or on Twitter. It is my intention to provide interesting bits of information in those places, more frequently than in the newsletter, and it would be great to have your company there!
Until the next time,
Be well and enjoy Being!
Lars Andersson
