Dealing with physical pain

This weekend, Scott Kiloby gave a seminar at the Providence Institute in Rhode Island, following a talk Thursday night in Lincoln MA. I find his work accessible and interesting, and when he's in town I make an effort to go hear him.

The instructions for the weekend were to treat negative experiences (pain, fear, sadness, etc) by noticing that there are thoughts, and there are body sensations. Scott defines thoughts as words and pictures arising in the mind. Words may appear in the mind in written or spoken form. Pictures in the mind may be 2D or 3D, crude line drawings or complex photo-realistic scenes. Body sensations are just the direct feelings in the body, without any thought attached. If you start to describe a sensation as "sharp" or "throbbing" or "itchy" or "cold", you're mixing it with words and thoughts. Just feel it exactly as it is, without labeling.

I often think of awakening as an abstract and impersonal thing, to which the hassles of my daily life are irrelevant. But many of the tools and techniques for awakening are surprisingly practical, and of course it is ordinary human beings with typically trivial daily hassles in their lives who chase awakening.

For me, one of those trivial daily hassles is pain in my hips and lower back. Over the weekend during some meditative moments I found myself distracted by an itchy restlessness in my thighs and calves. All this pain and restlessness has gone on for a few years now, starting in a time when my job and my relationship were both stressful.

As I continued to try to focus my attention, I decided to apply the instructions to the restlessness I was feeling. I noticed that there was a periodic quick tensing of my leg muscles, and in between those tensings, there was an itchy sensation that would build up, and then the tensing would lower it again. I saw that the tensings were actually intentional at some level, and their purpose was to keep the itchy sensation from getting too pronounced. I saw there was a worry that if allowed to continue, the itchy sensations would turn into a full-scale leg cramp. I'd had leg cramps as a teenager and knew they were very painful. It was not surprising that a phenomenon perpetuated by a certain level of fear would have originated during a stressful period of my life.

I observed all these things Friday night. When I went to bed that night, I drank a half-cup of tonic water because the quinine helps calm muscles, and between that and my new understanding, I was able to keep my worry under control and sleep better than I'd slept in months.

Physical pain seems to be a purely physical phenomenon so it's easy to assume that thinking and emotions play no role. But they definitely can make pain feel much worse. I noticed that I had a mental image of the location and shape of the pain in the body, just a sort of very simplistic anatomical diagram, but nevertheless a picture in the mind, and therefore a thought. With some effort I could discriminate between that picture and the raw sensation of pain. When the thoughts are separated from the sensation, the sensation always (in my limited experience) becomes more bearable. "This sensation is unbearable" is itself a thought.

Starting with this simple mental image gave me an opportunity to dig into the role that thinking and emotions played, and from there I had some really useful insight. It also made me hopeful, and that's important when pain involves an aspect of depression or anxiety because a feeling of hopelessness will make it very hard to do anything with the pain.

As with many of Scott's talks, a fundamental practice was his five-second resting in awareness practice. This is a sort of micro-meditation of putting aside all one's thoughts and opinions and views briefly, and noticing the peace and calm that are available in their absence. When I'm doing this frequently, as he advises, I usually find that I notice all kinds of things that I didn't notice while my thoughts were running the show.