Whoever you are, whatever you have been through, you have had pain. From a stubbed toe or razor burn to broken bones and surgery, all of us have been hurt or experienced pain of one kind or another. Aching, stabbing, heavy, sharp, throbbing, pounding; our language is filled with colorful descriptors of pain, and most of us wince just thinking about it.
Pain can be roughly divided into acute and chronic categories. Acute pain is relatively short lived. This is the stubbed toe, the headache, the belly cramps or even the broken leg. Acute pain results from an insult, injury or illness that resolves with time or treatment.
Chronic pain goes on for six months or more. Some examples are illnesses like arthritis or cancer, or severe injuries that develop complications or don’t heal. Chronic pain can put a terrible strain on the person who lives with it.
When you feel pain, what do you do? If you can immediately remove the source of the pain, you do that, as when you yank your hand back from a hot stove or pull your thumb out of hammer range. Then what? Do you apply ice, take a pill, distract yourself and give it time? Do you swear and curse whatever or whoever hurt you?
Most of us try to get rid of pain as quick as we can. We don’t like it, we don’t want it, we prefer to get beyond it and move on, thank you very much. Pain is equated with suffering, and who wants to suffer? We fight our pain.
So it might sound crazy to say that one way to manage pain is to pay closer attention to it, to get to know it intimately. Yet that is precisely what people do who use mindfulness to cope with pain.
Mindfulness means paying attention to your immediate experience, fully and without judgment. I’m sure you have heard the term. Mindfulness programs are sweeping the nation, useful for everything from daily anxiety to chronic pain to post traumatic stress. The military uses mindfulness to train soldiers for battle, children are learning it in schools and professionals of all kinds are going to workshops and classes. It’s all the rage, and for good reason.
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, a popular program that teaches mindfulness, began as an intervention for people with chronic pain. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., developed this program at the University of Massachusetts in the 1980s and the resulting wave has buoyed up thousands of people.
Mindfulness is simple but not easy. What I will do here is give a very brief synopsis. Do try this at home.
To apply mindfulness to pain, you go toward the sensations, rather than away. You don’t fight, or run. You don’t try to change anything. You sit quietly, observe your breathing for a few minutes, and then examine the actual physical feeling associated with your pain, gently and with detachment.
What is the sensation? Is it pressure? Is it heat? Is there a pulling sensation, or tingling? You simply observe. If you can experience the sensation directly, without putting a name on it, that is even better.
You can use your breath to explore and observe your pain. Imagine you are breathing into the actual site of the pain sensation. This draws the attention to the area while at the same time often relaxing tight muscles unconsciously. Let the breath out, and then breathe gently into the site again. Observe.
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After you watch the body sensations, and you may notice them change as you do, you can move your attention to your mind. What are you thinking about your experience? What are you telling yourself about your pain, your body, your life? Again, just observe. Don’t judge yourself one way or another. You might find that your anxiety about your pain eases up as you observe.
Over time, with practice, people who do this learn to live with their pain rather than suffer with it. The pain changes, the experience of pain changes, the whole thing softens. Pain becomes another sensation, another experience, a part of life rather than a driving force. And by the way, mindfulness can be used to ease emotional pain as well.
The act of becoming an objective but attentive observer of our own experience actually brings us into the here and now, right here, right now, for a moment at a time. In this moment there is no past to haunt us or future to frighten us. For a fleeting present moment we are free.
But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. Sign up for a free workshop on Oct. 22 at the SHAC by going to shac.unm.edu/forms/counseling-workshops.html. Or check out the book Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Dr. Peggy Spencer is a physician at Student Health and Counseling and UNM Center for Life. She is also co-author of the book “50 Ways to Leave Your 40s.” Email your questions to her at pspencer@unm.edu. All questions will be considered, and questioners will remain anonymous.
