Meditations on Pain
Meditations on Pain
The last two years have provided me with a wonderful opportunity for reflection and deepening of my own personal practice. During this time I have discovered something unique and valuable that I now feel moved to share.
It started around ten years ago when I discovered that despite decades of yoga practice when I came to sit for meditation, there was still a lot of tension and pain in my body. A few years later, something my teacher Acharya said caught my attention:
“Pains in the body experienced during meditation are caused by previous sins (wrong thoughts and actions).”
It had long been my feeling that there is a strong connection between what happens in the body and what happens in the mind, but it did not occur to me that the effect on the body would be long lasting, and I was working with the belief that the yogic stretching could somehow eliminate them.
When we feel tension or pain in the body, our instinct is to change our bodily position, stretch, move, and ease the pain. This is what we do in the physical yoga practice of asana. But I discovered that there were still significant tensions and pains in my body even after decades of practice. I concluded that much of this stress simply gets re-distributed but not eliminated.
And when one thinks about it, how can stretching and changing the body position eliminate mental suffering that is dependent on thoughts, feelings and memories? Surely, only by reflecting on these past sufferings and coming to terms with them can we have hope of reducing them and eliminating them. I discovered that yoga practice by itself is not enough.
Acharya’s statement gave me a new inspiration. What would happen if, instead of trying to physically move the body to eliminate the pain, I would meditate on it? What would happen if I started to deeply explore the sensations in my body?
This was the beginning of a fascinating process. As I started to meditate on these sensations, I began to discover the psychological components that underlay them. Through this reflection on the mental component while feeling the physical sensations associated with them, the bodily tensions started to release.
BUT just think about all the stresses you have experienced in life - not just what one usually thinks of as causing pain - what about anger, shame, anxiety, jealousy, humiliation…? All of these things cause body stress… and the memories do not just go away, they remain in the unconscious and I discovered that even though we are unconscious of them most of the time, the bodily stress is always there. In a lifetime we have 1000s of experiences that cause us stress and because of the mind-body connection, these events are printed in the body.
Over time I developed an array of different tools/methods to explore and release these tensions from various perspectives. This is what I would now like to share.