Natural Pain Relief: How to Soothe and Dissolve Physical Pain with Mindfulness
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About this ebook
“The most lucid and effective guidance for transcending pain I have ever encountered.”
—Charles T. Tart, PhD, editor of Altered States of ConsciousnessThe newest treatment for pain is one of the oldest, most effective strategies for pain-free living: mindfulness. With Natural Pain Relief, meditation expert Shinzen Young teaches you how to retrain your relationship to pain through traditional meditation practices.
Drawing from 40 years of results in the field, this widely respected teacher offers the essential techniques that have proven successful at pain-management centers around the country. This integrated learning book and CD adapts the core principles of mindfulness training to a practical process that can treat even extreme, chronic pain effectively, possibly reducing the need for drugs or surgery.
Through step-by-step techniques taught in plain language, you’ll learn how to overcome your internal resistance to pain by observing and opening to it, which is the key to transforming physical suffering into a flow of pure energy. With regular practice, you can tap into your mind’s own power to overcome physical pain.
Five guided practices include:
- How to deconstruct pain into manageable pieces
- Experience how pain naturally transforms into energy
- How to allow pain to dissipate into space
- Use the “Breath Pleasure” technique to dramatically soothe pain
- Free up your energy to heal and begin living your life again
Previously released as Break Through Pain.
Shinzen Young
Shinzen Young became fascinated with Asian culture while a teenager in Los Angeles. Later he enrolled in a PhD program in Buddhist Studies at the University of Wisconsin. Eventually, he went to Asia and did extensive training in each of the three major Buddhist traditions: Vajrayana, Zen and Vipassana. Upon returning to the United States, his academic interests shifted to the burgeoning dialogue between Eastern meditation and Western science. Shinzen is known for his innovative “interactive, algorithmic approach” to mindfulness, a system specifically designed for use in pain management, recovery support, and as an adjunct to psychotherapy. He leads meditation retreats throughout North America and has helped establish numerous mindfulness centers and programs. He also consults widely on meditation-related research, in both the clinical and the basic science domains. He often says: “My life’s passion lies in exploring what may arise from the cross-fertilization of the best of the East with the best of the West.”
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Reviews for Natural Pain Relief
5 ratings1 review
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5The book is good but audio meditations are missing :( Scribd should put these in audio books. Otherwise it won't help anyone.
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Book preview
Natural Pain Relief - Shinzen Young
Material
FOREWORD
When I first met Shinzen Young at a scientific conference in the winter of 1986, my psychological studies of altered states of consciousness had already gained me an international reputation as a scientific authority. In terms of intellectual knowledge, I was already an expert
in meditation, but I had little personal experiential knowledge of meditation. I had received meditation instruction from a number of well-known teachers, but I had accepted that when it came to meditation practice, I just did not have the necessary skills.
Then I heard Shinzen give his lecture on meditation, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. At some level deeper than intellect, a part of me was saying, This man is speaking from direct experience, not book learning, and he knows what he’s talking about!
I had listened to famous spiritual teachers over the years, but they had never touched me in this way.
Shinzen volunteered to teach meditation in early morning sessions for the rest of the conference. These sessions changed me from a person who believed he did not have the necessary talents for meditation to one who was not only learning the process, but enjoying it! Since that time, meditation has been a rewarding part of my daily life.
I have long been intrigued by Shinzen’s work using mindfulness meditation to work with pain and suffering. Luckily, my interest has been primarily intellectual, for I hate pain and suffering and do not want to personally test whether his methods work at high levels of pain! I have tested Shinzen’s methods at relatively low levels of pain and suffering, though, and they do work.
Suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance, Shinzen says. I recently experienced the effects of mindfulness and equanimity in reducing suffering. This story took place, interestingly enough, early in a ten-day retreat led by Shinzen that my wife and I were attending, just after Christmas 2003. I had been experiencing, off and on, some funny feelings
in my chest and body, including feeling faint when I got up in the middle of the night. My wife, Judy, is a nurse, and during the retreat, when I told her about what I was feeling, she took my pulse and found it weak and irregular. A physician attending the retreat suggested that I go to a local hospital.
Half an hour later, I was in the emergency room, hooked up to all sorts of monitors, watching my irregular heartbeat on a monitor—sometimes very fast, sometimes skipping—and receiving injections to bring the fibrillations under control.
I managed to remain serene and calm throughout this experience. After all, I was at Shinzen’s meditation retreat, practicing mindfulness and equanimity, and I saw no reason to stop the practice just because I was in a hospital. As Shinzen later remarked to me, the cosmos had transferred me from the basic meditation retreat to the advanced medication retreat.
Every once in a while that night and the next couple of days in intensive care, as I observed my body sensations, thoughts, and internal imagery—the basic retreat practice—my thoughts and the corresponding images and body feelings would start to take off. Oh my God, I’m in a hospital, my heart is skipping beats and acting crazy, my pulse is weak, I could die!
I kept observing the thoughts, images, and body feelings with as much attentiveness and equanimity as I could muster. In less than a minute, they would finish, and I would be calm and serene again, able to intelligently respond to what was needed.
Needless to say, I was impressed with myself and with what I had learned from Shinzen. If there was ever a time to panic, being in a hospital with my heart acting up was a suitable occasion—and yet I was taking it all in stride. Suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance. I had enough meditative skill to have almost no resistance, so the psychological pain and resistance could not build up to any significant degree of suffering.
Current scientific research is finding that the age-old practice of mindfulness meditation can be very helpful for a variety of health challenges. As I know from experience, the technique can be difficult for many people to learn, so we are fortunate to have this book and CD of guided exercises by Shinzen, whom I consider to be one of the world’s foremost meditation teachers. After receiving his training and mastery under Eastern teachers, Shinzen systematically studied and experimented with ways of making meditation skills more relevant and easier to learn for modern Westerners.
The exercises presented here are one of his most successful applications: learning to greatly reduce and even eliminate the suffering that normally results from physical and psychological pain. Just about all of us will have to deal with such pain at least occasionally, if not frequently or chronically, so this book you hold in your hands is a great gift!
—Charles T. Tart, PhD Professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis whose books include the classic Altered States of Consciousness and Mind Science: Meditation Training for Practical People
INTRODUCTION
If you are reading these words, chances are you have a pain issue that remains unresolved. Perhaps you have tried other methods of relieving your pain, such as prescription medications or physical therapy, but have yet to find the relief that would allow you to live your life in a fully focused and present way, without being at the mercy of your discomfort.
As soon as pain arises in the body, the mind becomes preoccupied with how to get relief. If we can remove the cause of the pain or numb it with analgesics, well and good. But most people, at some time in their lives, face significant pain that they cannot escape. And hundreds of thousands of people, victims of disease or injury, must live each day in unavoidable and often excruciating pain.
If we cannot escape from the pain, must we then experience abject and meaningless suffering? Definitely not! There is an alternative, a way to escape not from the pain but into it. We can apply Mindfulness Meditation to the pain. This is a way of focusing awareness on the pain and observing it with precision, while at the same time opening to it and dropping resistance. As you develop this skill, the pain causes less suffering and in many cases breaks up
into a flow of pure energy. This may sound too good to be true, but it is a fact that has been independently discovered by thousands of individuals.
To be honest, it takes time, effort, and determination. On the other hand, growth of this skill snowballs.
That