Guided mindfulness meditation is a good choice for beginners; it’s one of the best forms of health meditation for pain control, no matter what the skill level of the practitioner.
Take a few moments to create a quiet space for yourself. Sit or lie down in a comfortable position, using pillows or other props so that your body is at ease.
Part 1
General principles of working with your pain in conjunction with the guided meditations that follow. Listen to this whenever you feel a need to review the basic concepts or re-motivate yourself to practice.
Part 2
Working with feeling/image/talk reactions to physical discomfort. By tracking these elements, you will not be ambushed by these reactions and be able to reduce suffering from pain. You will then actually welcome the feel/image/talk reactions and let them play themselves out in a natural way.
Part 3
This section is designed to give you the general picture of your discomfort by having you free-float within it. It is also designed to sensitize you to when the discomfort begins to break up into energy by having you notice, second by second, whether the discomfort is stable or changing. At any given instant, the discomfort that you are focusing on will either be perfectly stable, or it will be changing in some way, perhaps subtly, in intensity, in quality, or in shape.
Part 4
This section deals with the interplay of local intensity and spread. Often, the bulk of your suffering is not actually in the local intensities, but in the tightening around the subtle spread from those local intensities. This section gives you a process for working with that spread, as well as with the local intensities themselves.
Part 5
Contacting two flavors of pleasure within the breath: one is the pleasure of relaxing as you breathe out, and the other is the pleasure of oxygen intake as you breathe in. Finding pleasure within the breath is significant in working with pain, because pain tends to disrupt the breathing process. By finding pleasure within the breath, you are breaking up some of that interference.
Part 6
As you finish a period of meditation, it is important to return to your life smoothly and slowly, without losing the meditative state you have achieved.
This page was first published on May, 15th, 2008 and was last updated on May, 29th, 2008