This post about pain is a long time in coming. Meditators sitting on the floor in a lotus or half-lotus meditation position usually go through some days of pain. I went through months of it. After getting into the Deep Jhanas I realized there was no need to sit on the floor, that was an idea passed down through generations as those in Buddha’s time had no plastic chairs. Today, I strongly recommend – just sit in a plastic chair and be done with that nonsense!
But wait, there is more about pain here!
My Back Pain
I hurt my back in 1986 lifting 550 lbs on the calf-raise machine while in the Air Force at Hickam AFB in Hawaii. You’d believe me if you saw my calves today. Once you pack some meat on your calves, it doesn’t go away! Anyway, the weight was down around my feet in 100 and 25 lb. plates. You step up onto a raised platform where the balls of your feet go. Your shoulders go up under some heavy pads where the weight is felt. This is a ridiculous way to work calves because you’re risking injury to your spine and core muscles, but who knew any better in 1986? Not me!
I had been doing that weight for weeks, but that day my body just wasn’t having it.
Anway, I’ve had some regular back pain since.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in any configuration just doesn’t work for me. I tried for months to meditate without pain. It rarely happened. This is probably at least part of the reason most of my sessions were around 20 minutes. I just couldn’t take the pain for much longer. At least initially.
Back Pain in Meditation – How To Look at it
Something happens after a period of putting yourself through pain.
After looking at it during meditaiton and making it my object of focus for dozens of sessions, something began to happen with it.
I studied it. I learned about it. It began to have less effect on me.
Unless it was getting progressively worse, fast, then the distraction of it eased up. If it was getting worse, I just changed position or did some walking meditation instead.
The meaning of pain gradually changed in my mind. It meant less. It was a feeling, but it was a feeling in the back. Not in the mind. It was localized. There wasn’t a reason it had to affect my mind because it wasn’t happening there. It was happening in the back. I could separate it as occuring there and the back’s problem was the back’s problem, and the mind could go on focusing on whatever it liked. It could focus on the breath with no problem, just leaving the pain of the back to something else to worry about.
After a few months of this, let’s say 5-6, my idea of pain had changed dramatically.
It was no longer this dreadful thing. It was no longer something to be feared. I’d looked at it. I’d seen it change from second to second, minute to minute. I’d watched pain ease up and increase, just at random. In many instances it would match what my thinking was about it. If I was thinking how horrible the state was, it got worse. If I studied it with open mind and without fear, it sometimes disappeared completely.
The mind is the most wonderful powerful amazing thing.
I renamed pain to tingling. To heat. To electricity. To vibration. I toyed with all of these. None really matched, but I refused to call it pain anymore because that gave it some power that had been built up in the mind over decades. Since birth, really. We are taught what pain means. It means that firey feeling that inhibits movement or shocks us or destroys us.
Once you look at the pain you have in your meditation sessions over and over, you’ll find that pain means less. Don’t call it pain. Rename it. Call it The Fuzzies. Call it something that sort of matches what it feels like without calling it pain.
When pain in your back, feet, or wherever it is, annoys you during meditation, just refocus on it. 100%. Just look at it. Learn about it. See it for what it is. It’s just a feeling. It may not need to be stopped immediately. We were taught since young to stop all pain immediately.
That isn’t going to help you sit on the floor in a lotus position longer.
But then, is sitting on the floor like that doing anything for you anyway?
If you live in India or Burma or Thailand or some other place where people regularly sit on the ground without a chair, then it might be important to you to be able to sit without pain like that.
If you are meditating – here is permission to sit in a chair like the rest of the world – and meditate that way.
Really, there’s no qualitative difference in your meditation.
The ONLY Thing that matters is focusing on the tingling of the breath during meditation until you reach full 100% concentration on the tiny spot of feeling of the breath coming in and out of the nose. Access Concentration. Samadhi.
Pain can gradually diminish over time. Even disappear completely during a session.
This change in the mind about the perception of pain isn’t just for meditators and back or foot pain. It’s for anyone with chronic pain. Recurring pain episodes can debilitate us. Restrict our movements, and in so doing, restrict our lives. In many cases, there is no need for this drastic change to our lives.
Reframing pain and what it is helps considerably.
The Effect of Deep Jhana on Pain
So, even before reaching the Jhanas or full concentration on the feeling of the breath, you can change the meaning of pain and what it is to you. This can lessen it considerably. That doesn’t mean you’re going to go head over heels crashing in a bicycle race and sit there there smiling while everyone around you is screaming in pain, but it does give you a way to manage mild to moderate to significant pain that recurs or pops up from time to time.
A couple of weeks back I rolled my ankle running down my favorite mountain trail. This has happened at least 15 times for each of my ankles, but I won’t stop running this trail. It gives me tremendous pleasure pushing myself up and down it and seeing what I can still do at the ripe age of 58.
I heard it pop, as I usually do, but this one was extra intense. I lay on the ground gasping and panting and I am sure I muffled a few choice words to make it feel better. I quickly switched into a non-dual state of mind in which there was no suffering possible and I snapped right back out of it because the pain was so intense. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I wanted to see – would I be able to ignore even this 10/10 pain level?
The answer was no. lol.
I tried again. It took about three tries before the mind was able to slip into the non-dual state steadily enough that the pain had no meaning as pain. No negative meaning.
Then I watched as two Thai guys made their way up the hill toward me. They were ultra runners. They asked me what happened. I came back into the ego state and talked with them a bit. One guy immediately pulled out some sort of Freeze spray. He said it is for pain. I said, really?
I wondered, how did I go through my life not knowing about some sort of spray that helps pain?
I gladly accepted about 6 sprays to my ankle on all sides and pulled my sock back up over it.
Within a minute, maybe two, my ankle felt cold. It felt really cold. I was still in the feeling ego state, and yet the pain had subsided pretty dramatically because even in that state I could rename it cold instead of pain. I focused on the coldness of it.
I thanked them and they went on their way. I laid there for another five minutes before I stood up on it. It was freezing by this point and because it wasn’t what I had always known before as ‘pain’ – I was able to continue down the hill in the ego state. As the spray wore off in 30 minutes or so my ankle had loosened up and was pretty numb. I think it was just the natural numbness that accompanies an ankle roll after a while and not so much of the pain med, but these two things helped me recover quicker than I had in the past after rolling an ankle.
Deep Jhana seemed to create a place in the mind that can separate things in the body from things in the mind.
When pain is felt in the foot, I can look at it as the foot has pain. Not that “I” am in pain. If “I” am in pain, that means that the entire body and mind are affected with this pain.
It need not be like that.
The part that is affected ONLY has the pain. The mind can go on unaffected for all but the most intense pain.
Events that happened after Deep Jhana seem to be responsible for creating this Non-Dual state of mind that is there as a baseline and can be dropped into anytime.
This state of mind can be maintained easily when there isn’t something like intense pain to snap out of it and back into the ego-filled Vern State.
I hope this is making sense.
In truth, I don’t know the formula to tell you how to reach the Non-Dual State that always exists but that is shared with the Vern State. I can tell you what I did, but what results for you may be mildly or greatly different, or largely similar. I think we are all on individual paths. 🙂