Observing pain - an underrated skill to living in harmony with pain.

This is a response to a blog post from my colleague in New Zealand, Bronnie Thompson who has done much significant work in occupational therapy for chronic pain and whose blog has been an inspiration and helpful resource to clinicians and clients everywhere.

Clients who are familiar with my work will be aware that I use mindfulness as a tool. I don't really get anybody to do meditation of any sort (meditation, while being a tool that can facilitate mindfulness, should be used with care and taught only by experienced teachers. I would say that while I am significantly experienced with using mindfulness in therapy, I would not dare to venture to teach meditation. I will write a blog post about this later.)

In the recent meditation retreat I attended, there were a few sessions called “sittings of strong determination”. This was really interesting – we had to stay in our positions (and cross-legged meditation positions aren't the most comfortable ones) without moving our bodies at all (not our legs, not our eyes, not the position of our hands) for as long as we could, a full hour if possible. We were supposed to be aware of sensations, but observe them in a detached manner, not react to them. What was interesting was that there were actually many people who started the course with some form of chronic pain (typically it's the sort of circumstances where they would have already gone to the doctors and the doctors are not very sure what to do about the pain - not due to a misalignment somewhere or weak muscles or something like that, although I still maintain many people actually have very weak muscles and should work on strengthening those first), but by the last day (when they were allowed to talk and share their experiences) they related that they didn't feel the pain that was bugging them previously anymore. It took me 3 days to develop this skill of sitting through an entire hour without moving (although it was only introduced to the students on the 4th day).

Something I have realised from this experience (and also in my experiences working in pain management) is that skills to deal with pain are very subtle and need to be cultivated consistently before one needs it (just like after the meditation course we were encouraged to go back and continue deliberate practice of detached observation of our bodily sensations – and many things in life also need such deliberate cultivation, like working out and eating healthy for example, if you notice, this blog is really all about these subtle things).

Personally I am very good at dealing with pain and working through pain because of my background as a Taekwondo athlete and my coach’s policy was no painkillers because they could dull senses and affect safety performance. When in the ring fighting with an opponent in a dangerous combat sport (and typically having many rounds of fights to go) we really get plenty of hands on practice on observing but not reacting to pain. This was a skill that I realised served me very well later on in life. But then, after developing this skill, we also have to learn how to recognise when a pain needs to be addressed and when it needs to be worked through, but that’s another blog post altogether.