One method of cutting the concepts & Relating to Pain

My friend Emily is staying with me, and this morning I awoke to find her grumbling. She asked if I could surgically remove her uterus. Several hours and many yards of gauze later... just kidding. She was hurting!

I would have resisted my urge to mansplain something to her about pain, but as I was heating a hot water bottle for her and she curled up in a ball, we got into a discussion about different ways of relating to pain. I'll keep the discussion private, but here's one approach to using meditation to change your relationship with unpleasant experiences.

I've practiced vipassana meditation regularly for several years, and one of the four objects of vipassana listed in the Satipatthana Sutta is vedana. Vedana is often translated as "feelings", but in this context it does not mean emotions. Emotions are much more complex. The psychology term "hedonic tone" or a more colloquial phrase like "feeling tone" might be more useful. According to the Buddha and modern neuroscience (if you need me to dig up a reference, contact me), most perceptions are almost immediately followed by a reactive tone in the mind: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (neither wholly pleasant nor wholly unpleasant). I don't want to reduce this to a brain function alone, but one of the jobs of the amygdala is to immediately make a snap judgment about stimuli coming through the sense organs in order to determine safety.

Practicing vedana as the object of vipassana (this process is called vedananupassana) means simply noting the tones that arise in response to stimuli in the body or the environment. I practiced this as my main form of meditation for several months a few years ago, and its effects have made some lasting changes in how I relate to my world. At first it seemed like the feeling came with the stimulus, but after a while, I noticed that there was a tiny, tiny gap between the sensation of a comfortable breath and the subtle rush of pleasure that came after it.


This came in handy during a retreat, when I was experiencing some wicked back pain between my shoulders. I hunkered down and paid deep attention to the gap between the sensation and the tone that followed almost immediately. As I attempted to zoom in, I could actually beat the feeling tone to the punch. When I was able to do that successfully, the sensation felt electric, and I could experience it change in mental texture and intensity. The intense sensations almost felt like a sort of rapture. Not pleasant but blissful. I suspect these were flickers of piti (Pali, "rapture") arising from deep concentration.

Explicitly noticing how the mind categorizes almost everything it's aware of as being pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral generates a deep familiarity with those categories. This benefited me in a few ways that I noticed viscerally:

-The mind mostly ignores or quickly moves on from things that are neutral- neither wholly pleasant, nor wholly unpleasant. But upon examination, some things are worth paying attention to even if they don't create a pleasant or unpleasant feeling.

-When unpleasant things happened, I was able without almost any effort to recognize that I deal with unpleasant stuff all the time. One more unpleasant thing is no big deal. In fact, unpleasant isn't really all that different than pleasant. They're almost like different colors. One is purple, the other blue. Purple is not blue, but they're really just two versions of the same thing. Unpleasant is no problem. Conversely, pleasant is also no big deal. The mindstate produced by being somewhat desensitized to pleasant and unpleasant is equanimity, but a very restful, alert, and content equanimity. It's all ok.

-When I was experiencing something as unpleasant in my everyday life, something changed when I would say quietly to myself, "well, this is unpleasant." It was as if the negativity of the feeling tone wasn't as strong as the pleasure of being able to catch and recognize that response in the mind. It created a sort of perspective, a step back, some breathing room, and enough space to see the situation and my mind's response to it with a little more clarity and a sense of humor.


I'm a psychotherapist by trade, and I can remember having a session a couple years ago that went pretty badly. After the session ended, and I was sitting at my desk, I threw my head back and exhaled, "well, that was unpleasant!" It was as if I had put the whole thing in the unpleasant bin, where I knew just what to do with it. No story lines necessary. No heroes or villains or agendas.

Just to drive home the point: with this kind of meditation, no effort is made to judge the phenomena that are noticed. That's just judging, not meditation. The practice is to find the tone (sometimes almost a bodily feeling) that comes up along with experiences that arise inside or outside the body.

Happy practicing!