How to Relieve Intense Pain with Meditation

Three deep and powerful techniques

Photo by Raychel Sanner on Unsplash

My interest in using meditation to relieve intense pain stems from personal experience. I will not go into detail, but my pain has sometimes been so overwhelming that I have been unable to think of anything else.

In these situations, three types of meditations have provided me relief and significantly reduced the suffering:

1. Focus on change: Expansion and contraction
2. Tonglen
3. Focus out: Meditation on breathing and music

I hope these can be of help. Customize them in ways that work well for you.

Focus on change: Expansion and contraction

When pain is very intense, it is difficult to escape from. No matter what you do, the pain is still there. Meditation, however, offers an effective strategy for relief. You can focus directly on the pain and reduce your resistance to it. By escaping into the pain, with full attention, you can radically change your experience of it. Here’s how.

Shift your attention from the pain, the contents of experience, to the container, the sensory experience per se. When you can do this (as detailed below), only the contours of the sensory experience remain in the…