A few years ago, I took part in a short meditation class in Thailand. A couple of participants – myself included – started getting restless after just a few minutes of sitting on the floor with our legs crossed. The tingling pain in my calves was so intense that I had to move. “So much for 30 minutes of ‘stillness’... I suck at meditation”, I thought. The monk leading the class gave us a slightly judgmental look : “You have pain ? Let the pain be your teacher!”
I brushed off what he said, thinking he was simply getting annoyed by our lack of ability to sit still, but it strangely came back and stuck with me for a while. I started paying more attention to all the little pains in my life. Petty worries. Stress. Emotional trauma. The occasional illnesses. I was slowly developing an awareness of the connection between my mind and body. I began cutting down to the essentials whenever I had to visit the drugstore – do I really need it ? – and try to go without medicine as long as possible whenever I was sick. I started taming awful period pain (hello ladies) that was (and still is) forcing me to take a leave from work every other month.
I literally started talking to my body. “ What’s there ? ” became a question I would always ask myself whenever I would experience some discomfort. At first, nothing came, but after a few times of getting into that “pain meditation”, I started seeing flashes of colors, random objects, trees, animals, or the face of a friend or family member. I would recall some recent situations at work, or my attention would be drawn to the most unexpected memory from ages ago. Just like in a pre-sleep state, I would tap into symbols that had very little connexion with one another, but probably made much sense to my physical body and the little problems it was encountering at that precise moment. I would often fall asleep in the process, and wake up feeling better – not completely cured, but better. Now I am still just beginning to make sense of all the messages my body is sending me this way, but I know I must keep listening to it. It seems like pain is some sort of mystical language connecting the physical world to all our stories and feelings, and it is up to each and every one of us to find our own keys to decipher it. And I must admit... that grumpy monk was right after all.
Let me know if you ever experimented with pain meditation, and what is your take on it. I am also curious about books or videos on the subject.
(Alternatively, if you know how to align some text next to a floating image in markdown or anything else that works here, I'd like to know how...I just spent an hour and a half researching but I gave up :)
