Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Author:Barbara Bradley Hagerty [Hagerty, Barbara Bradley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594631702
Amazon: 1594631700
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THINKING AWAY YOUR PAIN

Can a meditative practice or just a disciplined mind conquer not merely psychological but also physical pain? I will admit this question has colonized much of my own emotional life ever since I developed chronic pain in my vocal cords. But if statistics are any guide, I have plenty of company: Some seventy million other Americans suffer from chronic pain. Researchers have found that older adults (sixty and older) naturally develop strategies for living with unremitting pain, particularly using “coping self-statements,” that is, intentionally thinking positive or affirming thoughts about pain and their ability to handle it. By contrast, younger and middle-aged adults wage an emotional fight against the pain, and lose.25

Could meditation teach those coping mechanisms to the young and middle-aged, offering a sort of Advanced Placement course in controlling your mind to help you control your pain? Could it be that your thinking soothes both soul and body?

“The mind is a powerful organ,” Madhav Goyal told me, “and the beliefs and expectations that it forms have effects on the body.”

I visited Goyal, a doctor and researcher at Johns Hopkins University, a few days before he moved to India. Goyal’s family had already decamped, and he met me at the door of his near-empty house, bespectacled, with an open face and appealing smile, the kind of smile that apparently springs from two hours a day of meditation. In fact, it was his early, painful experiences with meditation that eventually led to his writing the definitive journal article about the benefits of meditation.

A few years ago, Goyal attended a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat, which involves sitting cross-legged for more than ten hours a day. He arrived with some trepidation. During a previous retreat, he had been a little overzealous with the lotus position and had aggravated a bad knee. It had plagued him ever since. Goyal decided that if his knee started to act up, he would ask for a chair. On the third day, he said, his knee began to throb uncontrollably and he asked the teacher for a chair.

“The teacher was this old-fashioned guy who said, ‘You know, I understand you’re a doctor and all that, but you’ve been doing very well sitting down there. I’ve been watching you. I think you should just go back and sit down on that cushion again.’”

Goyal debated: argue or accede, chair or cushion? He eventually returned to his cushion.

“That next hour, I was watching my pain with a great degree of concentration and I was seeing that it was about a nine out of ten. It was just unbearable,” he remembered, unconsciously rubbing his knee. “And then I noticed that the pain was not there constantly, that it was coming and going rapidly, kind of like the way electricity goes through a light bulb. It was a nine out of ten one second, and then a zero out of ten.

“It had just completely disappeared,” he said, amazed at the memory.

Goyal was free of pain for the rest of the retreat, and although the pain has returned a little, it does not bother him nearly as much.

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