In this guided meditation, longtime meditation teacher and pain expert Vidyamala Burch offers a tender practice to help us be with our whole selves with openness and kindness, even when we are experiencing pain.
Being in pain makes being present extra challenging.
On a physical level, being in the present moment while our body is in pain is often extremely unpleasant. There is a part of us, understandably, that wishes we could escape from it entirely.
At the same time, the experience of pain itself can be overwhelming—to our senses, our thoughts, our emotions. It can feel like drowning, when what we long for is just a moment of peace to rest in.
In today’s guided meditation, longtime meditation teacher and pain expert Vidyamala Burch offers a tender practice to find a middle way—one that doesn’t veer into denial or give in to overwhelm, but rather allows all that is happening to be gently met, as Vidyamala says, with “wholeness, integration, and kindliness.”
A Meditation for Finding a Middle Way When We Are In Pain
Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
- Start by establishing a meditation posture. You can do it sitting; you can do it lying down. The main thing is to choose a position where you can be as relaxed as possible and yet alert. Once you’ve chosen your position, begin to settle. Allow the weight of the body to rest down into the support beneath you. If you’re sitting, it’ll be through the bottom, into the chair, through the feet, into the floor. For lying down, it’ll be through the back of the body, into the bed or the floor, and then the head resting into the pillow or cushion.
- See if you can cultivate a sense of rest, allowing the body to be held. Let go of gripping. Receive the support of whatever’s beneath you. To help this, you could take a few deep breaths and then on each outbreath release a little bit more, letting the next in-breath flow back in in its own time.
- With each in-breath, breathe in freshness and vitality. With each out-breath, let go of gripping. When you’re ready, allow your breathing to find its own natural rhythm. Allow your awareness to pour out of the head, where it so often seems to be located, and feel the body resting inside the movements and sensations of breathing.
- Allow your awareness to fill in the body a little bit more. Let it pour down through the torso, through the hips, feet, and legs. We’re not looking in from the outside or thinking about the legs and the feet as a concept or an object. Rather, we’re resting inside sensations of contact with the floor, with the chair, or the bed. Maybe there’s a sense of tingling, buzzing energy. Maybe there’s dullness or numbness. Whatever our experience is, allowing awareness to fill the feet and the legs. If there’s pain or discomfort, see if we can meet this with an attitude of kindliness and care, softening automatic habits of resistance and tension. Allow awareness to come to the buttocks, letting the buttocks be soft, resting into the chair, into the bed.
- Allow awareness to fill the whole torso—including the belly, the chest, the front and the whole back of the body and the back, the whole spine. Have a sense of the torso opening a little bit in all directions on the in-breath and subsiding on the outbreath. Be careful not to force or strain. Receive on an in-breath, letting go on the outbreath. Again, if you’ve got pain or discomfort anywhere in the back or the front of the whole torso, see if you can allow it into awareness with an attitude of care and kindliness. Let it be part of our experience, softening the resistance and the automatic tension that can so quickly arise.
- Now bring awareness to the shoulders, arms, and hands. Let your hands be supported, resting on the legs or in the lap if sitting. Rest them at the sides of the body, palm upwards (if lying down) or on the legs, palm downwards (if sitting). Let go of gripping in the arms with tension, just letting them rest into gravity. Let the shoulders fall away from the midline of the body into gravity. Allow shoulders, arms, and hands to be full of awareness. This might show up as discomfort, tingling, heat. It could be sensing the contact with clothes, contact with the surface the hands are resting on. Receive all this into awareness with kindliness.
- Now come up through the arms and up to the neck and the head. If you’re sitting, let the head be poised on the top of the spine, maybe tucking the chin in just a tiny bit, so there’s a release through the base of the skull and yet openness in the throat. If you’re lying down, see if you can let the weight of the head be fully held by the pillow or the cushion. Let go of holding on, gripping in the head, letting it rest. Let the jaw be soft, the lips and tongue be soft so the wind of the breath can flow freely through the back of the throat on the way into the body and then back out again on the way out of the body. Let the cheeks be soft, eyes soft, forehead soft. We could imagine the brain resting inside the head softly.
- See if you can feel into the physicality of the head. So often the head can feel split off from the body. The head is just a thought factory, and then the body’s just this kind of thing that we drag through life. But the head is a limb of the body, just like the arms and the legs. Sense the feelings, the sensations in the head. Temperature, tingling, buzzing, softness, maybe even contact with the air brushing against the skin.
- See if you can have a sense of wholeness in the legs, torso, arms, neck, and face. This experience of embodiment, moment by moment by moment, the flow of sensations in the whole body arising and passing, arising and passing.
- If you’ve got pain or discomfort right now, let’s attend to that part of the body. Take your awareness to that part of the body and notice if it’s surrounded by resistance or hardness. Let’s see if we can find this sweet spot between denial on the one hand and overwhelm on the other. Denial will be a kind of turning away, a hardening and not wanting, a pushing away. Maybe there’s a little bit of breath holding. Maybe there’s tension in the head, tension in the bottom. If you notice that, then see if you can turn a little bit more towards the experience, metaphorically speaking, adding it into awareness a little bit more, very gently and tenderly, breath by breath. Let it be part of this flow of experience in the whole body. Breathe into that area and imagine that the breath is bathed in kindliness.
- If, on the other hand, you’re feeling overwhelmed, the only thing in experience is the pain or the difficulty. The practice here is to broaden. Feel the bottom on the chair or the bed. Feel the support beneath us. Feel breath in the whole body. Feel the whole range of sensations in the whole body. The pain is just one aspect of this multifaceted experience of being alive right now. If you notice yourself hardening up again, tensing, turning away, suppressing, denying, blocking—use awareness to interrupt that process and soften. Relax the palms. Relax the hands. Come closer. Breathe kindly.
- This is a training in wholeness, integration, and kindliness. We’re able to be with all of our experience with presence and kindliness. If we have a wound, we broaden. If we’re blocking off, we come closer. That is the practice. Our awareness is dynamic, subtle, receptive, fluid.
- You can keep on practicing if you’d like to, but I’ll bring this guided meditation to a close. Let’s bring the weight of the body to the foreground of awareness, feeling, resting into the support beneath us. Feel breathing in the whole body. Broaden awareness to be aware of sounds around your environment. Open the eyes if they’ve been closed. Bring a tiny bit of movement into the body, maybe the fingers and the toes or some other part of the body. Notice any tendency to immediately halt the breath and immediately start pushing and rushing. Stay inside this subtle movement with a soft brow. And when you’re ready, come into bigger movement. In your own time, reengage with the activities of the day.
