Can Mindfulness Relieve Pain?

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Suffering a toothache on a plane from Boston to San Francisco, I thought about mindfulness and pain. Nothing could be done, so I called on mindfulness for help.

I recalled another toothache that had happened a dozen years before when I was in a hotel in Madrid, just waking from a jetlag nap when I felt pain in the bottom jaw near my left incisor, tooth number 21, a bicuspid in the American Dental Association naming system. At that time, I was not a believer in matters of mindful pain-disappearing practices.

But, when the pain of number 21 moved to tooth 20, I asked myself, why not try to imagine it moving to 19? When there, I should be able to continue my astonishing guided imagery. It did not take long before the pain was at 18. Missing a wisdom tooth, it was the last tooth at the back of my jaw.

OK, said I, can I move it out of my mouth? It turns out I could—and did. From that last tooth, I moved the pain out; it was gone. Gone! Could I do that with any pain, anywhere?

Traversi Operation Anagoria

Source: Public Domain

My toothaches were minor annoyances, nothing but short blips, compared to the analgesic suffering so many people endure. More than 100 million Americans and 1.5 billion people worldwide suffer from chronic pain. I knew that mindfulness could play a large role in improving cognitive and physical health issues and that recent studies showed mindfulness meditation plays a significant role in reducing pain.

Searching for mindfulness information, I came across a not-so-recent yet magnificent Psychology Today article, “Breathe Away Pain,” published many years ago by Ferris Jabr. How can someone breathe away pain when pain is real? Pain is a symptom, an alarm bell calling for action to be taken by the mind, the body, and one’s general practitioner; more than that, it’s a pain clinic.

Yet Jabr tells us that we can “breathe away” pain if we can learn to relax with eyes closed to focus awareness. It seems that we have that power. That is more than just good advice for reducing pain. Awareness should be routine for living an anxiety-free positive life.

Louise Sharpe, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Sydney, and her group ran a meta-analysis of mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) in pain and published its results in The Journal of Pain. With data from 127 unique studies, it concluded that mindfulness-based interventions likely do play a relieving role in diminishing anxiety and depression, especially for pain associated with fibromyalgia and headache.

I am a convert who now understands that the forever-astonishing human mind (or is it the fantastic brain?) can heal anything when trained or reset to keep watch on the health of the body. When pain receptors release neurotransmitters to the brain to tell it something is wrong, the brain replies along the nervous system back to the troubled spot in the body to do something—perhaps to release endorphins or to inflame a body part—to keep the body safe.

In back-and-forth communication, the brain does not use precise GPS coordinates, but the message is sent to the neural "cell tower" nearest the place of discomfort. After all, neurologists tell us that a pinched nerve in the neck can cause pain in a finger. When you have a toothache, remember that the pain you feel is not necessarily coming from the tooth nearest the pain.

Mindfulness meditation is not just for toothaches; with daily news of world uncertainties ballooning our already strained anxieties, we still have the power of mindfulness to breathe away not just pain but a full range of marginal agonies. For a start, I suggest following just three short sentences in Jabr’s article:

First, you should simply relax, while maintaining good posture. Then close your eyes and accept all sensations as they filter through you. Don't judge them, but rather focus on your breathing. If you get distracted, gently guide yourself back to the sound and rhythm of your own breathing.

Follow that advice a few times daily, and always remember this: There will be sunny days ahead.