Why Meditation is not Enough to Heal Pain

Don’t get me wrong, meditation can get some people pretty far on the pain healing journey. There is always benefit to be found from slowing down, activation your parasympathetic nervous system, taking the seat of the witness, and watching your life at play.

Yet even with a dedicated daily yoga and meditation practice, I still found myself in massive amounts of chronic pain. This article explains why.

I still believed my body was broken.

Meditation teaches us to watch thoughts come and go, and in doing so to reduce our reactivity to the world around us. However, my thoughts were always continuously about why my body hurt, what I might’ve done wrong, how I might do things differently, and who I might need to see next. Honestly, when I don’t feel well my thoughts STILL go down this familiar neural loop.

What is needed in pain recovery is actually the knowledge that your body is okay, your body is safe, and that you are not broken (or at least not as broken as you thought). Without this base knowledge, you can watch your worries about your body float on by, but you’re not replacing them with an updated neural network that is geared towards safety, towards healing, towards empowerment, and towards a new pain-free (or greatly pain-reduced) version of yourself.

This is why pain neuroscience education is the first step in every leading evidence-based recovery process from chronic pain. It wasn’t necessarily my path — but goodness would I have felt better a LOT sooner if it had been!

Here is what the latest neuroscience of pain tells us:

Tissue damage is not directly correlated with pain, and in fact is a poor predictor of pain.
There are very real, measurable changes in the nervous system that take place in an individual with chronic pain. These include the areas of your brain that fire when you feel pain, the neural pathways in your body that fire, the neurotransmitters that release at synapses involved in danger pathways … and much more.
These neural pathways are changeable, that is, they are plastic … you are neuroplastic.
You can heal your chronic pain by working with these neural pathways.

When you do not know these basic, well-accepted facts amongst neuroscientists who study chronic pain, pain feels like a very real, very imminent threat. Simply meditating while watching pain sensations and your thoughts and worries around pain sensations float by doesn’t quite work. Or at least doesn’t work long-term. There is no change to your perception of the danger of your pain.

Pain neuroscience is here to tell us that our pain is not as dangerous as we think … in fact, in many cases it may not be dangerous at all.