Jon Kabat-Zinn Ph.D. - Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief: Practices to Reclaim Your Body and Your Life

Also by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Meditation Is Not What You Think: Mindfulness and Why It Is So Important

Falling Awake: How to Practice Mindfulness in Everyday Life

The Healing Power of Mindfulness: A New Way of Being

Mindfulness for All: The Wisdom to Transform the World

Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on its Meaning, Origins, and Applications (ed., with Mark Williams)

Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Momentand Your Life

The Minds Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation (ed., with Richard J. Davidson)

Letting Everything Become Your Teacher: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness

Arriving At Your Own Door:108 Lessons in Mindfulness

The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (with Mark Williams, John Teasdale, and Zindel Segal)

Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, Revised and Updated (with Myla Kabat-Zinn)

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Sounds True

Boulder, CO 80306

2023 Jon Kabat-Zinn

Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author(s) and publisher.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical recommendations of physicians or other health-care providers. Rather, it is intended to offer information to help the reader cooperate with physicians and health-care providers in a mutual quest for optimum well-being. We advise readers to carefully review and understand the ideas presented and to seek the advice of a qualified professional before attempting to use them.

Published 2023

Cover design by Lisa Kerans

Book design by Meredith Jarrett

BK06436

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kabat-Zinn, Jon, author.

Title: Mindfulness meditation for pain relief : practices to reclaim your body and your life / Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Description: Boulder, CO : Sounds True, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022010779 (print) | LCCN 2022010780 (ebook) | ISBN 9781683649380 (paperback) | ISBN 9781683649397 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mindfulness (Psychology) | MeditationTherapeutic use.

Classification: LCC BF637.M56 K345 2023 (print) | LCC BF637.M56 (ebook) | DDC 158.1/3dc23/eng/20220716

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010779

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010780

T he universe you are about to enter in picking up this small book graced with color, pictures, and words is the universe of your own true nature. It addresses and embraces your absolute validity and completeness as a human being, inclusive of and also extending well beyond the conditions and circumstances that have shaped your life so far. Not many people will seek out a book on the subject of pain, especially one addressing how to live and live well with a chronic pain condition, unless they understand something firsthand about suffering, and how difficult it can be to live the life that is yours to live as fully and as satisfyingly as possible under such challenging and often rending circumstances and to take on such a challenge while you have the chance, which only occurs in the present moment. This book and the practices it invites you to engage in can be a doorway into that universe of possibility.

Know that you are not alone in this engagement. Many thousands of people with various chronic pain conditions and diagnoses for whom medical and surgical treatments have either not been appropriate or were not beneficial have taken up this exploration and adventure through what is called mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR. The benefits overall for most people have been and continue to be profound and life-restoring.

There is an inevitable and essential solo aspect to mindfulness as a meditation practice and as a way of living. Obviously, no one can meditate for you. You have to do the inner work yourself. All aspects of this book, along with the guided meditations in audio form, are meant to be friendly and supportive resources, reminders, and guides to inhabiting and navigating that territory. Hopefully, this offering will also help you to keep going when you encounter the challenges and trying circumstances that inevitably keep surfacing in all of our lives. And hopefully, it will also remind you over and over again of what is most important, especially in those moments when it is so easy to lose heart.

For it is neither understatement nor overstatement that it is only the hardest work in the world to turn toward and open to what we most wish would simply go away. By doing so, and by embracing with a sometimes-uncomfortable intimacy the unwanted and the aversive in all its forms, you can discover that there is almost always room to grow and heal and transform your life, no matter what obstacles you may be facing. As you will see, putting out the welcome mat for all experience and holding whatever arises in awareness in the present moment, whether it is pleasant, unpleasant, or fairly neutral, is the ground of both formal and informal mindfulness meditation practices.

But beyond the solo dimension of mindfulness as both a rigorous and ongoing meditation practice and a way of being, there is also the very real and extremely necessary element of community associated with the cultivation of mindfulness. We are social beings, and we need community almost as much as we need oxygen when it comes to living lives of meaning and fulfillment across the life span, given what life sometimes throws at us. In hospital-based MBSR programs, that community arises spontaneously in the eight weeks of classes that medical patients attend. They come with a wide range of medical diagnoses, including major chronic pain conditions that have not fully responded to standard medical treatments, if they have responded at all. When we feel we are part of a community of people who like ourselves also have very challenging conditions, we realize that we are not alone. What is more, we can be inspired seeing what others have to live with and come to terms with in their lives, and by reports of their victories, both large and small, in the ongoing cultivation of mindfulness in their lives.

One university professor, who I knew personally from my days as a graduate student at MIT decades earlier, came to MBSR in advance of a bone marrow transplant to prepare himself for that ordeal and the extended isolation in the hospital that the procedure required. In class one day he expressed the strong feeling that everybody in the room belonged to what he called the community of the afflicted. He also said that he felt far more at home in that room with those other medical patients than he did with his colleagues in faculty meetings. Looking around a crowded subway car during rush hour in Boston one day while he was in the middle of the eight-week MBSR program, he had a momentary and poignant realization, which he later shared with us in class, that we are all part of the community of the afflicted.