How Meditation Can Manage Chronic Pain and StressDaniel Goleman

One of the stunning findings that showed up
in long-term meditatorsand these other scientists were quite skeptical about [it],
but Richard Davidson my co-author and his group went ahead and tried itthey had people
who had done 1,000 to 10,000 lifetime hours of meditation come in and simply do a retreat
for one day in the lab. And they did a measure of the genes for inflammation,
and they found that there was a down-regulation of inflammatory genes from one day of meditation. What this means is that inflammation, which
is a cause, its a risk factor for a wide range of diseases, diabetes, arthritis, cancer,
cardiovascular disease, you name it, inflammation almost always plays a role in disease. And what this says is that intensive retreats
in meditation, even for a day, help you lower the level of those genes.

We dont yet know if this is clinically
important; thats another study that needs to be done. But we do know that its so remarkable that
people in genomic science were amazed that a simple mental exercise could have such a
profound impact on this array of genes. Pretty eye-opening. There was a remarkable finding when it comes
to how the Olympic level meditators experience pain.

Ordinarily if you bring someone into the lab
and you tell them Were going to give you a burn in ten seconds, it wont cause
blisters on your skin but youre going to feel it, its going to hurt, the moment
you tell them that the emotional circuitry for feeling pain goes ballistic. Its as though theyre feeling the pain
already. And then you get them the touch of the hot
test tubewhatever it is, and it stays ballistic, and then for ten seconds more it stays ballistic;
they dont recover emotionally. The Olympic-level meditators had quite
a different response.

You tell them Youre going to feel this
pain in ten seconds, their emotional centers dont do anything. Theyre completely equanimous. The pain comes and they feel it, you see it
register physiologically, but theres no emotional reaction, and theres no emotional
reaction afterward, so in other words, theyre totally equanimous, theyre unflappable. Even though they experience the pain physiologically
they dont have the emotional reaction.

And what we find is that calming the emotional
reaction is one of the most powerful benefits of meditation. And Im not talking about the Olympic level,
Im talking about beginners. Theres a wonderful method called Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction; it was developed by a friend of ours John Kabat-Zinn years ago. And its for people in hospitals, people
in clinicsalthough anyone could benefitbut one of the strongest findings on this has
been that it helps with people who have chronic pain.

And Im talking about pain that medication
is not going to help you with, theres nothing medicine knows what to do about this except
give you horrible narcotics that are addictive. And here is a very positive alternative, because
what happens when you do MBSR if you have chronic pain is: the emotional component changes. You shift your relationship to the pain. It no longer is My pain, oh my God I cant
stand it, instead its Oh, theres that sensation again.

So the physiology of the pain continues, but
the emotional component, which is really where the hurt is, disappears or is much reduced
because you no longer have that same relationship to the pain that we do ordinarily..