Use Meditation to Relieve Back Pain

Summary: Meditation has more powerful pain relieving effect than morphine. The application of meditation in back pain relieving is proved to be efficient. Brain scans provide strong evidence on meditation’s pain relieving effect. This article not only analyzes the meditation’s pain relieving effect, but also provides several easy meditation techniques that people can do on their own.

When back pain interferes with our daily functioning, most people would probably turn to pain killers for help. If you are one of those people, you will probably be surprised to know that meditation techniques are proved to be more powerful than morphine in pain relieving. A new research on Journal of Neuroscience reported that morphine can reduce about 25% of pain, while meditation’s effect ranging from 11% to as high as 93%. This study shows that an hour of meditation can reduce 40% in pain intensity and 57% in pain unpleasantness.
The application of meditation in relieving back pain has been proved to be efficient by a research from Duke University Medical Center. Their study tested the effect of an 8-week long loving-kindness meditation program (a Buddhist tradition to develop love and transform anger into compassion) on 48 chronic low back pain patients. The findings indicate a negative correlation between medication practice time and back pain intensity and anger level. The results suggest that meditation is beneficial in reducing pain, anger, and psychological distress in patients with back pain.
The effects of meditation on brain have strong physiological evidence. Brain scans during meditation shows a significant reduction of brain activity in the primary soma sensory cortex, which is an area involved in painful stimulus processing. At the same time, meditation increases brain activity in areas including the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula and the orbito-frontal cortex, which shape how the brain builds an experience of pain from nerve signals.
After knowing the power of meditation on pain relieving, you might be excited to know how to do it. It is a stereotype that meditation needs to be done with your legs crossed and your hands in a prayer position. Actually, meditation is a simply a process to empty your mind so that you can relax your body fully.
Here we share some easy meditation techniques that you can practice by yourself:

• Single Subject Focus – try focusing on nothing but a candle flame or a picture that does not lead you to any thoughts that you have in your mind.
• Feeling Focus – try focusing on how your body is feeling without judging anything you feel. Fully put your mind on how your body feels, how your muscles feel, and how every organ inside of you feels.
• Outside World Focus – try focusing on the environment around you. Simply observe everything without thinking. Look at their colors and shapes like you are an outsider.
• Walking – try focusing on how your feet, legs and the whole body feel while you are walking and every move you make.
• Breathe Counting – close your eyes and how many times you breathe in and out. Count your breath till ten then start from one again. In this way, you can be more focused on breath itself, but not the number.
• Word Repeating – think about one word with one syllable that you can repeat with each breath in and out, for example, “health”.

During meditation, make sure you dress in comfortable clothes and in a quiet place where you won’t be easily distracted. Closing eyes is not necessary but it may help you concentrate.
After several days of mindfulness meditation, you may not only benefit back pain reduction, but also improved attention, improved sleep, and improved quality of life as well.

2011? Dr. Brendal Norris, Chiropracticbackpainrelief.org, Read other articles
about back pain and back pain relief at http://chiropracticbackpainrelief.org
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