In certain practices pain is treated as a message and your best response is to attentively listen to it, without judgement and even without a desire to end it. This, naturally, changes the way one experiences pain.
'Mindful people' feel less pain
121–130 of 159 posts
Re: 'Mindful people' feel less pain
#122I think Marvin Minsky had it right in his book The Emotion Machine (2006): From Chapter III. From Pain to Suffering >Why does the sensation called pain sometimes lead to what we call suffering? How could such a simple event distort all your other thoughts so much? This chapter proposes a theory of this: if a pain is intense and persistent enough, it will stir up a certain set of resources, and then these, in turn, ar…
Hah. There's definitely pain out there that can't be studied to oblivion. Anyone so pompous hasn't experienced, for example, a cluster headache.
It's interesting that I'm reading a book written by a person who suffered from cluster headache. It's a book about mindfulness in which he suggests to treat your pain as a message and listen to that message, that is, study the pain. He no longer has this headache.
Re: 'Mindful people' feel less pain
#123I've definitely felt this. I'm more 'mindful' as the article says.. in the sense that I can step outside my emotions and control them. As in, if I'm getting angry, I can step outside the anger and evaluate whether it's necessary or helpful at the moment or not. If it isn't, I stop it. Otherwise, I let the anger creep into my voice to make the other person more receptive to the urgency of the situation. It works simil…
Are you sure you're just "more rational"? None of that seems mindful. It sounds like you're bordering dissociative disorder.
Re: 'Mindful people' feel less pain
#124I don't know how much I really believe this. Could this be a case of false correlation, as opposed to causation? Most medical advice for dealing with pain tells you to distract yourself from the pain, and certainly not to focus on it. Whereas mindfulness exhorts us to focus on our immediate circumstances, and not distract ourselves with more abstract thoughts. These 2 approaches to pain-management seem very contradictory.
https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/qa/what-are-some-ways-...
Re: 'Mindful people' feel less pain
#125> "Mindfulness is related to being aware of the present moment without too much emotional reaction or judgment," said the study's lead author, Fadel Zeidan I've always thought of the word "mindfulness" as one of those vague, new-age nonsense terms, like "psionic body energy" and "ethereal consciousness". Even given the above quoted definition, I still have no idea what it means. Does anyone know what is an example of…
You’re absolutely correct, the terms have been muddled and people, even ‘experts’ confuse the terms. The book: The Mind Illuminated is a great modern day guide on meditation and the different stages of progression one may hit along the way.
While meditating, one typically develops two skills: 1. Samadhi: stable attention, being able to focus on the meditation object without forgetting or getting distracted. 2. Sati: mindfulness. Best translated to something like peripheral awareness.
Samadhi is focus on the book you’re reading without losing your place because the dog is barking. Sati is being aware of the context of your environment (dog barks, birds chirping, the feeling of your butt against your chair) without losing sustained attention on the book.
One cannot really develop mindfulness without sustained awareness, as otherwise you context switch from the soup you’re eating to that thing Brett said at work, to back pain, back to the soup.
Training those two skills gives a person the ability to better focus their attention on things deliberately while keeping enough in your conscious periphery that you have enough context to switch attention to other things that matter.
Re: 'Mindful people' feel less pain
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah. There's definitely pain out there that can't be studied to oblivion. Anyone so pompous hasn't experienced, for example, a cluster headache.
yea, I guess torture supposedly doesn't work if you just externalize it. certainly not my experience
love it. i've actually been tortuted. so I've actually experienced the pain of torture. it's seriously real pain. but okay. downvotes . awesome
Re: 'Mindful people' feel less pain
#127I've definitely felt this. I'm more 'mindful' as the article says.. in the sense that I can step outside my emotions and control them. As in, if I'm getting angry, I can step outside the anger and evaluate whether it's necessary or helpful at the moment or not. If it isn't, I stop it. Otherwise, I let the anger creep into my voice to make the other person more receptive to the urgency of the situation. It works simil…
Are you sure you're just "more rational"? None of that seems mindful. It sounds like you're bordering dissociative disorder.
You've taken someone's mastery of a life skill we expect of all adults (emotional self-control) and are pointing to the closest pathological condition you can find even though it's mile and miles away from what the parent poster describes.
Re: 'Mindful people' feel less pain
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that true if your being tortured by someone other than yourself? I've seen the picture of the monk who set himself on fire while meditating in protest. I wonder if suffering is only optional if you inflict it on yourself.
For an interesting perspective on this topic, I'd recommend "Man's Search for Meaning", by Victor Frankl. Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, and one of his points (as I understand it) is that humans deeply desire to know that their life is meaningful, and even if another person is torturing you, you can find meaning by maintaining your human dignity in the face of the evil around you. The storie…
It’s easy to make this argument: Jewish people were in a place where their experience was entirely existential, thus anything is survivable simply because the other option is death (and so it was for their children and their friends).
It’s an absolutely different story when you are being wrongfully interrogated in the USSR and thus giving up simply implies a life in prison. And the other option is another day of torture.
Suffering is relative.
Re: 'Mindful people' feel less pain
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah. There's definitely pain out there that can't be studied to oblivion. Anyone so pompous hasn't experienced, for example, a cluster headache.
It's interesting that I'm reading a book written by a person who suffered from cluster headache. It's a book about mindfulness in which he suggests to treat your pain as a message and listen to that message, that is, study the pain. He no longer has this headache.
Cluster headaches are sporadic and their cause is unknown. A person can have one once and never again. Best not to read into anecdotes.
Re: 'Mindful people' feel less pain
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who self-immolated in public. He appeared to remain calm throughout. Searching for "the burning monk 1963" will turn up images and videos, though I won't link to them here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%9...
XKCD 846: "It's hard to imagine the pain of a deeply infected dental nerve. To get an idea, put your hands in a bowl full of ice cubes, and hold them there for 90 seconds." Here Randall is using this example as one of the worst pains in the world, while others submerge themselves in ice baths voluntarily for health and enjoyment (eg. Wim Hof the ice man) There is something about facing an unpleasant stimulus (to put…
There’s also something to be said about the brevity of pain, even if the end is death. As incredible as thst monk’s composure was, hismnerves would have been dead within a short time, and he would have followed in a minute or two. Still an amazing thing to maintain himself in the face of that, butmits different than the same or worse pain for hours, days, or weeks. Being burned hurts, but anyone who has been badly burned can tell you it hurts so much more after the acute injury. Sticking your hand in ice really does hurt, but you can stop it anytime you want, and while it hurts it’s in an extremity. As someone who’s done that, and had an infected dental nerve can attest, it hardly compares. This may sound off but the fact that the pain is in your head makes it somehow worse, more inescapable and debilitating.
I never felt so much relief as I did when the endodontist gave me novicaine, and a large bolus in your palette isn’t pleasant either. Still it was like a cool breeze of relief next to that tooth. People are always scared of root canals, but the truth is that if you need one, it’s actually nothing at all next to the pain that brought you there.