The Diane Rehm Show on NPR: the Power of Meditation

The Diane Rehm show had an interesting segment on the power of meditation yesterday (June 22). There isn’t a transcript available at the moment, but you can listen to the podcast on her website.

I should mention first that Jonathan Foust – one of the guests on the show – is a meditation instructor of mine. So I’m rather partial to him anyway. I also emailed a question during the show about chronic pain, mainly asking what medical research there is about meditation’s effect on chronic pain. This was kind of a softball question, but I mainly wanted to see what they had to say about chronic pain.

I was familiar with the guests’ responses. Josephine Briggs (director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) didn’t cite any particular studies, but said that there are a number which have shown that meditation helps with chronic pain. Jonathan mentioned that meditation can help people change their relationships with pain. This is something I’ve written about before, so I won’t go into it in too much detail here.

Overall, the show seems like a good introduction to meditation and medical research related to it. One thing I did find very interesting were some comments from people who had tried meditation and had trouble with it. In particular, one caller said that he has serious concentration issues. How can he then sit down and meditate?

The general consensus of both guests to the show and those who called in are that there are a lot of different kinds of meditation. Some suggested that this gentleman try walking meditation, yoga (kundalini yoga in particular), martial arts, or some other meditation that moves his body. The trick is to find something that works for you.

I’ll be following up with a poll about your own meditation techniques.

‘Working with Pain’ meditation February 9th

Remember how I was posting about my experiences with an awesome meditation/talk on “working with pain?”

Well, the group I go to is having its annual discussion on “working with pain” on February 9th at 7:00 pm at the UU Church in Arlington. I should mention that this year’s talk is going to be given by the other group coordinator, Stig. He has a different – one might say slightly more cerebral – approach to dharma talks. It should be interesting to hear his take on the subject.

The full schedule of talks is available on Jonathan Foust’s blog. The post also includes directions and other useful information about the group.

“Skillful” Reactions to Pain

I had my first “topic request” for a post. (Please pass on more requests in the comments section, or as an @ request on the Twitter feed.) A friend asked me to write more about my reaction to pain mentioned in the previous post. She described my reaction of “Oh, I’m in pain…it will pass” as being potentially very alien to people.

I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration and methodology from mindfulness meditation, so a lot of what I’m about to say is my interpretation of wise things I’ve been told. I learned a lot of this from Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW) meditations I’ve attended. One of the people who leads discussion after the meditation is Jonathan Foust. He actually has a 30 minute (or so) podcast about “Working with Pain” on his website. If you’ve got the time, it’s a wonderful talk. There’s also a guided meditation mp3 on the same page.

I could talk about a lot of pain theory and techniques, but instead I think I’ll describe one of my first IMCW meditation experiences. This was the experience that made me really “get” mindfulness meditation, and totally convinced me how wonderful it is. It was also a – pardon the pun – insightful experience.