Rice Business Report July 2019 Rice Business report2xxzzzasa | Page 15

Use Mindfulness to Relieve Suffering Without Painkillers
By Kevin Schoeninger
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Insight #2: Pain is Different from Suffering
Now, that we've seen how important it is to turn toward pain, pay attention, and ask deeper ques-
tions, let's move to our second insight-pain is different from suffering. This is important because we
normally lump the two together. What happens when we do that?
Suppose you are skiing and break your leg. Immediately, you feel the sharp pain of the break. What
does your mind do with that?
If it were me, I'd quickly make a series of mental jumps: wondering how bad it was, how long it would
take to recover, how long I'd have to miss work, and how I would pay the bills. As a teacher and train-
er of mind-body practices, I use my body all day long-and I can't do what I do without being mobile.
With a broken leg, I would quickly imagine I couldn't work and might struggle to pay the bills. These
thoughts add a story layer onto the pain that would cause me to suffer
Studies show that when you add stories of suffering onto physical pain, it makes the pain feel worse.
(For example, Dr. Maaike de Boer has shown how telling yourself "catastrophizing" stories about pain
increases perception of pain intensity.) Suffering causes pain to intensify and linger.
Attaching to stories about your own suffering may even slow or prevent healing by creating unneces-
sary tension in your body and blocking your receptivity to the healing messages available in pain.
So, there are two aspects to a painful experience: you have raw physical sensations of pain, then you
interpret what your pain means. In other words, there is the pain itself, then there are mental-
emotional reactions you layer onto the pain. This interpretive layer could include a wide range of dis-
tress such as worry, anger, blame, self-pity, guilt, and so on. It could include beliefs and attitudes to-
ward pain that you have learned such as "Suck it up." "Don't cry." "I deserve to suffer." Or, "Don't
show weakness."
Insight #2 says that secondary reactions to the primary pain sensations are the cause of suffering. The
raw sensations of pain are unpleasant and uncomfortable, but tolerable and instructive, if you can
separate them from unhelpful secondary reactions. This applies to physical pains from injuries and ill-
ness, as well as to emotional pains from events such as job loss, loss of a loved one, or divorce
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