How Can I Meditate (Or Do Anything Else) When I'm in Pain? | Sebene Selassie

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:18Happy Sunday, everybody. Hope you're having a good weekend. Today, we're going to answer a very common meditation question. How do I meditate when I'm in physical pain or psychological pain? For better and for worse, Sabine Selassie has a lot of experience with this. She's gone through four rounds of cancer treatment. She's also gone through a divorce. So she understands both physical and psychological pain. Before we dive in on this, let me just quickly say that Seb is the teacher of the month over on danharris.com. That means she's producing guided meditations to go along with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes.

0:54She's also doing live meditation and Q &A sessions. As you know, we do these every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. I'll be doing the next one solo, but she'll do the one after that. Another thing I want to say before we dive in is that if you want to come meditate with me in person, I've got two events coming up. There are a few tickets left for the meditation party retreat I'll be doing with Sabine, Jeff Warren, and Afosu Jones-Korte the weekend of October 24th at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. We do a mix of meditation, Q &A, and socializing. There's also plenty of free time for yoga, massage, tennis, hiking, pickleball, whatever.

1:28And then the other event is on November 18th. That's a live taping of this podcast in New York City with the comedian Pete Holmes. It's a benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center. If you want to come to either or both of these things, there are links in the show notes. Okay, we'll get started with Sabine Selassie, who you'll hear in conversation with my executive producer, DJ Kashmir, right after this. Sabine Selassie, welcome back. DJ Kashmir, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. And I'm really looking forward to teeing up this question for you because we get it all the time.

2:06So we have a lot of folks in our virtual sangha, our online community. Sometimes we call it the renegade sangha. People who listen and subscribe to danharris.com and are along for the ride. A lot of folks who ask us about how to meditate with pain, with physical pain, whether that be like acute and severe momentary pain or whether that be chronic pain. And I know this is something that you have a lot of experience with, and I'm sure you've been asked it a million times too. But I'm asking you now on behalf of, yeah, all those folks who are asking us. Yeah, this is such an important question and a tender question.

2:48And I feel like it's also a tricky one. Yes, I have experienced pain from cancer over these 20 years. I've probably experienced the most pain in the past four, and it really transformed my relationship to pain itself, but also how I teach and talk about pain. And yeah, I almost feel guilty for the ways that I've given instruction, answered questions about pain in the past, and stuck to a classical mindfulness approach of being with the experience, always with titration and allowing people to bring compassion to themselves. But there's a quality in which I privilege the meditation over tending to the pain.

3:33And it's hard because there is a mental amplification of physical pain that I think meditating with pain and being with pain really helps us see that there's a way in which we are projecting pain often. I know I've done that where pain will arise and then I'm projecting out from the actual experience and almost amplifying or increasing the pain with my thought about the pain. And if I can actually be with the experience of the pain, it's sensation, it's vibration, it's tingling, it might even be stabbing, but it's an actual felt sense experience. And there's such power and beauty in being able to experience that for oneself and start to have a relationship to pain as a changing, impermanent, physical thing.

4:25And there is a aversion that we all have to pain, a dislike of pain, leaving out maybe the greatest masochists. If that's your practice, go for it. But for most of us, we're trying to avoid pain. And there's a lot of also ideas about pain that are culturally contextual. And this happens a lot, I think, in Buddhist contexts that if progress on the path is like the easing of suffering, then if you're in a lot of pain, physically, emotionally, mentally, then you must be doing something wrong, right? And so there's this judgment of pain that we add on top of the pain we're having. And then in the new age world, that can turn into like, if you're not getting wealthier and happier and physically stronger, then you're not spiritual enough.

5:19So it's like this wellness culture grift that physical health and mental health equals worth. And bell hooks has a quote, I don't know it off the top of my head right now, but I quote it often where she basically talks about how our culture considers those without pain the most worthy, right? And so that's why I feel like it's such a tender question. And it's something we spoke about before, how personal practice is. It's sometimes hard to give general instructions because it's such a personal experience, including how much pain we can tolerate, right? So what's painful for me physically might be really different than what's painful for you or someone else.

6:03And so it really becomes a living practice of really understanding what's happening. Are we really in touch with our sensations and our experience of pain? Or are we spinning out? Will this get worse? Is it because I didn't do this yesterday or I ate that today? Sort of these judgments of ourselves. Is it tied up with this idea of like, I must be doing life wrong or meditation wrong or spirituality wrong if I'm in pain? And really get in touch with what's needed in the body now. This has really come up for me, as I said, in the past four years, but also this year, the past eight months or so, that I've had some of the worst pain I've ever experienced in my life.

6:45And it required different interventions at times, you know, sometimes pain meds, a lot of time movement, which we don't really allow ourselves if we're in some idea of a formal practice or meditation with pain. A lot of different sort of elements like water is really helpful for me with pain. So I'm lucky I have a big bath. And so I take a lot of baths and meditate in the bath. That's how I start my day. I just said a lot and would love to hear what you have to say too. but that's sort of my top thoughts about it. That was so fascinating. I feel like I'm hearing at least a few major threads in there.

7:24One is this sort of classic meditation instruction, which has some real value, especially if the pain is relatively bearable of being with it, of trying to detach yourself from the story you're telling about it. Yeah, there's a big difference between my foot hurts I'm feeling how my foot hurts stabbing pulsing there's a big difference between that and my foot hurts it's probably infected I'm gonna die I'm too young to die right and now we're in a panic attack I'm hearing that and then I'm also hearing that like you have evolved over the years in such a way where it's like just a deep awareness that's not always the right move or the most supportive move, or at least that it's often tied up in all these other things.

8:16The stories we're telling ourselves about how the pain is our fault, or how the pain reflects a lack of worthiness, or even just a sort of militant need to stay with the pain and be a good meditator in a moment where what's really needed is like an ice pack or medication or a walk or a bath or something like that. And I think maybe I'm also picking up on something I hear from a lot of the very best meditation teachers, which is like a sort of humble reluctance to just give blanket advice, knowing how idiosyncratic this experience is for people who are listening. So that's my attempt to sort of reflect what I think I'm hearing.

8:52Where did I go wrong there, if anywhere? No, nowhere. And, you know, I would add to that last bit that every experience of pain is different also because each of our experiences of pain are different. It's so interesting sometimes, Often when I'm at the doctors, they ask me, are you in pain? They give you that 1 to 10 score or whatever range to score your pain. But what is 1 and what is 10 to you? And I've taken to describing what I'm experiencing on a day-to-day basis as discomfort. So that they understand that acute pain is something that I reserve for very specific experiences. that might feel like unbearable to someone else or really easy to another person and really starting to understand that for ourselves.

9:41I'm always fascinated by the fact that physical pain and mental and emotional pain are processed in the same part of the brain. And so there's a similar quality here that what seems overwhelming and unbearable for some people emotionally or mentally just seems like Tuesday for someone else. This practice of really paying attention, bringing awareness to our experience, our mind, our body, our emotions, that we start to really untangle what this particular experience of suffering is for us. Because it is so unique, and it's wound up in so many other patterns too, or issues of control. I feel like I have a lot of issues around control with pain, but I'm always trying to prevent pain because I experience so much right now and really allowing myself to take care of my body without that need to be so deterministic about what's going to happen and really just live with what is occurring in each moment.

10:43Pain is such a deep teacher that way. All pain, but especially physical pain, because it often leads to the mental and emotional suffering. I never heard that what you said about how mental, emotional, physical pain are all processed in the same part of the brain. That feels like it has all kinds of implications. Yeah, right. I'm remembering maybe a month after the birth of my daughter, my wife was feeling really ill, and we went to an urgent care kind of in the middle of the night. And as she was describing her symptoms, the provider said something along the lines of, it sounds like a kidney infection, but that's probably not it because you'd be in a lot of pain.

11:28and you know sure enough it was a kidney infection and sure enough she had been in a lot of pain but for a million complicated reasons her pain tolerance and how she feels about expressing her pain and how other people believe or don't believe it when she says she's in pain she sort of presented to this provider as someone who couldn't possibly have a kidney infection when in fact she did and it just I think it speaks to what you're saying about how pain means different things to different people. Pain tolerance means different things to different people. And we've all got our own ways of handling it or not handling it.

12:04It's pretty deep stuff. It is deep. And it takes us into some of the deepest teachings about identification too, because I've shown to have a high pain tolerance. So my doctors are cautious with me when I say that I'm experiencing or not experiencing pain. Like, what do I really mean? And there's a way in which which that can become sort of like a flex, right? Like I can stand it. Or we can get really like collapsed by our pain and my pain. And both are kind of an over-identification. And something that happened to me very early in my cancer journey, like maybe 18 years ago or something, I was hospitalized and really sick.

12:48And I was looking at a newspaper and it was Darfur. Sure. And there was a woman and her starving baby on the cover. And these images we can imagine are familiar to us now too. And I was sort of in this mode of like, why me with all the pain and suffering I had? And then just seeing that image, it's like, why not me? This pain is not mine alone. And this suffering is so universal. It's so human. Yeah. So that question of why not me can become a beautiful thing to drop into our practice, not as more punishment. I should be suffering, but just to understand that this is human. This is what it means to be alive.

13:31And pain, illness, all forms of unwellness are part of it. It reminds me of something I've been trying lately in my own practice. Sister Dang Niem, who's a frequent flyer on the show, has a poem about the wave and the ocean and basically this idea that the wave suffers if it feels like it's separate from the ocean. And of course, it's not separate from the ocean. And I've been experiencing a bit of an uptick in sort of low-grade panic symptoms recently. And something I've been trying, when I can remember, is to just drop the phrase into my mind And you're not the wave, you're the ocean. Just as a way of sort of acknowledging like, this is a thing that's happening to me right now, but it's not unique.

14:25And we're all suffering. And the story of this moment is less than even a drop in the ocean. And it seems like pretty abstract and like it probably shouldn't work, but it always brings my heart rate down when I remember to do it. I love that. And I love that it's a ocean metaphor and a nature metaphor because it also takes it out only of the human realm, right? That we're part of this huge interconnected web of life. And there are all sorts of manifestations of experience in that, including animal and more than human. And so I love that it works for you. I want to ask you one more thing before you go.

15:08I've been meaning to go back to something you said a few minutes back. You were talking about how given the idiosyncratic nature of pain and all the different nuances and complexities that can show up for any individual person in any individual moment, you said something about how really what it actually comes down to is being in touch with what the body needs right now. And if you can answer that, then you'll have a better sense of whether it's a walk or a bath or an ice pack or a sitting meditation or a bath meditation or whatever it might be. And this is advice that has come up multiple times, even just in the course of these last few Sunday interviews we've been doing.

15:55And every time I hear it, it feels intuitively right and just way, way harder to do than to say. And I was just wondering if you could say just a little bit about the how of trying to answer that question for ourselves. What does my body need right now? That's such a good question. And I want to preface it with, if we're not feeling chronic pain or emotional distress or something that feels like it needs a particular tending to that feels particularly tender or destabilizing even, that could be a time when we want to feel into what is needed. And that is a somatic practice that I think I'll talk to in a second.

16:50If we are not in that tender or destabilizing place, I think it can be really helpful, especially if we're at the beginning stages of our practice, to not sort of choose here and there. To stick with a practice so we start to learn our own systems, right? So it can be helpful to say, I'm only going to practice breath meditation for a month, three weeks, two weeks, one week even. but to really explore something so that we gain some traction, some understanding. And that might turn into a year of a particular kind of practice. It really is such a power in becoming our own masters of particular ways of understanding our own systems, right?

17:35So if we're jumping from practice to practice, it's a little harder to do. Of course, we'll start to understand things, but we won't see the same sort of patterns and habits of mind and body and heart that we would see if we were sticking with practice. So I'll say that first. And then say, if we feel like we're ready to kind of work more intuitively, I don't even want to say intuitively because I think there's a lot of intuition involved in sticking with the practice too. But if we want to work more improvisationally and playfully and, you know, we feel like, okay, I get this meditation thing and I want to see like if I can feel into what was right for me because I know these different practices now and I have a good handle and I want to see which ones work for what.

18:19For me, it would involve coming to some sort of stillness and that might be standing and swaying. It doesn't have to be perfectly like hopefully not rigid and dropping the question in and listening. is seeing even if I can bring my awareness away from my head, which is not necessarily the place where thoughts come from. That's our idea of the brain. But there's a way in which we can be very head-centered. And so when we drop into the body, feel the belly, feel the chest, feel the feet on the floor, we can kind of listen to other cues just besides our thoughts. And just say, you know, what do I feel like today?

18:55And really feel is the operative word there, right? So we're sensing into, oh, okay, yeah. I feel like a tightness in my belly. I think I want to do some lying down practice so that I'm not holding my belly in that way. I can really relax my whole body or, oh, my heart feels a little constricted. Metta always makes my heart feel open because I focus my attention there and the way that I learned it. I have a lot of emotions roiling. I might want to do a rain practice so that there is more of a sense of what's happening right now that's grounded in more than just our like planning mind? So if we're relatively new and or if we're feeling a relative level of okayness in our body, it can be a really good idea to pick one practice and stick with it for a period of time to deepen.

19:44And if we're a little further along and or if we're really going through a thing, a good place to start can just be to try to drop that question, bring our attention to the body, what's needed right now, and just see what comes up. Yeah, that's something people could try. And that's with the caveat that like, me, there are people who really like doing something different every day from the get-go, and that works for them. So all of it comes back to really knowing ourselves, right? I had a teacher one time, I was expressing how, in part as a symptom of working on this show, I was feeling a little flooded by too many practice options.

20:27And also I was in a period where I really felt like just answering basic questions like what does my body need or how am I feeling or what emotions coming up like even that felt really far away. And so the advice I got which I followed for most of a couple of years was just sit down, follow one inhale, one exhale, and then see what's happening in your body and then do another inhale and another exhale and just see what's happening in your body. Rinse, repeat for however many minutes you have. And it was like, it was just such good advice. It was the best of both worlds in a sense. You know, it was just linear enough, just simple enough, but it was like forcing you to keep trying to build that muscle of listening a little bit more after, I don't know.

21:17for me at that time 30 or 35 years of not really doing that yeah the simpler often the better I think that's a good place to wrap for today I just want to thank you again a lot of folks who are listening today will be will have had you in their ears for a few weeks and they'll have you in their ears for another week and a half or so before our next teacher of the month comes on and And yeah, just so appreciate what you're offering and excited to do this again sometime. Thank you, DJ. It's lots of fun.

21:54Thanks to Seb and DJ. Don't forget that Seb and A is doing companion meditations for all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes and also weekly live guided meditation and Q &A sessions over on danharris.com. and our next one is coming up. Our next live session is coming up on October 21st at 4 Eastern. We do these every Tuesday at 4. I'll be doing that one solo. Also, there are links in the show notes if you want to sign up for the meditation party retreat that Seb and I will be doing the weekend of the 24th or if you want to sign up for the New York Insight Meditation Center benefit that I'll be doing with the comedian Pete Holmes, which is coming up in November.

22:34That's a live taping of this podcast. You should come to either or both. We'd love to see you there.

23:06Thank you.