Hi and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday. It's Eve here with you.

So I met with my mentor and meditation teacher the other day and we discussed how to manage

pain or discomfort in meditation and daily life. I've been having a lot of neck pain over the last couple of years

and I remember thinking to myself when it was at its worst that I would never be free of the pain so much so that it would bring me to tears.

Pain can be all consuming and anyone who has experienced chronic pain or is currently experiencing it knows this all too well.

The pain is a lot more complex than you might think. There is the sensory experience where nerve sends signals into our spinal cord and up into our brain registering that the pain is there.

What happens next though is what can really add to the experience of pain.

So it's really normal to want pain or discomfort to stop and almost always pain is labeled as bad.

And if it persists we tend to reinforce this by negatively judging it.

We might go out of our way to find solutions or worse we might do anything to make it stop and that might include doing things that aren't always good for us.

And my meditation teacher asked me when you thought to yourself that your neck pain would never go away what happened to the pain.

I said it got a lot worse and that's because I was thinking about the worst case scenario rather than what I was feeling at that moment.

Now we obviously can't just think ourselves out of physical pain or discomfort but our mind can play a huge role in how we heal from pain both physically and mentally.

And there is now mounting research to show the role that meditation and mindfulness can have in managing and responding to pain.

This is not to say that medication or physical therapy don't play a role as they do but understanding the mind's ability to help to heal is enormously helpful.

Where there is physical discomfort or pain there is often emotional and mental discomfort and vice versa.

And getting caught in a negative thought pattern can be very easy thinking that things will never change or get better.

A body scan meditation is a really great practice for dealing with and managing pain or discomfort.

It provides a space to really get to know the mind and the body and how sensations appear painful or not.

When my neck pain was really bad I would almost tell myself that my entire body was in pain.

And when I did a body scan practice I would see that not every part of me was in pain it was actually just my neck.

The layers of thinking were telling my brain your whole body hurts and as a result it would tense up giving me the impression that everything hurt.

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