Relieve Pain or Be With It? [Rerun]

Practicing Human

Cory Muscara

Self Improvement, Health & Fitness, Meditation, Happiness, Mindfulness, Education, Personal Development, Wellness, Mental Health, Personal Growth, Presence, Positive Psychology, Self-improvement, Buddhism

5 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As humans, it's inevitable that we will encounter pain in our life. Much of this pain is out of our control, but some of it we can influence and soothe. This is true in our meditation practice, as well. When pain arises in meditation--an itch, knee pain, etc--should we alleviate it if we can, or should we practice being with it? Listen on to find out.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're
0:05.2	getting a little better at life. I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's
0:10.1	episode we're going to talk about in meditation whether you should alleviate
0:15.8	discomfort as it arises or practice being with it. More to come on that in a
0:21.9	moment first let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.
0:30.0	So today's topic is inspired by a question from one of our listeners, and the
0:49.2	question is, I've been practicing mindfulness meditation for some time now, but I
0:54.9	have one problem. I have a topic dermatitis which makes my skin itch almost all
1:01.6	the time. Would you say it's better to ignore it and continue meditating in big
1:07.1	discomfort or just scratch it but then probably lose my focus. I rely a lot on
1:14.4	making myself comfortable before I start my practice, so the moment I stop
1:19.2	being comfortable I can't concentrate on meditation. I wonder what your advice
1:24.0	would be. So thank you for the question. The reason I wanted to turn this into a
1:30.2	podcast episode is because I think it is relevant to all of us, even if we're
1:36.7	not working with the skin condition or serious pain within our meditation
1:41.4	practice. Because at the heart of this is an inquiry into, do I alleviate the
1:47.7	pain if I can? Or do I practice being with it? And all of us can relate to that
1:52.9	in meditation and also outside of meditation. So what's the answer? Well, as you
2:01.9	may have guessed, it's not so black and white. In fact, the answer very much
2:08.6	depends on you. What your intentions for practicing are and what you know about
2:15.2	yourself and your patterns of conditioning in relationship to discomfort. There
2:21.2	could be merit in scratching the itch and getting some relief and there can
	...

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