Chapter 14

Getting Physical: Healing the Body

In This Chapter

Understanding the real connections between mind and body

Discovering ways to manage pain mindfully

Exploring how to cope with your illness using mindfulness

Mindfulness for people with serious medical problems was initially adopted in the USA, and now the approach is rapidly being adopted all over the world. Doctors who’d exhausted all traditional medical routes referred patients to a stress-reduction clinic that used mindfulness to help people cope with pain, anxiety and stress.

As the patients engaged in mindfulness, they began to discover a different way of relating to their challenging experiences. They began to feel better, despite their medical problems. The symptoms didn’t necessarily disappear, and the aim of mindfulness wasn’t to make them go away. The patients found a different way of coping with the illness: from a state of wholeness and wisdom, rather than fear and disharmony.

This chapter explores why mindfulness may be beneficial for those suffering from a chronic health condition, and offers a variety of different ways of beginning that journey. You certainly don’t have to be ill to benefit from mindfulness, but thousands suffering from serious medical conditions have found relief through mindfulness.

Contemplating Wholeness: Healing from Within

The word ‘heal’ is related to the Old English word for whole (‘hal’). The word ‘health’ originally meant wholeness.

Get a sense of what being whole means for you, and as you read this chapter, continue to reflect. Mindfulness is about going to that capacity you have to be aware, whole and free, no matter how broken you feel your body to be. This is a totally different way of seeing what healing truly means, but seems to lead to a peace of mind conducive to feeling better.

Physical disease, or dis-ease, isn’t just a problem with the body, but a problem for the mind too. As I explore in this section, your mind and body are inseparable – a whole. When you suffer from a disease, you need to look after both your body and mind to best manage your difficulties. You also need to consider how a sense of being whole can come about whatever happens to your body. Everyone’s physical body perishes in the end – how can you live so that this process is dignified rather than full of stress, anxiety and the feeling of being broken?

When you practise mindfulness, you practise an act of love. You’re befriending yourself, slowly but surely. You’re engaging in an activity for yourself, to look after and nurture your own health and wellbeing.

In mindfulness meditation you may at some point connect with your own deep, innate sense of wholeness. You begin to touch a depth of relaxation, of peace, of calm, that you may not have been aware of beforehand. This encounter with your own wholeness is profoundly healing in the sense of feeling at peace with yourself and with an inner conviction that things are going to be okay, however they work out. Your ill heath, your body, your thoughts, the emotions that arise and pass away, aren’t everything. They’re a part of the whole. The thought, ‘It’s all my fault; I’m completely useless,’ is just a thought, not a fact. When you begin to touch this inner wholeness, your illness becomes less threatening. You become more optimistic in both the present moment and the future. From your more detached, free and light-hearted stance, your perception of your predicament shifts, and you allow more space for your body to heal as best it can, while taking all the medical treatment as appropriate.

Mindfulness helps you to see things from a bigger perspective. If, due to your disease, you feel low and down, out of control, and that you just can’t dig yourself out of the hole that you’re in, you probably feel depressed, isolated, lonely and afraid. However, consider the same situation from a bigger perspective: remember that you’re suffering in the same way as many others. You can become aware of both the suffering you feel and those aspects of you that are healthy and well. Although you may have a bad back, what about the parts of your body that are functionally well? Mindfulness shifts the fixed patterns of the mind and enables you to see from eyes of wholeness. Then perhaps you can forgive yourself for feeling down – you’re human after all.

Seeing the Connection between Mind and Body

Imagine you’re scared of spiders. As you walk downstairs before dawn, you can see a shape on the floor in the gloom. ‘It’s a spider!’, you think. Your heart starts pounding and you begin to sweat. You’re not sure whether you should even move, in case you disturb the spider. Your thoughts go wild. Then you look again and notice that the shape doesn’t look quite right. You switch on the light to discover it’s only a mark on the carpet! You feel relieved.

When you saw the mark as a spider, a whole series of changes took place in your body. You experienced the changes because of what you thought and interpreted the mark to be – in other words, because of your mind. When you realised it was just a stain on the carpet, a set of calming reactions took place. The object remained exactly the same. The way you changed your bodily reaction was by bringing curiosity to your experience and then switching on the light. Through awareness and curiosity, you begin to interpret things differently, to see them as they actually are rather than what you think they are.

By becoming more skilful in the way you use your mind, you can create the conditions to help rather than hinder the healing process. High levels of stress reduce the strength of your immune system, so any creative ways of reducing stress are bound to have some positive effect.

Here’s a very short exercise you can try that clearly demonstrates the link between your mind and body:

1. Make yourself comfortable sitting or lying down and close your eyes if you want to.
2. Imagine you are hungry and are about to eat your favourite food. You can smell the food and see it on your plate. Take a few minutes to imagine what the food looks and smells like. You take a piece of the food and begin eating. Imagine the taste of the delicious food in your mouth.
3. Notice any changes happening in your body. Are you salivating? Do you feel the desire to have this food now? Do you feel certain emotions manifesting themselves in your body? Are some parts of your body becoming tense or relaxed?

This short exercise (or form of torture, with all this talk about food!) again shows how your mind can directly have an effect on your body. All you did in this exercise was use your mind to create images in your head. And yet all sorts of physical changes took place in your body. You may now even go off to cook this food you’ve been imagining. In the same way, using your mind in the right way can go on to create positive, healing effects in your body.

Acknowledging Your Limits

You have a certain amount of time and energy on this planet. If you didn’t have any limits on time, you’d live forever. If you didn’t have any limits on your energy, you’d never need to sleep. So, how can you best use the time and energy you do have? If you try to do more and more, you eventually break down. You’re better off becoming aware of your limits and acknowledging them, but continuing to push those boundaries every now and then, in a healthy and mindful way.

At one point in my career, I believed that I could do anything and everything. I took on more and more jobs and responsibilities. I was doing more but achieving less. By the end of the day I was exhausted, my energy levels were very low and I was just about finding time to meditate, just to keep going. One day I woke up and thought ‘enough is enough’ – why sacrifice my health and wellbeing for the sake of yet another promotion and a bit of extra cash? I began to reduce the responsibilities that I could reduce, and looked for more efficient and creative ways of doing the things I had to do. In this way, I enjoy challenging myself, and testing my limits, but I don’t overdo it.

Don’t confuse accepting or acknowledging your limits with feeling defeated. If you suffer from a long-term health condition for example, you don’t have to give up and curl up in the corner for the rest of your life. Accepting your limits means accepting that your body isn’t well and you need to start taking small steps to begin improving your condition, as your doctor advises. You may need support from a group, or from your own friends or family. You also need to remember that you won’t magically transform, and that therefore you need to work at accepting your limits slowly but surely.

Accepting limits reminds me of what bees do. When a bee is stuck in a room, it continues to fly into the closed window, thinking that it can go through. If the bee could see that the window is a limit, and it’s not possible to get out that way, it wouldn’t keep knocking into the window until it died. If you find yourself hitting limits again and again, and getting frustrated, be imaginative and try a different approach – don’t keep flying into the window just because the view looks great on the other side. Try a radically different approach.

Rising above Your Illness

To rise above your illness means to separate yourself from your illness rather than to identify yourself with the disease. In this way, you may become less overwhelmed by your condition.

Dana Jennings, who suffered from cancer, wrote in a New York Times blog:

Being able to laugh in the face of cancer lets you continue to own yourself, as hard as that might be, rather than ceding ownership to the disease. A good laugh reminds you that you are not your cancer.

You are not your illness. Laughter may be one way of reminding yourself of that fact, and mindfulness is another. Some days are better than others. Some days may be dark, and you may need just to hang on until things lighten up a bit. Remembering that ‘I am not my illness’ may help.

Recently, when I was practising a mindful meditation, my body felt lighter and lighter, in a pleasant way. I felt completely calm and at ease. Everything was okay with the world. At that point in time, I didn’t identify with my body and yet I felt completely at ease and fine with the experience. In fact, I felt as if I was truly myself. Experiences such as this remind me that my body isn’t as solid and real as I normally think. I like to think: ‘I am not my body but I am aware of my body. I am the awareness – aware of thoughts, feelings, my body and the world around me.’ In this sense of wholeness, you experience a freedom from the chains of thinking ‘I’m ill’ or ‘I’m incomplete,’ to achieve the freedom of being, of resting, in the sense of ‘I’m alone.’ In this context, I mean alone as in ‘al-one’ or ‘all one’, the original meaning of the word alone. This is the opposite of feeling lonely and isolated. It’s a feeling of being connected to yourself and the world around you.

Don’t use mindfulness to try to chase certain pleasant experiences. Whatever you experience in mindfulness practice is okay – the meditation isn’t good or bad. The sense of wholeness is your true nature, right here and right now, not just in some exotic mindful experience. Experiences come and go, but awareness is always here, whether you want to be aware or not. Identify with that presence and you’re immediately reminded of your own sense of wholeness.

Using Mindfulness to Manage Pain

Acute pain is a sharp pain lasting for a short time, sometimes defined as less than 12 weeks. Medicine is quite good at treating acute pain. Chronic pain is pain that lasts for over 12 weeks, and doctors have a much harder time treating such a condition. Many consider chronic pain as one of the most underestimated health-care problems in the world today, having a massive effect on both the patient and being a major burden on the health-care system.

The World Health Organization found that between a half and two-thirds of people with chronic pain struggle to exercise, enjoy normal sleep, perform household chores, attend social activities, drive a car, walk or have sexual relations.

It has repeatedly been found that those who complete an eight-week mindfulness programme find their level of pain reduced. This is surprising, because mindfulness asks you to go into the place that hurts and allow the sensation to be there, rather than to fight with the pain itself. The following sections explain how this may work.

Knowing the difference between pain and suffering

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Pain is a sensation that you’re bound to experience from time to time. In fact, pain is often a very useful sensation – without pain, you’d go around damaging yourself without realising it. If you’ve ever been anaesthetised in your mouth by your dentist, you know how easy it is to bite the inside of your cheek, even making it bleed, without realising.

Suffering is different. Suffering is something you create yourself, often unknowingly. Say you suffer from arthritis. Each morning, when you wake up, for a split second you just experience the raw sensation – the pain of having arthritis. Then, within a second or so, your mind begins to interpret the experience: ‘That stupid disease. Why me? I bet I got it because of the unhealthy food I used to eat. It’s not fair. I’m so annoyed! It’s all my fault. What will happen in the future?’ Unhelpful judgements, interpretations and predictions all lead to suffering.

A useful formula to remind you of the difference between pain and suffering is:

Pain x Resistance = Suffering

In other words, the more you resist or fight or deny or avoid your pain, the greater the suffering you experience. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy to reduce your urge to resist pain – resistance is the automatic response to pain. But through the tools and approaches in this book, you can learn to reduce that reaction and therefore begin to find relief from your suffering.

Pain can be emotional: feelings of sadness, loneliness, grief, anxiety or anger. Suffering is the way you meet those emotions. If you’re curious about them and almost welcome them rather than trying to push them away, fight or block them, you’re unlikely to create much suffering. However, if you avoid the emotions through addictions like drugs or excessive alcohol use, to avoid these feelings, you’re likely to increase your own suffering.

All the avoidant strategies can’t make the pain go away, they just numb it for the time being. This can be helpful in the short term to help you to cope, but by avoiding the painful sensations or emotions, you sustain and feed them. Suffering is something you can begin to manage and control by looking more carefully at the thoughts and feelings you’re experiencing – the very act of turning towards painful experiences begins to change the level of suffering you have.

Here’s a quote from Nisargadatta, a famous Indian spiritual teacher. He experienced the pain of throat cancer in the latter years of his life:

Pain is physical, suffering is mental. Beyond the mind there is no suffering. Pain is essential for the survival of the body, but none compels you to suffer. Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life. As a sane life is free of pain, so is a saintly life free from suffering. A saint does not want things to be different from what they are; he knows that, considering all factors, they are unavoidable. He is friendly with the inevitable and, therefore, does not suffer. Pain he may know, but it does not shatter him. If he can, he does the needful to restore the lost balance, or he lets things take their course.

Coping with pain

Here are a few things to remember about pain when applying mindfulness to the condition:

• Pain can only exist in the present moment. You only need to cope with this moment now. By worrying about the rest of the day, week, month or year, you begin to create suffering for yourself.
• Tension increases pain. By becoming aware of the sensation of pain and imagining the breath going into and out of the area of pain, the tension naturally begins to release, thereby reducing the pain. However, if the tension stays, that’s okay too – your intention is all you can control here. Become aware of the actual sensation of the pain itself. Notice where the pain is located in the body. Does it have an associated shape, size, texture or colour?
• Trying hard to reduce pain doesn’t really work. (This is just like how trying to relax can create more tension.) By discovering how slowly but surely to acknowledge and accept your pain, your experience may change for the better.

Here’s a mindfulness meditation you can try to help you through your pain:

1. Adopt any position that you feel comfortable in for a few minutes.
2. Feel the sensation of your own breathing. Be aware of your breath with a lightness, a kindness and a sense of gratitude as far as you can.
3. Notice how the pain grabs your attention time and again. Try not to criticise yourself for this. Understand that this is a difficult practice and guide your awareness gently back to the feeling of the in-breath and out-breath around the nose, chest, belly or wherever else you find it most easy to focus on. Continue for a few minutes.
4. Now bring your attention to the sensation of the pain itself. This may feel frightening, or you may be very reluctant to try moving your attention to the pain. However, if you’ve never done this before, why not give it a go? Imagine your breath going into and out of the centre of the pain, or however close you can comfortably move to the pain.
5. You may find saying the following words to yourself helpful, as you breathe in and out. You may want to make a nice, slow recording of it – perhaps with music in the background if you like – and play the recording back to yourself:

Breathing in, I am aware I am breathing in,

        Breathing out, I am aware I am breathing out.

Breathing in, I am aware of pain,

        Breathing out, I am aware of pain.

Breathing in, I am aware of pain,

        Breathing out, I know I am not my pain.

Breathing in, I am aware of tension,

        Breathing out, I know I am not my tension.

Breathing in, I am aware of anger,

        Breathing out, I know I am not my anger.

Breathing in, I am aware of sadness,

        Breathing out, I know I am not my sadness.

Breathing in, I am aware of anxiety,

        Breathing out, I know I am not my anxiety.

Breathing in, I take things moment by moment,

        Breathing out, this is the only moment.

Breathing in, I know I am awareness,

        Breathing out, I know I am free.

You can change the wording to whatever you feel comfortable with. Feel free to experiment. Practise at least once a day and note the effect.

Using Mindfulness during Ill Health

In the mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic, a popular saying is: ‘If you can breathe, there’s more right with you than wrong with you.’ You don’t even have to be able to sit up or to move to benefit from mindfulness. Mindfulness is mind training, and so no matter what the condition of your body, you can still train your mind.

Mindfulness is used to support those with cancer, heart disease, diabetes and a whole range of other chronic conditions. How does it support you when you have such a physical disease? Here are some ways:

• Mindfulness offers you a way to support yourself and build some inner resilience so you aren’t overwhelmed by the looming decisions you may need to make and difficulties you may meet. Making choices about your treatment is an extra stressor when you’re unwell. With mindfulness, you can access a greater clarity of thought.
• Mindfulness offers a way of connecting with something other than just your physical body, making you feel more grounded. The illness may have a physical impact and cause changes to your appearance. Your whole sense of personal identity and self-worth can be questioned when you look different as you gaze at yourself in the mirror.
• Ultimately, mindfulness is about realising that you’re more than just your body, mind and heart. You’re more than your fleeting thoughts and fluxing emotions. You’re more than your illness. Through the practice of mindfulness and a natural self-enquiry that arises, you begin to discover a different dimension of yourself, a dimension in which illness no longer overwhelms you.
• Mindful awareness can help you to spot unhelpful and untrue thoughts, thereby defusing their potency. If you’re ill, stress increases not only for you but also for your family and friends, when you all need greater support and calm. Some people even believe that they’ve brought the disease upon themselves due to stress. This belief leads to further distress.
• The space offered in mindfulness may help you to uncover a direct experience of an understanding through which life and death begin to make sense on some level. Serious illness puts you face to face with the prospect of death. Facing death may force you to reflect on your priorities, on what is most important in your life.

Illness isn’t all negative. Surprisingly, research has shown there are positive effects of terminal illness. Some patients report increased spirituality, a deeper appreciation and a generally more positive perception of partners and significant others. Some people report greater compassion and willingness to express emotions. Higher levels of spirituality indicate that the patient senses that the illness is part of a bigger picture, and is more likely to be at peace amidst such challenging life circumstances. The phenomenon of this re-prioritisation and personal development seems to occur when people overcome their trauma, and is called post-traumatic growth.

You can develop mindfulness in two main ways, even when you’re feeling ill: either by practising mindfulness exercises and meditations, or by living in a mindful way whenever it comes to mind in the moment. So when you’re lying in bed waiting for the doctor, you can try and enjoy some deep, mindful breaths. When you’re waiting for your test results, you can slowly walk up and down and feel the sensations in your feet – that’s mindful walking. When you spot yourself saying negative, harsh words to yourself, you can try soothing yourself with some words of self-kindness, or remember that you’re not alone with this condition – many others are in a similar or worse situation all over the world. You don’t need to beat yourself up just because you can’t find the time or motivation to meditate. Any short mindful exercise counts.

Aiding the healing process

When you sit down to meditate, any aches, pains and physical discomfort that you may have managed to ignore during the course of the day become more apparent. The practice of mindfulness is about allowing and managing these uncomfortable feelings rather than totally distracting yourself from them; you use them in a positive way.

Mindfulness can make you feel empowered. Even if you can’t move a muscle in your body, you’re able to do something within your mind that may do you some good. In this way, you’re able to be proactive at a time in your life when you feel most powerless. Mindfulness can feel like a lifebuoy when you’re struggling to stay afloat. What a relief!

I can’t guarantee that mindfulness will help you heal – but there’s a chance it can, so it’s worth a shot, especially if the practice makes you feel a bit better.

All the mindfulness exercises in this book can help you at a time of illness – choose whatever appeals to you. A selection of some practices you can do to help reduce stress and aid the healing process are:

• Mindfulness of breath. Practise focusing your attention on your breathing. If you find focusing on the breath too difficult due to any pain you feel, try counting your breaths or saying ‘in’ and ‘out’ to yourself as you breathe in and out. Even managing just one mindful breath is a great start. Allow yourself to become aware of the natural, life-giving energy of your breathing as it finds its instinctive rhythm. As you breathe, you may become aware of a physical tightness in the body that restricts the breathing process. Allow and accept this, and breathe into the tension. If the tension melts, fine; if the tension doesn’t, that’s also fine.
• Mindfulness of body. Being mindful of your body is a particularly important stage if you’re unwell. Bring as much kindness as you can to your experience. If you aren’t too overwhelmed by the sensation of pain, allow and accept it as far as you can. Feel the sensation of pain in a neutral way, staying with the feeling and doing nothing else. In addition to kindness, bring some curiosity to your experience, as best you can. The more nurturing and gentle you can be in your relationship with your body, the better. Try some yoga, stretching or tai chi if they help to soothe the pain.
• Mindfulness of thoughts and emotions. In mindfulness, you can welcome your thoughts and emotions rather than resisting them. You may want to use your breath to anchor yourself in the present moment every now and then when you find yourself swept away by thoughts, as happens very often. Notice the nature of your thoughts. Are they catastrophic? Are they always about the illness? Do they focus on the future all the time? What about your emotions? Allow yourself to move into your emotions rather than resist them. Notice in what part of the body they manifest themselves and use your breath to soothe them. Trust in your own capacity to heal, to make whole.
• Mindfulness of being. Become aware of your own sense of identity – be aware of the sense of ‘I am’. Experiment with letting go of your identification with your body, your mind, your emotions, your health and illness, your desires and fears. Keep coming back to the sense of being, the sense of ‘I am’. Rest in this state of ‘beingness’. If you find yourself getting lost in thoughts, imagine that your thoughts are simply dancing on top of your awareness. Remember that your thoughts and feelings are like waves in an ocean of being that is you. Expect thoughts to arrive rather than resisting or fighting them. Just as clouds aren’t distractions for the sky, so thoughts aren’t distractions for your mindfulness practice. Just be.