Meditation for chronic pain: how it helps and how to practice
Clinically reviewed by Dr. Chris Mosunic, PhD, RD, CDCES, MBA
Chronic pain is difficult to manage but meditation can help. We share 5 meditation techniques for pain relief, and wisdom from meditation teacher, Avi Craimer.
Living with chronic pain isn't just a physical struggle—it can also affect your mental and emotional wellbeing. While medication and traditional treatments have their place, complementary approaches can also manage and lessen pain. Meditation has proven to be a game-changer in dealing with chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, arthritis, and more.
How does meditation provide pain relief and ease chronic pain?
Meditation isn't just for easing stress and anxiety or to help you relax — it's a robust tool that can significantly lessen chronic pain. Mindfulness meditation, in particular, offers a unique approach to pain relief, helping people treat pain from the inside out.
Meditation has scientific backing for use as pain relief. Regular meditation changes brain structure in ways that may help manage pain. As a result, studies have shown that meditators have higher pain thresholds than non-meditators, even for externally induced pain.
Meditation offers a time-tested, scientifically supported means of managing chronic pain. By integrating mindfulness into your daily routine, you're managing your pain and investing in your overall wellbeing.
💙 Learn how to practice meditation for pain-relief with our Untangling Physical Pain meditation.
5 meditation techniques for relief from chronic pain
Meditation and mindfulness can help you deal with chronic pain in many ways. From the physical to the emotional, these tools can help you navigate painful times.
1. Try guided meditations
A guided meditation led by a seasoned practitioner can take your focus away from the pain, helping your body and mind relax. The more you’re not focusing on the pain the better you’ll feel. While it’s always possible to meditate on your own, having someone to guide you through can help you to focus more on the practice itself and less on the physical discomfort you’re feeling.
💙 Try this guided practice on physical pain from the Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt.
2. Practice visualization
Studies have shown that the mind often can’t distinguish the difference between visualizing something and actually doing it. Practicing safe-place visualization meditation involves imagining a serene place or situation, which can make you feel more calm. This practice can shift your focus and reduce the mind’s perception of pain.
💙 You can enhance the experience by pairing your visualization meditation with a serene soundscape. Try Jasper Lake. There’s also a guided visualization in our 7 Days of Soothing Pain series.
3. Explore body scan meditation
A body scan helps you identify and release tension in various parts of the body, which can be particularly helpful for those with chronic pain. Meditation teacher, Avi Craimer, explains below.
“An important mindfulness practice you can use to work with pain is called the body scan. This is a practice where we move our attention systematically through different body parts, starting at the top and working our way down, then back up again. We try to accept and be attentive to whatever sensations we notice in the body without evaluating or trying to change what we find.
“If you notice yourself doubting whether the practice can work for your pain, remind yourself that mindfulness helps with all forms of pain regardless of the cause. Then practice attending to your body sensations with those three qualities of mindful attention, focus, acceptance, and clarity. These qualities take time to develop, so be patient with yourself and stick with it. Finally, from time to time, ask yourself how you are reacting to your body sensations, and spend some time being mindful of what comes up.”
💙 To practice a guided body scan, check out our collection of Body Scan meditations. You can choose a practice length as short as three minutes or as long as 30 minutes.
4. Start mindful breathing
Mindful breathing can activate your body's relaxation response, thus reducing pain. This can work even better if you’re in the habit of practicing mindful breathing regularly. The more you teach your body to relax and find ease when you breathe deeply the more efficiently it will respond when you use this tool.
💙 Our Breathing Room meditation with Prof. Megan Reitz can help you use the breath to guide you into a more balanced place.
5. Try a loving-kindness meditation
This practice involves sending goodwill and kindness to yourself, which can help alleviate the mental and emotional stresses associated with chronic pain. If you’re experiencing pain and focusing on how difficult it is, that can really take a toll on your mental health. However if you’re able to offer yourself compassion and patience, even in the face of painful adversity, it can enhance your overall wellbeing.
💙 It can be useful to try this meditation as a guided practice the first time. Calm offers several Loving-Kindness Meditations that vary in length from three minutes all the way to thirty minutes.
How meditation teacher, Avi Craimer, used meditation to support his own experience with chronic pain
Avi Craimer, a meditation teacher and philosopher, provides expert pain relief tips and tricks. Avi’s experience extends from teaching individuals to teaching public courses and leading workshops in diverse settings like hospitals and local government. Avi’s history explains his journey with pain.
Where did your journey with chronic pain begin?
Avi Craimer: “I still remember the sharp crack of pain as the back of my head landed on the concrete floor. I was just four years old, and I’d fallen from the staircase of an unfinished basement at a friend’s house. I was lucky; the doctors found no signs of fracture or concussion. Yet, within a few years of that fall, I began to have severe headaches, quite a bummer for an energetic 7-year-old. As I grew up, chronic pain became a familiar, if unwanted, part of my life.
“By my mid-20s, things had approached something of a turning point. The pain had become so bad I could hardly hold a book or do household chores. Around then, I started a meditation practice. I had little hope of it helping with my pain, but quite unexpectedly, it did.
“Bit by bit, as I sat noticing my breath and body sensations, I began to feel the deep knots of pain in my body start to untie themselves.”
Is it fair to say the pain is not all in your head?
Avi Craimer: “Let’s start by addressing one of the greatest barriers for those considering whether to try using meditation for chronic pain. Often, people with chronic pain feel that the reality of their pain is unrecognized, doubted, or diminished by others. The idea that meditation can help us with our pain could be seen as just another way of claiming that our pain is all in our heads.
“The antidote to this understandable concern is to understand that just because meditation uses our mind doesn’t mean it can’t affect physical pain. I’ve taught meditation to people recovering from surgery and seen how it helped them with postoperative pain. Nobody would say that that is all in their heads!
“Pain isn't solely a physical experience–it has a psychological component. Your mind influences how you interpret pain signals. You can cultivate awareness of this process through mindfulness meditation, altering your perception of pain.”
What is the paradox of paying attention?
Avi Craimer: “When we’re in pain, the last thing we want to do is give it our full attention. In fact, before mindfulness hit the scene, cognitive therapies for people coping with pain emphasized distraction of various kinds. Mindfulness meditation encourages the opposite approach. To become more aware and more attentive, rather than more distracted. Brain studies have shown that when trained meditators pay attention to painful sensations, the pain-sensing parts of the brain light up, but the parts of the brain responsible for the suffering associated with pain are less active.
“It isn’t just the amount of attentiveness that matters, it’s also the quality of attention. Sometimes people with chronic pain develop a hyper-vigilant type of attention. They may be very sensitive to every subtle shift in their pain, but this doesn’t help reduce their pain and may make it worse. The type of attention we cultivate in mindfulness practice is focused, accepting, and clear.
“Focused means that our attention goes where we tell it to go, it isn’t scattered or easily pulled away by random distractions. Accepting means that as various experiences enter and leave our awareness, we allow them to come and go without resistance. We try not to judge or evaluate these experiences as good or bad. Finally, clear means that we have a vivid and precise awareness of what’s happening, not a dull or vague one.
“By training these three qualities of attention, meditation teaches us to attend to our pain in a way that helps reduce our suffering.
“You may think ignoring pain is the way to go, but mindfulness teaches the opposite. By paying careful attention to your pain in a non-judgmental way, you can diminish its intensity.”
How can you regulate your response to pain?
Avi Craimer: “Learning to focus mindful attention on our pain is a big part of the mindfulness strategy for pain. Yet, we also need to be mindful of our response to the pain. Our most common and natural response to pain is aversion, we don’t like it. This response isn’t something we can just switch off, but we can start to consciously notice it. As we become more aware of our responses, we automatically start to regulate or soften our more extreme responses, and this helps us manage our pain.
“Here’s how. First, tune into your pain. Then ask yourself, ‘What else happens inside me when I sense this pain?’ You aren’t looking for a quick and easy answer to the question. Instead, you are using the question to point your attention to your present moment of experience of reacting to your pain.
“Sometimes, the response will be obvious. You might notice a torrent of worried thoughts or a visceral frustration. Other times it will be more subtle or surprising. I still remember the first time I realized that my pain made me feel safe. I didn’t want to be in pain, yet, I felt afraid of being without it, so familiar had it become over the decades. As this example illustrates, there is no right or wrong way to respond to your pain.
“Stress exacerbates pain. Mindfulness meditation equips you with the tools to control your stress response, which can, in turn, lower the intensity of your pain.”
How do you put the pieces together?
Avi Craimer: “Mindfulness brings together the body and the mind to help you manage pain. By practicing regularly, you're not just getting short-term relief - you're also building up your body's ability to handle pain better in the future.”
How do you handle chronic pain these days?
Avi Craimer: “I still get headaches and other chronic pain issues occasionally, but my overall experience of pain is dramatically different. Through meditation, my pain levels have been dramatically reduced, and when they do flare up, I know there is something I can do to cope.”
Avi Craimer is a meditation teacher and philosopher. After graduate study in philosophy at UBC and Georgetown, he became a founding director of the Consciousness Explorers Club, a cutting-edge meditation community in Toronto. He is also a writer and content developer for Calm.
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