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Suppressing pain techniques (for sitting meditation)

 

Re: Suppressing pain techniques

Post by frank k » 

Alīno wrote: ↑Sun Jan 28, 2018 9:25 am...
Do you have any other techniques about dealing with the pain ? Or teachings about it ?

Metta :anjali:
compendium of the best exercises and stretches for sitting meditators for full lotus and any sitting posture
https://lucid24.org/misc/qigor/eight-pi ... index.html

Learn to meditate in all postures, switch between standing, chair sitting, and walking as needed to relieve pain.
Sitting through pain in small doses (a few minutes) can be good for training mental toughness, but understand that you're doing damage to the body.

I've seen the results of hundreds and thousands of burmese meditation mentality sitting meditators who push through pain and ignore it for long periods, and as a result sustain long term back, knee, leg damage.

I've even experienced some of this myself. You push through sitting leg pain too much, it starts killing off tissue and nerves, and that affects your ability to even walk and stand without stumbling and being clumsy. I've seen plenty of monsatics following burmese style sitting regiments for 6-10 hours a day, and I see them often trip and stumble for no reason, but I know the reason. The nerves have been damaged.

Those health problems take a really long time to heal.
And the problem with damaging nerves, is that when you become numb to pain, then you lose your feedback system telling you that you need to change postures. So when I was in the process of extending the length of my full lotus sitting from 1 hr to 2 hours, I did some damage because I wasn't getting the pain signals that healthy nerves would send.

As a result, I had to stop doing any cross leg sitting for about a year waiting for the nerve and leg damage to heal.

So everyone has to figure out the right balance of switching between walking, standing, sitting, lying down as needed, by trial and error.
And doing daily exercises and stretches to soften the body up.


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