The Pain and Everything Else

For pain anywhere. Simultaneous attention: the pain and a comfortable place, held at once, with equal weight.

Guided open-attention meditation · about 5 minutes · eyes closed

The player includes recorded narration and adjustable room tone. Start when you are ready. You can pause or end at any point.

About the practice

This is one of the pain series, after the four steps in Les Fehmi's Dissolving Pain. Nothing in it asks you to push into pain or to change any care you are getting; it changes the shape of attention around the sensation, not the sensation itself. The narrated explainer gives the reasoning. The questions invite an experience of space and attention. There is no correct sensation to produce and no score. This player does not measure brainwaves or confirm alpha synchrony.

Transcript

Spoken cues from the session script. The recording leaves space between these lines; pauses are part of the practice.

Settle in and let your eyes close. This session is for a body that hurts somewhere today. Nothing in it asks you to push into the pain.

There is nothing to achieve here. The questions are invitations. If the pain does not change, that is fine too.

Before you go anywhere near the pain, can you find one place in your body that does not hurt right now? A hand, a foot, an ear.

Can you imagine the space inside that comfortable place?

Keep your attention on the comfortable place, and now include the place that hurts. Can you feel both regions at the same time?

Give them equal weight. The pain is not the centre. The comfortable place is not an escape. Both, evenly.

Can you imagine the distance between the two? The space from one to the other, through the body.

If attention snaps to the pain alone, that is what pain is for. Notice it, and let the other region back in.

Now add a third thing. The sounds around you, or the feeling of your breath. Pain, comfort, and sound, all at once.

Can you imagine the whole body as one field of awareness, with the pain as one event in it, among many?

Can you include the space of the room? The pain is now one small part of a very large field.

Can you imagine attending to all of it as effortless? Nothing held, nothing pushed away.

Rest here. The pain can do whatever it does. You are the whole field, not the one place.

Before the bell, notice how much of the field the pain takes up now. Just notice.

When the bell sounds, open your eyes slowly, let your vision stay wide, and keep everything else in view.

Choose another meditation or read about the method and attribution.