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Change your relationship to pain
When I started what’s now called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979, there was virtually no science of mindfulness whatsoever. And part of my original aim was to actually use the clinic as a kind of pilot to see whether we could catch people falling through the cracks of the healthcare system. And challenge them to do something for themselves that no one else on the planet could possibly do for them, including their physicians, to move in a direction of greater well-being and healing, starting from whatever is going on with you now, whatever diagnoses you may have, whatever troubles, whatever stress, whatever chronic pain conditions. And as an experiment, see whether mindfulness might actually serve as a useful and powerful compliment to all of the traditional medical approaches for dealing with chronic diseases and chronic disorders and chronic pain. Which are [inaudible 00:17:56] of course, and many of them do not have magic bullet medical solutions.
And we found very, very quickly that people who had been suffering say from chronic pain for decades, we’re going back to the doctors and saying, “That eight-week program in MBSR did more for me in eight weeks than you’ve done for me in eight years in terms of my pain.” And what they meant by that was like there are limited ways that medicine has for regulating pain. But the brain, the entire human organism, does have ways to regulate the experience of pain. And to differentiate the various elements of what we call monolithically pain, which would include the somatic element, an emotional element, a cognitive element, having to do with meaning, history, narrative, and so forth. All of those different elements to differentiate that from the experience of suffering, because they’re not the same. And so the aim was not necessarily to make people’s pain go away, but to have them change how they are in relationship to the unwanted and the unpleasant, and sometimes the seriously unpleasant.
Change your biology
I don’t want to overstate the evidence because the entire field is in its infancy, but the vast majority of studies are suggesting that when you do something as simple as what looks from the outside like nothing, this is having profound effects on not just the activity in your brain. But actually if you do it over days, weeks, months, and years, the actual architecture of your brain, the very structure of your brain rearranges itself, because you’re exercising certain kinds of muscles, just the way the deltoid muscle would get bigger if you’re working with progressively greater weights. And your chromosomes have their ear to the rail too, and they are, what’s called in the molecular biology, up-regulating and down-regulating regulating hundreds of genes that are being expressed on our chromosomes. And some of them have to do with very important health-related things like oncogenesis, proto cancer genes, and inflammatory genes and so forth. Families of which can actually predispose us to going on to develop cancer, or inflammatory processes that may underlie most of the chronic diseases.
And also there are studies that are showing that when people practice mindfulness in various kinds of forms, that their telomeres, which tend to get shorter with age and much faster with stress, tend to actually lengthen, or at least not degrade as quickly when you’re cultivating mindfulness. So there’s never been a richer moment than now to bring the science, the beauty of what we know of the brain and the entirety of the organism through these new sciences, together with these ancient contemplative practices that really have to do with embodying the full dimensionality of who you already are.