For more than a year I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing one of these 10-day meditation marathons as a way of adding to my five tepid years of the practice. I think I can handle the emotional isolation involved, but I’m genuinely concerned about the physical pain.
We’re talking about sitting cross legged for 10 hours a day for ten straight days. I can’t sit cross legged for 10 minutes without pain shooting up my back and down my sciatica. I famously can’t make it through dinner without standing up to stretch my legs. I’ve got two partially herniated discs that I’ve managed to control over the years with a combination of exercises and abandoning the fun stuff I used to do like long-distance running. How am I gonna make it through a marathon of sitting up straight?
The primary complaint about physical discomfort for folks that do Vipassana is back pain. And this is for people that don’t generally suffer from back pain.
I’ve done a few Google searches and found a lot of references to Vipassana meditation as a way of reducing back pain, which is often linked to stress. This seems like good and bad news. I’d be happy to add it to my back-relief arsenal that already includes stretching, sit-ups, pushups, and all other manner of funny looking abdominal exercises. And I’ve always been underwhelmed by Western medicine’s approach to back pain, as well as Western society’s horrid treatment of our backs. It took me some time to stop expecting doctors to be able to do anything about back pain, and once I did I found that I could get along with them a lot better. These days I don’t bug those doctors and they don’t bug me, but then again they ask me to sit on my butt for 100 hours.
Still, there’s something scary in this “it’s all in your mind” approach, even if that happens to be true. My guess is upon starting Vipassana I’ll try to explain that I’ve got disc hernia that makes it hard for me to sit still, and a peacefully smiling instructor will tell me that back pain in fact comes from spiritual imbalance and that there’s nothing for me to worry about. Everyone goes through back pain during meditation, they’ll say, you’re no different, and you have to stop listening to what those doctors tell you.
If you’ve ever had chronic back pain you know it sucks. I’m fully ready to believe that a good chunk of it’s in my head. I’m hoping this will teach me how much of it is.
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