Here’s some more evidence of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation to control pain. In this study researchers found that even a short course of meditation training and practice allowed subjects to reduce their pain sensitivity and raise pain tolerance. This is particularly useful for people suffering from chronic pain, where the pain does NOT serve as a useful warning against further injury, but is simply a harmful amplification by the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) of pain signals from an old injury that may in fact have healed locally. This research also helps to explain how the meditative state of relaxation often induced by acupuncture is more than just a benign side-effect–it is part of the pain reduction effect itself! Or, as Lieutenant T.E. Lawrence responds to a fellow officer at the beginning of the movie “Lawrence of Arabia, “the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.” Read on:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/04/08/135146672/even-beginners-can-curb-pain-with-meditation