One of the most arresting images ever seen in the media

was the photograph of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire on a busy road in Saigon in 1963.

His act of what is called “self-immolation” was in protest against how Buddhists were treated by the South Vietnamese government.

An American journalist named David Halberstam witnessed the “Burning Monk” with his own eyes.

He later wrote,

“flames were coming from a human being;

his body was slowly withering and shriveling up,

his head blackening and charring.

In the air was the smell of burning human flesh;

human beings burn surprisingly quickly.”

But what is perhaps more surprising are these words,

“As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound,

his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.”

It was as if the monk was able to control his pain completely.

How did this monk achieve this state of calm and seemingly become impregnable to the pain of burning?

We’ve all burned our hands on something before

and know how much that hurts, until the nerves are dead

the pain a person feels from being burned is intense to say the least.

But the monk who set himself on fire was an extreme circumstance,

and today we’re looking into whether smaller events that involve pain can be controlled.

For instance, what about when an evil infection in your tooth has created a pocket of pus that causes an intense toothache.

Some of you will know how that feels

and might have wanted to perform some ad hoc home surgery and knock out your own tooth to stop the pain.

But imagine you could just eliminate the pain,

or at least manage your brain in a way that you could handle it?

The same goes for chronic backache, broken bones, ingrown toenails, the humming and throbbing caused by an insect bite.

Could you really avoid all of these aches and pains using only your mind?

In 2011, researchers in the USA wanted to get to the bottom of pain management and meditation.

They weren’t researching monks who had devoted a lifetime to meditation, but ordinary people.

According to NPR, the neuroscientists who led the study took normal healthy individuals

and asked them to attend four sessions on “mindfulness and meditation”.

They then subjected those people to pain by burning their legs.

The outcome of this study was that the subjects reported less intensity of pain after the sessions,

and measurements of brain activity showed that the parts of the brain that normally light up in response to pain were less active.

The conclusion was that meditation might help people deal with pain, and that you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to reap the benefits.

But that’s not totally blanking out pain, it’s just a slight reduction in pain.

So how do we get to the point that we can almost eliminate pain completely?

We found a scientific paper online called, “Pain Sensitivity and Analgesic Effects of Mindful States in Zen Meditators: A Cross-Sectional Study.”

In this study non-meditators joined a group of seasoned meditators

and they were all subjected to varying levels of pain, sometimes intense.

Unsurprisingly, the meditators reported experiencing less pain,

and the scientists believed this was related to how they managed to slow their respiratory rate.

A former student of vipassana meditation explained that when someone is asked to sit in the Lotus position for many hours a day,

that the position alone can be very painful.

He talked about being hit by an arrow,

in that first there is the pain of the piercing of the skin and after that there is the emotional pain that follows.

He said monks will observe the first pain and then ignore the second emotional response.

A trained monk might be able to sit and feel pain, observe it, but then accept it.

They don’t react to it emotionally.

They cut off all attachment to the emotional part of the pain.

Being able to disassociate yourself enough to cut off your emotional attachment to pain

doesn’t sound like the kind of thing most people can do,

but we wanted to know more so we looked online at forums where this kind of meditative pain management was discussed.

Many people who had been students of mediation said they didn’t think they could get to a state where they felt no pain at all when it should be extreme.

We did find one person who said he’d practiced Zen meditation for 26 years and said,

“I have actually had a crown done without Novocain, using meditation alone.”

Wow.

Meditation master or masochist?

If we take him at his word,

then it seems even a novice can use mediation to lessen pain,

and perhaps an expert might be able to deal with more significant pain,

but let’s look deeper into this.

While you probably won’t ever be in a position where you’ll be setting yourself on fire,

it is very likely that at some point you’ll experience chronic pain,

you know, the kind of pain that lasts a while and either never fully goes away or keeps coming back.

Before you ask,

no, you’re never going to escape the sudden jolt of pain that comes from standing on a Lego brick,

but you might be able to reduce other kinds of pain.

Dr. Ellen Slawsby, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School,

said that she has a bunch of tactics for controlling pain with both the mind and body combined.

Like the meditators do, she said controlling your breathing might help a lot.

It’s simple to do.

Sit down and take breaths and concentrate on those breaths.

It’s just you and your breathing.

It’s sometimes called “controlled-breathing.”

The New York Times writes that this is an ancient practice

and has been proven to not only help with pain but to also increase alertness and boost a person’s immune system.

Here’s a snippet from that story:

“Consciously changing the way you breathe appears to send a signal to the brain

to adjust the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system,

which can slow heart rate and digestion and promote feelings of calm

as well as the sympathetic system, which controls the release of stress hormones like cortisol.”

It sounds crazy, but one doctor who was interviewed said he had seen some of his patients transformed by simply taking some time each day to breathe in, pause, breathe out.

Ok, we know that if you didn’t do that all day you’d die,

but we are talking about a kind of focused breathing here, not the unconscious kind.