Customer Reviews

Break Through Pain: A Step-by-Step Mindfulness Meditation Program for Transforming Chronic and Acute Pain

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The 1997 Sounds True cassette tape version is so much better than this watered-down, tired-sounding CD and book. After using the taped version, which has four longish guided meditations and is so inspiring and helpful, the very brief guidance for the meditations on the CD version gives the impression that the author became bored or burnt out with teaching. I will continue to use the the cassette tapes and will throw out the more recent CD and book.

Enhanced by an accompanying integrated learning CD, Break Through Pain by Shinzen Young (a very experienced meditation teacher and founder of the Vipassana Support Institute and several North American meditation retreat centers) distills more than 30 years of experience in presented mediation as one of the oldest strategies for effecive pain-free living. Readers will learn how to apply the Buddhist Vipassana traditions that have delved into how to relieve pain for 2,000 years. Techniques to "melt" sensations of pain, break up pain through focused awareness, release the emotions of anger, fear, and resentment that amplify pain, and use pain as a gateway to emotional and spiritual freedom described as thoroughly as possible, for the lay practitioner to use for himself or herself. The practices of controlled breathing, guided meditation and mindful meditation especially are discussed in depth. An accompanying audio CD with easy-to-follow instructions walks the reader through basic techniques for pain relief. Written in plain terms accessible to the lay reader unfamiliar with the ancient practices, Break Through Pain is a "must-read" for anyone in distress or suffering, especially in situations where drugs and other conventional remedies just aren't working.

Shinzen Young is a meditation teacher who has been around for a long time. Much of his work is in the area of transforming emotions and pain. This combination book and CD is useful for those who want to get more of a feeling of control around pain.

Specifically, this book teaches you the relationship between attention and pain, softening around pain and having a different experience of it through training the mind to hold it differently. While it won't take the place of morphine, it will certainly help people in pain to live with it more easily. It will also help them to reduce their anxiety around pain, which aggravates the subjective experience of pain.

I am no stranger to pain having gone through a back, neck and wrist surgery. I teach meditation myself and I have graduate education in biology, biochemistry and psychology. I feel I am in a good position to judge the merits of the book and the book certainly has many merits as does the CDs. If you are interested in an introduction to several types of meditation, you might also like The Beginner's Guide to Meditation. If you are quite serious about meditation, you can look at a variety of references on my listmania lists which appear on my profile.

If you have chronic or acute pain, I recommend this book and CD on using mindful meditation to address pain. It's a short book of less than 100 pages, but every word counts! I've reread each section many times, and the entire book a couple of times each year. And the CD is really helpful with meditation.

I've always believed getting over pain meant pushing the pain away as though it were a foreign object. But when the pain isn't going to go away, learning to accept it as a part of me was the first step to reducing the pain level. When nothing else has helped -- even drugs -- the skills I learned from this book have worked to help me manage my pain, and in other ways of my life as well.

So, if you're open to trying a gentle, inner-directed approach to managing pain -- or possibly stopping your pain altogether, I urge you to read this book. You'll be glad you did.

Shinzen's meditations on pain have changed my life. I deal with pain on a regular basis and I use Shinzen's meditations all the time. I love this book so much I have bought many copies to give away as gifts. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK FOR ANYONE DEALING WITH PAIN.

the techniques let me move beyond the suffering by fully opening to the intensity of my fibromyalgia.

Here pain is synonymous with any uncomfortable body sensation, such as "anger, fear, sadness, embarrassment, impatience, guilt, confusion, jealousy...". If you are still in your body, then you will have these sensations and need to manange it.

The method consists of precisely localizing the pain in the body, have equinimity (openess, allowing) the pain, and noting how/where/when the pain changes.

Mindfulness heals. This extraordinary quality of direct presence is filled with compassion and space, and it transforms everything that it touches. This is a great read by a very gifted teacher.
If you wish to learn more about mindfulness meditation therapy, then I also recommend 'The Path of Mindfulness Meditation', available through Amazon.