How Mindfulness Affects Pain

When you tune in deliberately to say lower back pain and you let yourself fully feel it, mindfulness does, in a paradoxical way, relax all the things that you're tuning into. The involuntary contracting of things just lessens as you open up to feel it. It's also why mindfulness can cure the hiccups. So there are many things that are involuntary contractions. Something up to feeling it actually changes it and can relieve it. That's why it's psychosomatic. It's not purely psycho. And so it's an interaction of the mind and the body that has to do with the thalamus and this kind of gating.