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Dealing With Body Pain During Meditation
Shoulders, back, neck, and legs — there’s plenty of body parts to ache in meditation.
When you go to the gym to work out, or hop on a bike for a long bike ride, you might expect a few aches and pains when you’re done. But most people don’t expect meditation to result in body pain. After all, it’s literally just sitting there doing nothing. How could it cause pain?
Surprisingly, meditation can require more strength, balance, and stability than you might think. And if your body isn’t strong, balanced, or stable enough, you can end up feeling pain in various parts of the body.
Before you let pain stop you from practicing meditation, try the following ideas to make your practice more comfortable.
Sit straight but not stiff
Perfect posture is often considered a hallmark of the proper meditation position. But sometimes our attempt to have perfectly straight posture results in sitting too ramrod straight and stiff and causes pain.
If this is the case for you, you’ll probably feel the pain in your back and neck. It might be a gentle ache that covers a wide area, or it might be more of a sharp pain in one or two spots.
