Spirituality, Christianity, Buddhism, and the Mind-Body Connection

By Kent Bassett

Many people have woven insights from mind-body medicine with their spiritual and/or Christian backgrounds in order to facilitate the healing process.

We can recommend the following resources to explore the interconnection between spirituality, the mind-body connection, and healing.

Christianity and Mind-Body Healing

You can find Jennifer Johnson’s work online through her site: https://www.thoughtbythoughthealing.com

Michelle Wiegers is a pain recovery coach with a personal story of overcoming chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and ME/CFS. She comes from a Christian background and has integrated this into her work with clients.

Matthew Jarvinen, Ph.D is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist who led a round table around spirituality and chronic pain. Watch below!

Buddhism and Mind-body Healing

Buddhist teachings on mindfulness meditation are illuminating about the mind-body connection and chronic pain, and they’re known to help people not just cope with mental and physical pain, but unlearn and resolve many conditions, including anxiety and depression, but also neuroplastic or brain-generated pain conditions like back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, and so on. In the West many people encounter Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as a tool for coping with or managing chronic pain, but mindfulness can be much more powerful when combined with the awareness that the body is not damaged and full recovery is possible.

In the discourse on “Dependent Co-Arising,” the Buddha taught that mental and physical suffering can be nipped in the bud by focusing on the rapid-fire chain of conditions that necessarily precede them. For example, if you can attend to a physical sensation (like pain), and home in on the unpleasantness aspect of the sensation (known as vedanā or “hedonic tone”) that precedes the conceptual label of pain, you can start to reduce the intensity and bothersomeness of the pain. By paying bare attention to the “unpleasant” aspect that precedes or accompanies pain, you can retrain the brain to be less reactive, less fearful of pain. Over time, and with much practice, pain becomes just another of the many unpleasant sensations that are unavoidable for all humans. The severe pain of a chronic pain patient can slowly diminish as the powers of their mindful awareness and equanimity grow stronger and stronger.

Another useful mindfulness tool is to analyze painful sensations, breaking pain into direct sensations of heat, cold, numbness, tingling, pressure, and tension. What people typically notice with careful attention is that those direct non-conceptual sensations are never static, they’re constantly in flux. This can start to bring flexibility in working with aversion to pain, and reduce fear.

Another way to interrupt the cycle of pain-fear-pain, is to see how trying to avoid pain, which the Buddha referred to as grasping (upādāna) can perpetuate or worsen suffering. If instead of fearing and avoiding pain, we examine our resistance to suffering with mindfulness and see our fear as a fuel source for pain, fear can be reduced, and pain will naturally diminish. (Reducing fear is much easier when you’ve ruled out a structural condition and ruled in a brain-to-body diagnosis.)

Many other factors precede pain, including fear of injury, beliefs about the body, conditioned responses to movement or to eating foods, and so on. These prior beliefs can also be analyzed with mindfulness meditation and transformed.

Ancient Spiritual Insights Are Verified by Modern Neuroscience

In many ways, these 2600-year-old meditation trainings prefigure some of what we’re now learning about the neuroscience of predictive coding. Our sensory experience is determined much more by our somatic beliefs and our “priors” — our histories with pain, danger, fear — than they are about raw information coming in through our senses. Predictive top-down rather than bottom-up processing rules our moment-by-moment experience, and the Buddha pointed to ways we can see this more clearly and transform our sensory experience with mindfulness.

These methods can be transformational for primary pain conditions (like most back pain, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, etc., a full list is kept here), and can be helpful but much less so for structural problems like cancer, fractures, infections, etc. Structural conditions usually require medical treatment with mindfulness added only as a supportive therapy, whereas primary pain conditions can be redressed and transformed with mindfulness in concert with other tools like Pain Reprocessing Therapy and Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy.

For a fascinating discussion of predictive coding, neuroscience, and meditation, check out this interview with Michael Taft and Shamil Chandaria.

Here’s a presentation by Chandaria on the same topic:

For an academic discussion of the relevance of “Dependent Co-Arising” for unlearning pain and healing mental suffering that goes with chronic pain, check out this piece: “The Two Arrows of Pain: Mechanisms of Pain Related to Meditation and Mental States of Aversion and Identification”

Through Meditation We Can Slow Down Our Automatic Responses to Pain, Aversion and Identification, and Unlearn Them

Each person’s journey towards mind-body healing is different—some people gravitate towards fear reduction, others towards emotional processing, and some find that meditation is their most reliable tool for retraining their brain. If you want to hear a recovery story that emphasizes the meditative path out of pain, check out Tamara Gurin’s story of undoing CRPS through intensive daily meditation.

Note: We’re just starting to put together this resources page. If you have more spiritual or religious resources for mind-body healing, please email us at tmhfilm@gmail.com.