The theory that meditation can reduce stress, depression …

Studies have shown that meditation can help ease pain — one study published this year in the The Journal of Neuroscience found that meditators slashed their pain levels by 57%. Scientists, however, haven’t been sure how the mindfulness practice worked exactly to provide relief — until now.

New research has uncovered the brain mechanisms that affect our experience of pain. Mindfulness practice — the ability to observe your thoughts and feelings from an objective distance — may help ease pain, in part, by increasing activity in key brain regions linked to processing sensory information, such as the posterior insula, according to the …

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Melinda Beck: How you think about pain can have a major impact on how it feels.

That’s the intriguing conclusion neuroscientists are reaching as scanning technologies let them see how the brain processes pain.

That’s also the principle behind many mind-body approaches to chronic pain that are proving surprisingly effective in clinical trials.

Some are as old as meditation, hypnosis and tai chi, while others are far more high tech. In studies at Stanford University’s Neuroscience and Pain Lab, subjects can watch their own brains react to pain in real-time and learn to control their response—much like building up a muscle …

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Compassion is essentially the wish that beings not suffer – from subtle physical and emotional discomfort to agony and anguish – combined with feelings of sympathetic concern.

You could have compassion for an individual (a friend in the hospital, a co-worker passed over for a promotion), groups of people (victims of crime, those displaced by a hurricane, refugee children), animals (your pet, livestock heading for the slaughterhouse), and yourself.

Compassion is not pity, agreement, or a waiving of your rights. You can have compassion for people who’ve wronged you while also insisting that they treat you better.

Compassion by itself opens your heart and …

Mark Fenske: Between the heavy mallet and the paving stone, my misplaced finger didn’t stand a chance. But it wasn’t the sight of the bloody, smashed-apart fingernail or split-open fingertip that first made clear my mistake. It was the pain. That searing, body-tensing, tears-in-the-eyes pain.

The basic function of pain is to interrupt whatever else is going on and draw our attention to the fact that something is wrong, that the body is facing or has already suffered some kind of damage. Sensory nerves, called nociceptors (i.e. danger receptors) detect elements capable of body-tissue damage, such as pressure or extreme heat. The nerves’…

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Vidyamala talks about the worldly winds of pleasure and pain as part of the Triratna Buddhist Community’s International Urban Retreat, where for one week (8 – 15 October, 2011) people around the world at Triratna centers intensify their practice while staying their your home situation. The Urban Retreat is about learning to make Buddhist practice real and effective in daily life.

You can see more Triratna videos at from Vimeo.com.

Alex Knapp, Forbes: Dr. Kerr received her BA in American Studies from Amherst College and her PhD in History and Social Theory from the Johns Hopkins University, but in 2006 received a K Award from the National Institutes of Health to be retrained as a neuroscientist. Since then, her research primarily focused on the effects of meditation the brain.

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Tell me about your background. What got you interested in studying meditation?

The route that I took on the way towards my study looking at the effects of meditation training on alpha rhythms in somatosensory cortex has been…

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Studies have shown that ­meditating regularly can help relieve chronic pain, but the neural mechanisms ­underlying the relief were unclear. Now, ­researchers from MIT, Harvard, and Massachusetts General ­Hospital have found a possible explanation.

In a recent study published in the journal Brain Research Bulletin, the researchers found that people trained to meditate over an eight-week period were better able to control a specific type of brain waves, called alpha rhythms.

“These activity patterns are thought to minimize distractions, to diminish the likelihood stimuli will grab your attention,” says Christopher Moore, PhD…

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Pain is a huge medical problem. According to a new report from the Institute of Medicine, chronic pain costs the U.S. more than $600 billion every year in medical bills and lost productivity. Back pain alone consumes nearly $90 billion in health-care expenses, roughly equivalent to what’s spent on cancer.

Despite the increasing prevalence of chronic pain—nearly one in three Americans suffers from it—medical progress has been slow and halting. This is an epidemic we don’t know how to treat. For the most part, doctors still rely on over-the-counter medications and opioid drugs, such as OxyContin and…

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Marissa Cevallos: Meditation appears to be a powerful way to take away pain — just a short session is more potent than even morphine, if we’re to believe the headlines — but let’s take a closer look.

In a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, meditation rookies reported feeling less pain after meditation training than they had felt before the training.

The novice yogis weren’t simply being polite — scans of their brains backed up their “less-hurt” claims.

The study, from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, echoes other research that suggests clearing your mind can reduce pain, but it’s far too early to recommend that chronic pain sufferers toss out their pain-killers.

In the study, an instructor taught 15 volunteers a …