Young on Natural Pain Relief

[Originally this was part of a single long post on February 2026 reading.]

Shinzen Young. Natural Pain Relief: How to Soothe & Dissolve Physical Pain with Mindfulness

Young (no relation) has a lot to say about pain and how to reduce it in this brief book, but he also wants to talk about suffering. Young distinguishes the two carefully: suffering is pain plus resistance; it is a response to pain as a result of resistance, fear, anticipation and so on. (Although his focus is physical pain and the suffering connected with it, he points out that what he says is broadly applicable to physical sensations associated with “anger, fear, sadness, embarrassment, impatience, guilt, confusion, jealousy, and so on.” (p. 3))

This book does not (thank goodness) discourage treating ailments with modern medicine, or even try to convince people in pain to discontinue drug-based pain management. Once we’ve done what we can to treat our bodies with the best medical help we can get, we are often still left to deal with a lot of pain. The author is optimistic that we can learn eventually to displace drugs prescribed for pain with meditation but he is not really interested in deep cleaning your medicine cabinet.

After a brief review of the general topic of meditation, Young explains how a practice of mindfulness can be applied to pain. The basic strategy is “divide and conquer” (p. 29): break an unpleasant experience “into its parts, and keep track of them as they arise moment by moment. Often the separate parts are quite manageable individually, hence the aggregate experience loses its power to overwhelm you.” (p. 29) Easily said, but of course this requires a whole lot of practice and training.

Young uses a simple mathematical analogy to help explain how breaking experience into parts works. Suppose that a painful experience has components A, B, and C. Without training, our mind naturally shapes these into an experiential whole which is more than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, the effect of this combination into an experiential whole is typically multiplicative (if A, B, and C are each 10 units of pain, then the total multiplicative effect is 1000). If we can skillfully decompose the elements of the experience into parts, he claims, the total effect is additive instead (30 units).

Since suffering is pain plus resistance, we can lower it by learning to lower our resistance to pain through mindfulness. Often the pain itself, he claims, can then dissipate as well, or at least diminish. We resist pain both in conscious ways and also in unconscious and involuntary ways. Mindfulness, he thinks, gradually reshapes even your unconscious and involuntary resistance to pain.

Suffering is bad and reducing it is good, but there is a larger goal here beyond the reducton of suffering and pain. Young thinks that “working with your pain in this way fosters rapid personal evolution, a releasing of psychological and spiritual blockages, a kind of deep and permanent cleansing of the very substance of your soul.” (p. 36) The book, then, is about more than relief from pain. It’s about skillfully responding to pain in ways that help you grow as a person. I don’t suffer from chronic pain (yet!) and I have no personal success with any of this, but it sounds great if you can pull it off.

I know very little about Buddhism, but I gather Young’s divide-and-conquor strategy is a standard Buddhist technique, and not just concerning pain. Think, for example, of the practice of meditation on the unattractive, offered as a way to overcome the allure of beauty and sexual desire. In this meditative practice intense focus on each part of the body separately is used to break the spell of bodies-as-wholes. Or take how the (supposed) illusion of the self is broken down in Buddhist practice by decomposing the experiences that make up the sense of self (bodily sensations, elements of consciousness, etc.) until the whole no longer seems to have an independent intrinsic existence above and beyond the parts. Young’s divide and conquor approach to pain seems to follow the same basic pattern.

In each of these cases (as I understand it), Buddhists seem to take themselves to gain insight into some phenomenon by focusing on the parts until the whole they comprise comes to seem like an illusion. I do not doubt that this technique works, in the sense that intense focus on parts can clearly act as an effective solvent on our felt sense that some whole is more than the sum of its parts. But in each case it seems an open question which experience is veridical, the one before meditative training in which the whole is felt to exist or the one after in which it is not.

Whether the experience of a dissolving whole represents a genuine insight into reality depends in each case on whether the whole actually is more than the sum of the parts, at least in cases where the experience is of something else, that is, where the experience has the sort of broadly representational content we can assess for accuracy. Otherwise, we could reasonably worry that the technique amounts to little more than anesthetizing a part of your cognitive apparatus to shut out some unwanted genuine whole. Encountering any process of radical cognitive or emotional transformation, from psychoanalysis to meditation to drugs, I often find myself wondering: “Glad you feel better, but how do you know you didn’t just give yourself brain damage?” And I think if I had such an experience myself I would wonder if I’d simply self-hypnotically induced an experiential version of the fallacy of composition. If you’re a horny monk struggling to be free of desire, it may be therapeutic to break the parts of an experience of desire into components, but that does not mean you’ve really gained an insight into the nature of the object of desire.

So it seems to me that we need to take things case by case when deciding whether to apply the technique and how to interpret the experience it yields. The cases of the self and beauty are very difficult and I’ll just say I’ve hardly started to explore this vast territory—indeed, it seems likely to me that I’m deeply confused about what I take myself to be disagreeing with. I have a lot more thinking and reading to do about this! For starters, I suspect that Buddhism doesn’t rest its entire case on these experiences, as I’ve suggested.

In the case of pain Young’s approach strikes me as pretty appealing. The worry I’m raising about divide-and-conquor arises because of a distinction I’m drawing between an experience (of beauty, of the self, of pain) and what the experience is about (beauty, the self, pain). You can only worry about the veridicality of an experience if there is a gap between the experience and what it purports to be about. In the case of pain, is there really a fixed quantity of suffering that you’re potentially deluding yourself about by breaking it down into component parts? No? Perhaps? It depends, I suppose, on how richly we conceive of pain. Taking pain narrowly as raw sensation, there really seems nothing to be confused about: it is what it is and if diminished then it’s something different. Even if we conceive of it more richly as aversively representing physical damage, we can turn down the aversive aspect of it and continue to receive information about our bodies—in many cases, likely, more accurate information about actual damage because the aversive element can cause distorting feedback loops.

As for suffering, here we’re dealing with a much richer experience than raw pain. I’m not sure if all suffering is or arises from resistance to pain. But perhaps experiences of suffering that do arise from such resistance can be reasonably dealt with in the way Young recommends. But insofar as some suffering is more richly representational, it may present a trickier challenge.

Anyway, once he’s gone through this material, the rest of this little book becomes a brief commentary on the CD that is supposed to accompany the book, but which Amazon never sent. Since there was a little delay between my receiving the book and my actually reading it, I realized the problem one day too late to complain. What a pain!

Now if you read Amazon book reviews, there is always some dingdong in the reviews complaining about the shipping process or the book being damaged. I imagine authors sit at home reading these and clutching their heads: That’s the space for feedback to authors about the quality of the contents of the book, not distributors! But in this case, I do think the publisher deserves some criticism. It’s 2026! The number of people who have a CD player is shrinking rapidly. There’s material on their website, including by the author, but this book (published in 2011, and still in print) isn’t even mentioned, so there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to download the content. Strangely, they even sell a Kindle version of this book and I know the CD doesn’t ship with that (there’s a sad review on Amazon mentioning this). Anyway, the book was interesting enough to be worth reading in the end, but I wish they’d thought harder about how to update the delivery of the audio portion of a book that is still in print.