I have had a course of TM but I thought I’d give Mindfulness a try, tho it’s different to TM. I struggle with the concept of Mindfulness,mi am in severe pain so observing it in a kindly non- judgemental fashion always seems to me counter- intuitive! But I’d give it a try and just missed out with a course at the National as two departments got mixed up and none offered it because they ‘didn’t want to duplicate the service’. Hospital budgets cut and patients and staff at the sharp end !
The only online one I use is https://www.headspace.com/. There’s lots of information on there, and also a free thing with ten 10 minute long meditations, which is a good introduction. I also happen to have some CDs that I got when I took part in a study into it that was funded by the MS Society.
I know what you mean about the being put off by the idea of noticing pain & not doing anything about it. When I started the study I did, I thought that sounded like torture. But the strange thing is, it does help. It took a bit of getting used to of course, but eventually it became easier, and I find my experience of the pain lessens now. I used to say I’m in pain, but actually that’s not true. It’s only a tiny bit of me that’s in pain. By being mindful of the whole of my body, I notice that almost all of my body is feeling different things other than pain. It’s a bit like looking at a map, and the pain is a feature on the map. Noticing the rest of my body is like zooming out of the map, and so the pain becomes smaller. Alternatively, I can zoom in on the map, and explore the pain. Then I notice that it’s not constant - it comes & goes, and has different feelings. Generally, if I’m wishing the pain in my leg would go away, I’m more likely to feel tortured by it. But if I’m able to give my leg permission to feel whatever it’s feeling, then it tends to ease off quicker (or at least, I don’t notice it so much).
There is a free guided meditation called Working with pain on the University of Los Angeles website. The Mindful Research Centre.
Here’s the link and look down the list for the first Working with pain part (it’s in two parts). Recorded Jan 30th 2014.
You might be interested to know Glasgow University is currently doing a Phase II trial on Mindful based stress reduction (MBSR) for MS. Recruitment for the trial closed in mid Sept 2014. Here’s the link