Larmore learned how to pace herself, running her business from her home. But recently, "the sandpaper of living with chronic pain" got to her, and she enrolled in an InsightLA MBSR class taught by Goodman and German physician Chris Wolf.
"The eight-week program was one of the most challenging commitments I have ever made," she said. "But I found a new key that enables me to better accept, embrace and have an instrument with which to mindfully be with my pain and walk with it with more lightness."
Though anecdotal experiences about the benefits of meditation are easy to find, clinical randomized trials on meditation's effects are rare and in the early stages. And skepticism lurks in the wings of every study.
"When I submit articles to be reviewed, it feels like they are picked apart very carefully, and I have to work harder to prove my findings," said Dr. Natalia Morone, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh who has been studying the effect of mindfulness meditation on pain in adults. "There's more intensity to the review comments than if they were about a conventional subject."
But despite resistance, Kabat-Zinn is betting on meditation playing a larger role in medicine in the future.
"We are headed toward development of a new kind of medicine that honors the profound dilemma of the person who presents to a doctor with suffering," he stated with no uncertainty. "Since Buddhism has a history of understanding suffering, and since nobody goes to a hospital without some kind of suffering, what better place than a hospital to be grounded in meditation?"
