Reducing the Pain and Stress of Crohn's with Meditation

There's only one thing like the pain of an intestinal obstruction for a patient with Crohn's disease: labor and delivery.

Whether you're suffering from a partial or a complete obstruction, the pain is so severe that it means a hurried trip to the emergency room. But how can you deal with it well enough to even get yourself to the hospital?

Loss of control is a biggie with Crohn's patients. We have bathroom-related accidents, we can't eat many things we like and we're often so sick that we have to cancel our plans. Loss of a job due to absences or being unable to even undertake any steady work is a major stressor. Let's face it, fever doesn't inspire an individual to get excited about anything except the cause.

Any patient with a chronic disease finds relationships with others changed, no matter how supportive they are about the condition. Many of us find ourselves in a very long mourning process, coping with the loss of health and control over our lives. How is it possible to deal with the resulting stress?

Far and above everything else, most of the stress I've experienced as a Crohn's patient has been caused by my reaction to pain. Since my disease is punctuated with partial obstructions and narrowing of my small bowel, I've hit the hospital doors an even 100 times. I also took an extra-early retirement due to illness and suffered the consequences of reduced income.

What works most effectively for me in dealing with both pain and stress is meditation. Like many patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), before I could practice any meditation techniques, I had to actually learn how to relax my body. I was a walking box of stress.

I experimented by stretching out on the couch when I was not in pain and listening to various types of music to find which kinds worked best. After my third attempt, I realized listening to a flute did wonders. I bought several James Galway recordings.

Next, I set up out to learn how to actually meditate. There are a variety of books, tapes, CDs and DVDs available to teach dozens of techniques. Some are based on a sense of inner self or a relationship with nature, while others focus on beliefs of specific religions.

I discovered helpful ways to breathe. Whenever I felt a wave of pain as peristalsis tried to push food through a blockage, I inhaled, then exhaled slowly on a count. After I repeated this a few times, my heart rate slowed, I was no longer feeling panic from the pain and I was able to get my things together for the trek to the hospital.

However, I quickly discovered that what works in a quiet room at home isn't always so effective in the emergency room. It's not a quiet place. Distractions from conversations, patient complaints and even curtains pulled into place are impossible to ignore.

At this point, I realized I would have to move beyond sound and add visual images to my meditation practices. I discovered certain images worked as anchors of calm. I pictured myself walking through a field of daisies on a warm summer day. As I was able to actually feel the sun on my skin, the pain began to lessen. Stress melted.

Currently, I use a combination of several visualizations and music. I close each day by spending 15 minutes in front of my computer monitor, listening to a meditation. Although I keep CDs in the car, visualization is the more important technique when I'm feeling stressed at work or getting medical treatment.

Where can you find the tools for meditation? A great place to start is Beliefnet. If you enter the word meditation in the search box at the top of the home page, you'll pull up quite a few hits. Click on any one of them to see a page with a variety of meditation recordings, books and links to other useful sites.

A great place to check out a number of meditation practitioners and their recordings is SoundsTrue. Click on Meditation and Prayer from the list of links on the left side of the page. You'll then have access to bios of all the authors as well as a catalog of tapes, CDs, DVDs and books. Many of the items pictured have links under them that you can click in order to hear an excerpt.

I keep a running list of resources I'd like to have and also occasionally purchase them on eBay or Amazon. My favorite meditation practitioner is James Finley, a former Trappist monk who has also written extensively on Thomas Merton.