Get back onto the topic, and away from the flame festival, yes, I have used meditative techniques to control pain. When I was a kid, I used to get terrible migraine headaches. I got prescribed some painkillers, and prochlorperazine, to prevent vomiting. Problem was, the first symptom I had, every time was vomiting, so the pills wouldn't stay down. Then came the thumping, dull excruciating headache. So I had to deal with the pain, without pain relief. At the time, I was heavily into Judo, and studied Zen a bit. So meditating was quite natural, and I used various techniques to take my mind off the pain. This came in handy some years ago when I shattered my leg snowboarding. I don't think I'd stick a nail in me to test I could still do it however.
yes I use meditation to rid myself of either emotional or physical pain. It's a simple concept, you are just focusing your attention away from the pain. Controlling your focus. That's all. Any meditation is pain meditation. Practicing one technique for pain endurance sounds completely self-defeating. If you can focus on your breath, you can endure pain. I am sure I have a higher tolerance for physical or mental pain than anyone on these forums, unless they too practice controlling their focus. edit: Yes I would not feel much pain if I put the nail through my bicep, but I would never do something stupid like that. You are just opening yourself up to unnecessary physical problems.
Listening to music seems to do something like that for me. Anything with a heavy pulsating bass, seems to draw me in and drug me...
There is also meditation where one focuses on the pain, often the clenching we do around pain is more painful that the pain itself. And then pain can often transform or be less unpleasant when faced directly. Further pain is a message. Sometimes we know what the message is and the continued pain is redundant, but I think often we really do not know why we have a headache or back pain or a host of other pains less obviously self-created than driving a nail into one's hand - or getting someone to do this. If we open to the pain, we can find out what the real sources are: job stress, relationships, whatever.
What is the purpose of driving a nail through your arm? Why would you damage yourself like that? Would it not have been better to have done a meditation when you had a pain that you wanted to get rid of? What was the purpose of deliberately causing your arm harm? It seems to be a bit of an anti-meditational act.
While I feel that you can't make a claim so over the top without some kind of proof, trolling him is really just stupid, especially when you don't understand what meditation does and what it can do.
