Hi David P,
Welcome to the forum.
I'm editing and re-posting because I didn't really address this:
I’m wondering if anyone here has had experience dealing with pain or physical suffering, how you balance/approach in your practice, and also what advice or books you might recommend.
1) To re-interate a point in the thread, that of metta:
TT:I've slowly adopted the posture of a mother towards a beloved child in terms of how I reflect upon it when I do reflect upon it Mostly I simply embrace it and listen. It is one of or all three of the great teachers; old age, sickness and death.
So, being like an idealized parent who loves their child with patience, listening, comforting. This is so challenging, still. Just being gentle with oneself during such a difficult experience as chronic pain.
2. What I've heard or read Ayya Khema, Yuttadhammo, Goenka, Kabat-Zinn say is to try to just receive the sensations, observe their arising and passing. Myself, my own chronic pain abated a few years ago; I was inspired by the monk Thanissaro speaking of Ajahn Chah's abatement of the symptoms of malaria and so I started to sit with the pain of my own long-term sickness. When i sat with it I let go of a lot of extraneous thinking about it and slowly I also somehow started testing modifications in my behaviour off the cushion and I started eating in way that a friend here called the ketogenic diet (see below). So, while someday I expect pain from old age and/sickness will return, in this case meditation seemed to help me see my own disease state more clearly and help alleviate it.
So sometimes, from that steady meditational observation, some causality to the painful sensations occurs to oneself and helpful change in behaviour can be known. Regardless, this meditation observation of pain is like that of breathing meditation:
A. first, we just can be mindful and note the breath (or pain) -- satisampajana (awareness and understating the arising 'data')
B. then we can become discerning about the breath (or pain): is it long/short? --- patisamvedi (being aware of sensations)
C. then we can train in this, perceiving the entire body -- the training in observing and knowing the above (sikkhati (ph?))
D. then we can tranquilize the bodily sensations to some degree in just doing the above and we can train in that tranquility of breathing and clearly comprehending sensations and feeling the whole body.
(My recap of satipatthana instruction here is based on part one of Bhikkhu Bodhi's ten talks on the Satipatthana sutra provided freely by Bodhi Monastery in New Jersey. This bhante also deals with recurrent and sometimes debilitating head pain; though he does not address in that lecture, personally I think it informs his teaching.)But, as you know, a lot of times one may not find any answer and/or cure to end the painful sensations. One just understands them better, sees them more clearly without any additive misery from affective response.
By affective response what I can say from my experience is that when I was dealing with then-chronic unpleasant sensations it was completely natural to want painful sensations to go away, that any remittance of painful sensation, such as neutral sensations, also would generate mental pleasant feeling (the happiness of relief from pain). Then I would crave i) that abatement of pain as well as ii) the new pleasure that arose in the absence of pain, the happiness of releif. So now I'd have two pains when the pain returns i) the painful sensation and ii) missing the positive mental state that arose in response to painful sensation abating.
I think you are doing what can be done: observing it, trying not to add to it emotionally. But if the desire that the pain abates arises just as much as the pains, that's natural and no fault of you/your meditation. The emotional frustration is an arising pain like the physical pain; some people do see that emotional pain go (Ayya Khema is clear that she did not suffer her cancer, but that it was a lot of unpleasant sensation), but if it does not the we can go back to metta for ourselves, this mind that also suffers the bodily pains.
3. Lastly, per above, you did not ask about it, so excuse my compulsion to give it to you: ketogenic diet. When I had exhausted a few antibiotic protocols after three years of them, including daily IV, I came across the ketogenic diet. I still do a vegan ketogenic diet-version on and off. It is used a lot for brain problems (see these related university studies and trials, if you like: UVA, U. Pittsburgh, Duke, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Oxford). Based on what I know of deep infection and this diet in my own life, if you're not diabetic type I, then I'd try this. If you're diabetic type II, i'd consider if with the MD who is also Type II and does this diet for himself (can be found online). It made my illness something that brought me to meditation studies, and to changing how I live and enjoy my life and, in part, and understanding that there will come a time again when this personhood does not get a temporary break from that process of dying.
Best wishes and health to you,
Katy