Pain Scan Meditation (PSM)
After trying dozens of meditation techniques, I have found that Pain Scan Meditation (PSM) is the most effective way for reaching enlightenment.
Here, I will share the details.

How to meditate

1. Sit down with your eyes closed
2. Maintain deep, steady breathing
3. Observe your pain

How to observe pain (part 1)
Humans naturally tend to push pain out of their awareness.
In meditation, however, you'll do the exact opposite.
Pay attention to the following as you observe pain:

1. What kind of pain you are feeling right now
2. Where in your body you are feeling that pain
3. How that pain is changing over time

"Pain" here refers to any unpleasant feelings, such as regret about the past, anxiety about the future, fear, anger, sadness, loneliness, and self-hatred.
Various forms of pain will naturally arise during meditation.
Be aware of even the smallest discomforts, so you can better understand them.
For example, if you feel hunger, focus your attention on fully experiencing that feeling of hunger.

How to observe pain (part 2)
Here's how it works over time:

1. Identify a pain.
2. Direct your attention to the pain. It may temporarily intensify.
3. Sustain your focus. The pain will stop intensifying.
4. Further maintain your focus. The pain will begin to lessen.
5. Identify another pain and observe it in the same way.

Note: Always maintain deep, steady breathing at all times.
By repeating this cycle, the mind gradually frees itself from pain, ultimately achieving complete inner peace.

What happens with PSM?
By consistently practicing PSM, you may experience the following, sometimes within an hour:

1. A moment may arrive during meditation when your mental state undergoes a profound transformation.
2. Everything seems to pass by like scenery outside a train window (impermanence), and you become an impartial observer, simply watching without attachment (non-self).
3. You can observe the changes in your own mind with complete neutrality, as if gazing at a distant landscape.
4. By becoming this neutral observer, your mind achieves remarkable stability (nirvana).

How PSM works

• Maintain deep, steady breathing to ensure sufficient oxygen supply to your brain, even during challenging situations.
• When you try to escape pain, you block crucial information needed to resolve the situation, impairing your thinking. By accurately recognizing pain and its sources, you can eliminate cognitive and emotional biases.

What if PSM doesn't work well?
If you find it difficult to practice PSM, try training yourself to become more aware of your breath and body sensations.
Yoga or body scan meditation (especially yoga) is recommended for this purpose.

Learn more
Full documents about PSM are here:

True Meditation - Home
https://true-meditation.com/en

True Meditation - Early Buddhism was science, not religion
https://true-meditation.com/en/docs/what-is-buddhism

My Reddit post on r/streamentry (Same content, but feel free to check out the discussion there if you're interested)
https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/comments/1kn8jfs/the_simple_technique_to_awaken_pain_scan/

I'm sorry to sound like a killjoy, but when I read through all the links posted here, it makes me wonder when the other shoe is going to drop. I keep expecting to be asked to make a purchase. This post and the website it links to just appear to be spam to me. I guess time will tell.

Thank you for your honest feedback. I understand your concern about promotional content. My intention here is to genuinely share a meditation technique that I found effective without any commercial intent or sales pitch. The website linked is purely informational and free to access. Please feel free to explore it at your own pace, and I welcome any questions or discussions.

Satoru, I'm the moderator on DhO. I was initially concerned that your post might be spam, but after visiting all the links, I decided to let it stand, albeit with my comment.  Thanks for your explanation.

- Chris M

Thank you, Chris, for taking the time to review my post and the linked content.
I really appreciate your fairness and willingness to give it a chance.
I’m genuinely interested in sharing and exchanging practice insights with the community, and I’m glad to be here.
If there’s anything I should improve, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

This is a good technique. I also discovered it and found that it works as Satoru describes it. Shinzen Young describes a similar discovery when he was living in a Shingon monastery in Japan. Maha Bua also describes a similar thing in his Path To Arahantship. 

Satoru, as you say, this practice leads to mental stability and the realization of impermanence and not-self. In my case, this was a starting point for the development of other insights offering progressively more freedom and joy and less suffering, not only in terms of physical pain, but in all realms of life. I'd be interested to know more about your current practice. Do you feel that this technique has given you all you need from meditation, or are you still exploring?

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I think different people are looking for different things from meditation. I also think the technique that works best for someone will depend on exactly what they are looking for.

Personally, I am looking for the end of suffering, and I have always felt that observing the dukkha characteristic is the best method to accomplish that. If you want to end suffering it would help to understand how it arises, and how it fades. My interpretation of "observing the dukkha characteristic" is that it means watching the activity of the mind, noticing when dukkha arises, noticing how the ego is involved, noticing when dukkha fades. The 3 characteristics are interrelated so you might notice the other two are involved also (arising/fading = impermanance, noticing ego involvement leads to understanding anatta).

I also think my approach develops what Shinzen Young calls "clarity" and works best if you do it with what Shinzen Young defines as equanimity: don't push thoughts and emotions away and don't get drawn into them.


All together I think my practice, which has helped me immensely,  has a lot in common with PSM, so I think that method has merit for people who want to suffer less. Some people like to have very specific instructions so it might be a good method for them.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment and for sharing your experience — it's very encouraging to hear that others have discovered similar effects through this kind of practice.

> Do you feel that this technique has given you all you need from meditation, or are you still exploring?
As for myself, I find a deep sense of fulfillment through this technique and not trying to find new techniques now.

I know that some people have attained awakening through the same or similar practices, but those approaches are often complex or rely on individual perception, which may be why they haven't become more widely adopted.
That's why I've tried to present a method and theoretical framework that are as simple and understandable as possible, and to make them freely available to everyone.
Still, even when people understand my explanation, many seem hesitant to actually try this kind of approach, as it involves directly facing pain.

By the way, after discovering this method (your method), did you ever try to share it with others?

Thank you for your thoughtful reflections — I resonate with your goal of ending suffering. I believe it's a beautiful aspiration, and probably one that many people share.

> don't push thoughts and emotions away and don't get drawn into them.

I agree.
As described in the Anapanasati Sutta, I believe the breath is one of the most effective anchors for cultivating that kind of balanced awareness, precisely because it is always available to everyone, at all times.

> All together I think my practice, which has helped me immensely, has a lot in common with PSM, so I think that method has merit for people who want to suffer less.

I also feel that your practice has much in common with PSM. It's a real joy to encounter someone walking a similar path.

> Some people like to have very specific instructions so it might be a good method for them.

That's why I made PSM public — to help make awakening accessible to anyone, regardless of background or prior training. Though many DHO users may already be far along their paths, I hope it can still offer something useful to others.

At the time, I was part of a meditation group (sangha) and I discussed it with a teacher and some other meditators in the group. I got the sense, over time, that it was a sort of specific sub-category of the insight into impermanence and not-self, so I felt that it was already being taught, even if, for me, the insight into pain was more important/effective than it was for most of my peers.

One way in which the general form of the insight is described is as the knowledge of the arising and passing away of phenomena. The book, which was kind of the starting point for this forum, has a chapter on it here: 
https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight/30-the-progress-of-insight/4-the-arising-and-passing-away/

It's interesting to note that people often feel that they have all the awakening that they need when they attain this knowledge. I should also mention that it is insight number four in a list of 16 classically defined insights and it is not uncommon for people who have realized this knowledge to go through some bumpy times as other insights into the nature of suffering appear later on. So if you do happen to find yourself dealing with things like fear or misery at a later date, it would probably be worth looking into a teaching called the Path of Insight at that point. 

Another description of the general insight is Shinzen Young's "Gone" technique, which he describes here:
https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/art_PowerofGone.pdf
and here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POjfu1gUUAo

For Shinzen, the insight doesn't necessarily lead to a bumpy ride later on, so you can see that there are various takes on it. 

It certainly continues to serve me very well, and I am glad to see people such as yourself talking about it!

Oh, interesting.
I experienced Gone along with insights into impermanence and non-self.
One unique aspect of PSM compared to Vipassana or Shinzen's methods is that it doesn’t involve labeling.
That said, it doesn’t prohibit verbal thought either.
As concentration deepens, it becomes possible to feel arising and passing away at incredible speed.
I suspect that this may involve the workings of human working memory.

We know that acknowledging pain is more important than ignoring pain.
However, in my country, meditation techniques that focus on ignoring pain are far more popular than those that emphasize acknowledging it.
This "ignoring pain" approach is not so good for the mind and can even be harmful at times.
That's because pain contains essential information for living better lives.
I see this as a serious problem, and it has become one of my main motivations for sharing and promoting PSM.

同意です。我慢ばかりはよくないです。我慢よりも理解の方が人間を助けます。

(I lived in Japan for a long time, so I recognize the problem you are mentioning.)

Thanks for sharing this. It makes a lot of sense as it counters a deeply rooted habit of avoiding unpleasant feelings, which then becomes a lost opportunity to untangle and release grasping. I once heard a teacher say that 99 percent of people who get enlightened do so with unpleasant feelings.

This being said, people with severe trauma may be re-traumatized doing such a technique. They can experiece a flooding of overwhelmingly distressing feelings, which can even leave some further traumatized. I have seen this. Such traumatized individuals would be better off starting with developing an ability to tap into a safe base; techniques that develop a spacious awareness using neutral sensations (breath, sensations in the hands, etc) or positive feelings like metta. I have also seen traumatized people able to develop such a safe base.
Once they are able to access a sense of safety in themselves with such open awareness with neutral or pleasant feelings, they can begin to gently contact unpleasant feelings as you describe. 

日本にいらっしゃったのですね。ありがとうございます。

You're right.
​​​​​​​Although I only mentioned it briefly in the original post, I believe that in such cases, practices like yoga or body scan meditation — which help strengthen bodily awareness and develop control over the breath — can be very effective.Your experience of overcoming trauma by deepening your connection with bodily sensations is deeply meaningful and inspiring.
Thank you for sharing such a difficult part of your past with such openness.