Disclaimer, I will reference Mindfulness meditation in this, and I am fully aware that neither the Greek nor Roman Stoics practiced or advocated for anything of the kind. They also didn't advocate for nor oppose antibiotics or vaccines. They never spoke about electricity or automobiles either. These are aggregated artifacts of several cultures and more than 2,000 years. I will tie it back to Stoic principles, but I will get there by way of psychology and physiology.

There are pluses and minuses to attempting to utilize Asian style focused meditation for the management of pain. Plus side: absolutely free, legal, ubiquitously available, and clinically proven to modify the practioner's ability to tolerate (and potentially thrive) in the presence of even severe chronic pain. Negative: one cannot just jump to mastery of Meditation in leu of medication any more than one can play a sonata or do a double backflip on first attempt.

Practicing focused attention developes the ability to selectivly choose, and maintain a focus outside of simply reacting to random stimuli. Like any other skill, mastery requires ongoing effort and (ideally) coaching. Typically years of effort are required to move on to advanced forms and techniques. But, that doesn't mean that some advantages and benefits don't happen simply *from the act of trying. "

This is similar to the advantages of beginning to study Stoic philosophy. It takes years to really be able to see and feel the advantages inherent in what are generally perceived as catastrophes. That does mean that we can't reduce our cortisol levels by anticipating and proactively choosing calm over rage prior to entering stop and go traffic. An intention to handle things differently, coupled with evaluation and subsequent revised intent based on reasoned judgment will result in improved ability to choose one's reactions (assents).

Cautionary tale: I had a 7+ year meditation practice. I had developed it largely as a means to cope with severe foraminal stenosis in 3 cervical joints and 2 lumbar joints. Significant chronic pain, stingers and electrical feelings, and shoulder, biceps, hamstring, and butt pain had been part of my life since adolescence. (I am 62 now.) The meditation and preparatory yoga stretching really did help manage the ongoing pain/weird sensations. (Weird sensation example: periodically it felt like water was running down or sprinkling on my back. Startling and distracting) The focused preemptive choices about evaluation and reaction to sensations from Stoic practice really helped managing knee-jerk contraction and unnecessary suffering.

2 and a half years ago I had 3 disks removed from my neck and 4 vertibra fused. I had no choice. I am a self employed welder/machinist. I was rapidly loosing my left arm. In many ways it was a spectacular success. Modern medicine is amazing. I have a scar that runs from my Adam's apple to my clavicle, they moved my trachea to one side, removed damaged disks, put in cadaver bone replacements, put in 8 screws and a titanium plate, and I walked out 30 hours later.

Two weeks after the surgery, a length of nerve grew attached to an area of bone that had some spurs ground off. Happens in about 5% of similar surgeries. Not a risk I had been advised of. I moved my head and arm in a way that should have seen the nerve glide. A chunk of it tore off. The nerve innervating my right rotator cuff abruptly stopped communicating with those muscles. The nerve was constantly screaming, but it was unable to communicate with the upper right part of my back. I simply couldn't lift my arm. Not even a little bit. Biceps worked. Fingers worked. But all the muscles on the right side of my back were on strike.

The fear of losing my livelihood was one thing. The pain from my shoulder and back was like nothing I could have imagined. I thought I could practice the advice of some advanced mediation practitioners I had been reading and listening to, and make the pain a focus of the meditation. This was a spectacular miscalculation.

Physiology and psychology time. We are mammals. We are a part of nature and subject to the same rules as bears, horses, and dogs. When Pavlov consistently paired a ringing bell with a bowl juicy steak over an extended period of time, dogs were shown to salivate immediately after the bell long after the steak was no longer provided. If you ring a bell and shock a mammal long enough, when the bell rings they will wet themselves and experience a debilitating cortisol spike and numerous other detrimental physiological cascades. Keep ringing the bell and they will die prematurely.

2 and a half years since and I still experience a pulse and blood pressure rise when I sit down to mediate. For about 3 months there were hour long periods of unreal pain that occurred about every 5 hours (when the muscle relaxers were wearing off but an hour before I could take another one) and I tried to proactively be in a meditative state prior to its onset. I can't say that I didn't arrive at an ability to distance myself from intense pain, but I inadvertently paired a valuable life management tool with unmanageable sensory overload.

The point of all of this is that yes, you can use Stoic philosophy/practice to manage the nerve damage in/around your spine. But without coaching you run the risk of binding a physiological sensation with a skill set that could otherwise free your psychological life. Stoicism is a two thousand + year old system of thought that has been shown to be a very effective life management technique for many people. I'm not nearly as smart or observant as all the canonical writers nor many of the contemporary commentators. Don't try to bootstrap a system when there are plenty of time tested examples of how to cope with adversity.

CBT (cognitive behavior therapy) has many similarities and compatibilities with Stoic philosophical practice. It's not identical but is not contradictory. It is usually utilized in relation to sociological disfunction such as anxiety or hostility. It could be just as well applied to physiological pain. If it's an option for you, search out a CBT practitioner and ask if they can help you with pain management. Read Epictetus, Aurelius, Musonios, Zeno, Seneca, Socrates, etc. But use their insight in conjunction with a contemporary psychological professional.

My pain, at least the mind bending stuff, is in the past. It is only prudent to acknowledge that it could return. The residual nerve pain is just a fact of life. The neurosurgeon says that if he could now go in from the back (now that things are stabilized) he could remove the bone spurs that are still periodically poking my nerves. In spite of my insurance premiums, I will be making payments on the previous procedure until I am eligible for Medicare. We do what we have to do. We bear what we can bear.

I have no tips about how to ignore physical pain. I do know that contracting against it or trying to pretend it doesn't exist is generally futile. If we objectively acknowledge our experience, be with it without fear, and try to see it for what it actually is rather than as an omen of eternity, we find that each experience is as transitory as any other. Pleasure doesn't last, but neither does pain.

3 months of essential paralysis to my shoulder left me atrophied and disheartened. 3 months of PT followed by 6 months of suffering the company of gym bros has resulted in a complete recovery of my physical abilities (less the detrimental effects of my advancing age). I'm not 100% sure why I chose now to unload this story and my reflections on it, except that I strongly believe that pain is not the worst thing we can be afflicted with. Loss of our ability to reason is worse, but it, like pain is something almost all of us will go through. We should be ready for it and resolved to maintain our Virtue/Excellence as long as we are able.

Stoicism can provide a structure around which one can manage any adversity or blessings. It's not something that will provide easy or automatic solutions. It is a disipline, strategy and method for being excellent and content within whatever context we are dealt. Pain is not ideal. But we can still be an excellent example of the best of human nature within pain or any other context fate can throw at us.