Meditation and pain

Another good reason to practice!

People who practice Zen meditation have been shown to be far less sensitive to pain than nonmeditators, and they are better at coping with it. Meditating really isn't that much harder than medicating. The goal isn't to suppress emotions, but to identify how they arise and how they influence you.
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Meditation may help in a few ways: It may distract your mind so you react less to that idiot who almost cut you off or other hot buttons. It also may help you tolerate pain by helping you bypass a blame-and-stress cycle in your brain. This bypass helps decrease stress hormones and increase pain-squelching ones.

It's from a little article entitled "Use your mind to turn down pain".

(Don't worry about whether or not your meditation is technically "Zen" or not. The method described in the article is just basic tranquility/mindfulness.)