What is meditation, and how could it be helpful for osteoarthritis?

Meditation is a state-of-mind in which you are completely relaxed and hyperaware of your surroundings all at the same time. Excuse me? How can you be completely relaxed and hyperaware simultaneously? That is the beauty of meditation - I'll explain.

Contrary to the image of meditation as an almost "sleep-like state," as it is sometimes described, meditation requires an acute awareness of yourself, your body, and your surroundings. In meditation, you become completely aware of everything that is going on inside of you and around you. You become engaged with your senses and register everything. You feel your breath entering and leaving your lungs. You feel the clothes on your body. You hear the birds outside and smell the scents in the air. You sense the beating of your own heart. As you become intimately aware of yourself and what you are feeling - what you are sensing - you focus yourself in the present. In many ways, this is the essence of meditation - being here, now. Through this awareness; through this being in the present, you achieve a deep state of relaxation.

Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual leader who has helped make many tenets of Eastern philosophy readily accessible to millions of Westerners. Tolle teaches to avoid identifying yourself with your mind. He teaches that you are a spiritual entity and you happen to be inhabiting your body. Your body comes equipped with many tools. Your body has arms to carry things, legs to walk, a mind to think in order to navigate the world, eyes to see, and ears to hear. The mind, in Tolle's view, is a tool much as the arms are tools. Tolle believes that people get themselves into trouble when they become too identified with their own mind. The mind, in a sense, tries to take over the spiritual entity. Tolle, and many Eastern philosophers, seek to teach their students to learn to dissociate themselves from their thoughts. This is what meditation seeks to achieve as well!

In meditation, you focus on your senses. But, as you do, thoughts will inevitably come into your head: "I'm tired." "I forgot to put the milk back in the refrigerator." "I need to buy dinner." "I wish that my boss had appreciated it when I stayed late yesterday."
Instead of engaging these thoughts with a running dialogue, when you are meditating you watch your thoughts. You watch them as if they were lines that came up on a screen, and then you watch those lines go away and you return to focusing on your breathing and other senses. As you get better and better at meditating, fewer thoughts will come into your head during your meditation sessions.

But how does all this help my osteoarthritis symptoms?
Meditation actually offers an excellent opportunity to confront and control your pain. By learning to "watch your thoughts" instead of becoming consumed by them, you also learn to better control your pain.

When you experience pain, learn to focus intently on it. Characterize it. Pain isn't just "pain." It has qualities: Is it sharp, shooting, burning, dull, or achy? Where is it located exactly? By focusing intensely on the pain, the pain, ironically, tends to lessen. Think of the pain as a dark shadow and, when meditating, you are focusing the light of your consciousness on it by describing it deep detail, which exposes the shadow and makes it disappear.