You've come to the right place - you've discovered something deeper about meditation. In the Openhand Approach - our observation - we don't meditate to feel better. Or at least, we mediate to bring us back into alignment with the universal flow. But in order to get there, you've got to break down the distortion in order to get there. The distortion is where you identify with the physicality of life - where you make yourself less than the cosmic being that you are because of something you physically feel. You let the pain disempower you.

It's highly likely that when you mediate gently, without forcing, you'll touch your karmic pain. Unless that is, you're in avoidance and denial of it - in other words, all you're seeking is the bliss.

You have to get into your pain to realign it, to release the density and realign the energy in it. Then you bring true harmony to your system.

So if you activate your pain in meditation - I say wonderful! You're actually beginning to bring consciousness into your unconsciousness - trauma you've probably been carrying around for lifetimes.

So how to work with it?

Activate the pain and get deeply into it with your awareness. Feel it. Explore what it might be. Do this over several days - as the universe to show why its there... "show me!" Attentively watch the signs and synchronicities that show up. Keep pulling on the thread of your pain; express it, and let it out, through movement, or crying or what ever comes to you.

Then become as one with it - which means to be so intimately engaged within it, that you don't need it to go away.

When you are the pain, to the extent that you no longer judge it as negative, then you're ready to step through it as presence - as the one that you are; no longer limited and confined by something so small as "pain".

Then the pain will likely go away. And you'll have reclaimed an aspect of your soul which was buried in the unconsciousness of it.

It is for no small reason that the great poet and sage Rumi said...