I went to meditation class for the first time in a long time yesterday and I'm very glad I went. It was a body-scan meditation, and the discussion afterwards was centered around the mind-body connection. Specifically, how we (People with depression/anxiety) live mostly above our shoulders and ignore signals that don't originate inside of our own heads. The class was at 7, The meditation was about an hour, and the actual body-scan started about 20 minutes in at the toes and feet, sweeping up the body. I had gone the whole day, an entire working day of running around the hospital, without realizing I was having a gout flare. It suddenly made sense why I had been feeling panicky, on edge and withdrawn all day. It turns out that if you ignore the sensation of railroad spikes being driven into your heels long enough, it can make you kind of cranky. Back to basics with meditation again. I've recognized a pattern I think. Step 1. Habitually meditate with breath observation and body-scan. Step 2. Get bored of body awareness because I have a lot of unpleasant things I am bodily aware of, and I'm not at peace with them. Step 3. Move on to weird, abstract, 'transcendental' meditation because I think I'm 'above that pedestrian body stuff.' Step 4. Feel like meditation isn't doing anything for me. Repeat.
My flares are rare, thankfully. What it amounts to is take a pill every day, for something that's problematic once every few months, or take a lot of pills for a little while when it flares. My PCP is happy to have her nurses shove a needle full of prednisone in my ass too.
In my limited experience, I've found the simplest meditation techniques to be the most effective. Though I'm certainly guilty of making the same mistakes, always thinking "I did this meditation, what's next?" as though the meditation itself isn't the end goal.
That's definitely a possibility. The only thing mindfulness meditation really does is cultivate awareness. Ideally, a non-judgemental and passive awareness. That's all. It does sound kind of underwhelming at first, but you highlighted how easy it is to be unaware in the second paragraph of your original post. And whilst I can't speak for its effect on gout, being simply aware of undesirable thoughts/feelings/bodily sensations and sitting with them can often cause them to subside without much effort. But if you approach the meditation as if its a treatment, then there's already this judgement that there's these negative things you're looking to get rid of. Not only will this leave you frustrated, but it will hamper the development of that non-judgemental awareness which is the real key.