Become Intimate With & Emerge From Your Pain

Pain comes with life, closely accompanied by our “solutions” to it, most of which are all about getting away from it, whether through alcoholic, narcotic, erotic, intellectual, material, egoic, or spiritual means. The fact that these “solutions,” despite their anesthetizing capacity, only end up catalyzing more pain usually does little to stop us from pursuing them. Our resistance to our pain amplifies it.

Transcript

The flow is as follows.

We start with some breath work.

I use some ancient wisdom of pranayama and today I'm going to do a very powerful practice called Tamil breathing.

Tamil breathing is what the Tibetan monks use as a way to keep warm in the winter and those of you in the northern hemisphere like me,

It's cold out there.

It's nice and crisp and we would like a tip or two on how to stay warm during the season.

I guess I'm going to share with you some powerful techniques around that.

So I'll walk you through some voice,

Some breath work,

Some pranayama,

Some Tamil techniques on preparing and as you're breathing,

As you're getting warming up the fire from your belly and igniting the chi in your body,

It will also calm your mind.

And so we will lead from the breath work into the matters of the heart.

So once the mind is stable,

Calm,

Collected,

We will dive deep within into the matters of the heart and we will emerge from the other side with these golden nuggets,

Some wisdom nuggets that you're going to get along the way as we go through that and then we will summarize it with how we are feeling and what is emerging for us at that moment.

And then I will open it up for some Q&A.

So for the first 40 minutes or so,

Just stay tuned to what I'm teaching,

What I'm saying,

Try to follow along and experience,

Most importantly,

Feel what I'm saying.

And then I will open it up for questions and then it will be a good time for you to go ahead and drop in your questions in the comments.

And I'm happy to stay around and address them as best as the time will permit.

Okay,

So that's the general flow.

If you choose to go ahead and type in some questions,

Comments,

Whatever during the course of my teaching,

Just be assured that I'm not going to be looking at it because my job is one and only thing.

I'm going to be focused on giving you the best experience so that you get the biggest bang for the time you've chosen to be with Jay today.

Okay,

That's the way we flow here.

All of these sessions are recorded.

The audio tracks end up on my Insight Timer channel.

There's over 100 tracks.

You can go look it up,

Insighttimer.

Com slash jaychodhaga.

The videos are also recorded and they end up on my YouTube channel.

There's over a thousand of you following me there on YouTube.

Over 12,

000 of you follow me on Insight Timer.

My YouTube channel is youtube.

Com slash jaychodhaga.

All of this information,

If you're wondering,

How do I find all of these little things?

There's a link here,

Link there.

Just go to my website,

Joewithjay.

Com and you'll find all of the resources.

And also there's a circle on this app.

It's called Meditate with Jay.

That's a great place for you to ask questions,

Drop in any suggestions for future topics,

Ask for clarification.

If you missed a tip or two,

If you want to know where the recordings to find them,

Go ahead and drop your questions,

Comments,

Whatever discussion.

There's an active thriving community,

Over 600 of us.

And we will go ahead and make sure that your questions and comments are answered and looked at.

Okay,

With that said,

Why don't we jump into the practice?

So today I'm going to teach you some very fundamental practices around pranayama,

Which is the ancient wisdom of breathing.

In this I'd ask that you go ahead and downshift your gaze,

Close your eyes as you feel comfortable.

And let's start with some belly breathing.

So in this,

You will be breathing deep into the abdomen.

I want to see your belly rise and collapse.

Just like when you see a baby sleeping very peacefully,

You will notice its abdomen is what expands and contracts,

Not its chest.

Breathing in through the nostrils and exhaling from the nose or the mouth.

With regular even breathing for a count of five inhale and exhaling for a count of five.

Making sure that your diaphragm is being used to activate it here as you're breathing into the belly.

The diaphragm is a powerful muscle which activates your parasympathetic nervous system.

So you want to be using that muscle which regulates the opening and closing of your abdominal cavity,

Which also determines the quality and the volume of your breath.

As you're breathing in,

The abdominal cavity opens up allowing the lungs to take in maximum possible air.

And as you squeeze it out,

Feel your belly button squeezing back in towards the spine.

Imagine if you had bagpipes squeezing and expanding each of those bags.

Nice even breathing.

Now with this next exhalation,

I want you to keep your mouth closed and release that air squeeze the bagpipe with the sound of hum.

Now I'm extending this exhalation for a count of eight inhale still stays at five.

Mmm.

Mmm.

Mmm.

Mmm.

Notice that if you can drop that hum to further down into your throat,

Down towards the larynx.

Mmm.

Mmm.

Are you using your bagpipes?

Are you squeezing your abdomen as you're exhaling this air as a thin stream coming out to the nostrils mouth closed with the hum.

Mmm.

Now moving on to the next so as we inhale still for a count of five as we exhale we're going to open up mouth and we'll release it with the ah sounds like this.

Ah.

Feel free to play with the pitch.

You can go as high or slow and just try to change the variations of that and you can notice for yourself what that does to the feelings sensations in your face.

Imagine that the face is a facade that you're living inside of and notice what this vibrations of as you're exhaling with these sounds the hum,

The ah and as we go continue through the x-axis.

What does that do?

Do you feel any different in the different cavities?

There are four cavities inside the face and as we reverberate it we're actually massaging.

It's like an internal massage for all of your organs within your face inside your head.

So let's go and do that together.

Ah.

Extended exhalation as long as possible.

Turns out as a thin stream affair.

Ah.

Ah.

Ah.

Ah.

Now return back to even breathing.

We're going to breathe in for a count of five and exhale for a count of five.

Still using your diaphragm and allowing the belly to expand and collapse with each passing breath.

Now can we add a pause?

So what we're going to do is inhale for a count of five.

Hold for five.

Exhale through the mouth for five and hold for five.

So together let's do a few rounds of that.

Exhale for five.

Hold for five.

Exhale for five.

And hold.

Inhale.

Hold.

Exhale.

And hold.

Inhale.

Hold.

Exhale.

And hold.

Inhale.

And now let's go back to the even breathing.

Five in and five out,

No holding.

As I give you instructions for the next exercise we're going to be doing,

We're going to be doing something called tummo breathing.

I want you to go ahead and put both your palms on your belly.

The fingertips are almost touching,

But not quite.

So you're just kind of holding your belly back straight.

Hopefully you're just doing this sitting up.

And what I want you to do is go ahead and keep your eyes closed and just follow your breath as you're breathing nice and deep into the belly button.

Imagine that you're channeling this air that's going in through the mouth or in through the nostrils and down the windpipe into the lungs.

And imagine it goes further down to feed the fuel.

Imagine that there is fire in your belly.

Right at the center of the belly,

Around where the belly button is,

There is a ball of fire.

And with each inhalation,

You're fueling that flame.

Visualize that.

I want you to visualize that fire in your belly.

And imagine that the rest of the body,

This bag is like a balloon and there's this balloon that holds that fire at the center.

Deep inhalation all the way down into the belly.

And as you exhaling,

I want you to arch forward gently.

Inhale straighten up.

Throwing your shoulders back slightly.

And then as you exhale,

You're arching forward.

Keep the visualization of the fire.

Don't miss that.

Don't ever give up that image.

Three more rounds of this.

One last round.

And then we're going to do some holding,

One last round.

Straighten back.

And then as you're exhaling,

Arch forward.

Now after this fifth exhalation,

You're going to go ahead and breathe in.

Hold your breath.

I want you to swallow gently,

Swallow gently and relax your diaphragm.

You're still holding your breath.

Holding your breath,

You're going to relax the muscles in your belly.

And I want you to contract the pelvic floor muscles.

At the same time,

See if you can push down the diaphragm.

So what you're doing is almost sandwiching that ball of fire with the muscles in your buttocks and the muscles in your diaphragm.

See if you can squeeze and narrow that space between these two.

Holding that fire.

Hold it as much as you can.

Hold your breath.

And when you simply cannot hold any longer,

I want you to go ahead and exhaling.

I want you to go ahead and exhale,

Relaxing and letting go of any tightness in the muscles.

So now five rounds before we do this holding again.

As you're inhaling,

You're going back,

Straightening your back.

And as you're exhaling,

You're going arching forward.

Inhaling shoulders go upright and back.

Exhaling you're arching your back and going forward with your shoulders.

Three more rounds.

Two more rounds.

Last exhale.

Now inhale and hold the breath.

I want you to follow that holding breath with swallowing.

Just imagine you're swallowing,

Allowing your muscles in your belly to relax.

And then we do the sandwich.

Contracting the pelvic muscles and pushing down with your diaphragm.

Squeezing that ball of fire.

Holding your breath as you're doing so.

Hold as long as you can.

And as you exhale,

I want you to relax all your muscles.

This my friends is the Tamil method of increasing the heat in your body.

Now you got the basics,

You're welcome to go ahead and try it out.

Extend this practice.

You can do as many rounds as you see fit.

Now I want you to note that if you're feeling dizzy,

If you're feeling uncomfortable,

If it's giving you some sort of nausea,

If you're about to faint,

What have you,

Abort this practice,

You need to probably consult a doctor.

You don't want to be accentuating the situation.

You don't want to be escalating it into something that goes out of control.

But this is an ancient technique out of Tibet that has been stayed a secret for thousands of years.

And only recently scientists have gone and studied it and have brought it to the West and have started to explain the benefits of this.

Now as much as I said,

It is a process of increasing the heat in the body.

It also is a tremendous practice in helping to calm your mind.

So that is the direct benefit as we are leading into the meditation practice today.

Notice for yourself what has this last 20 minutes or so of breath work done for you.

Keeping your eyes closed,

I want you to notice the quality of your breathing right now.

Notice the pace of thoughts in your mind.

And notice the lightness that you may be feeling in your entire body.

As you have loved this prana,

This life-giving energy to flow in and water every single cell of your body.

As we consciously breathe deep,

As we consciously alter breath,

And as we hold breath,

We are activating our parasympathetic nervous system.

This is what yields the maximum benefits,

Compensating for all those times during the course of the day when we have inadvertently,

Because we have multitasked,

We have got distracted,

We got shocked,

We got alarmed,

We got excited.

We deprive the body of this prana by breathing shallow.

So just 20 minutes of breathing a day is like breakfast for your lungs.

You're energizing the body with the chi.

And so just notice for yourself,

Acknowledge what has this investment of time done for you right now.

Today I will guide you through a practice of becoming more intimate with your pain.

We all have a shadow.

And we have a shadow because there were things in us that we,

For all sorts of reasons,

Fleed from,

We've dissociated and disconnected from,

And we've kept those things in the dark.

And we were driven to do so because we were in pain,

In distress,

In discomfort.

And they stayed unresolvable hurt.

So today,

As I'm guiding you through this practice,

To now deliberately turn towards this pain is a heroic step.

So if you are here,

You are a warrior.

Turning towards your pain and then exploring it,

Experiencing and knowing it from the inside is an essential part of working with your shadow.

Because your shadow is where your deepest pain is stored.

The more skillful you are in handling your pain,

The better equipped you will be working with your shadow.

You may conceive of freedom as a pain-free domain,

But real freedom is rooted not in being without pain,

But in how you handle it,

How you relate to it,

And how intimate with it you choose to become.

Pain is unpleasant.

It's an unpleasant sensation.

And whoever you are,

Wherever you are,

You inevitably experience pain.

Today's pain may still be occupying you and tomorrow's pain too,

Together amplifying today's pain.

We don't get what we want and there's pain.

We get what we don't want and there's pain.

And even when we get what we want,

There's pain.

If only because of how things change and how litten in control of this we are.

Just as inevitably we tend to store as much as possible of our pain in our shadow,

Finding strategies to numb,

Bypass or otherwise get away from our pain are just some of the tricks we've always been up to.

The more we try to flee from it though,

Whether through denial,

Dissociation or distraction,

The more deeply it takes root in us.

So how do we go about addressing,

Resolving and healing this pain?

The simple answer is turning towards your pain.

As you start to recognize that in order to emerge from your pain,

You first have to enter it.

That you may be asking,

Isn't the point to get rid of pain or at least to get away from it?

After all,

Isn't pain already unpleasant enough?

Why make it worse by moving closer to it,

Let alone entering it?

The very notion of turning towards your pain and getting close to it is to start knowing it well.

And that may seem counterintuitive at first,

Somewhat masochistic.

And you begin a compassionate exploring of the roots of how you try to avoid pain,

How you adopted these tactics to protect yourself,

These early childhood efforts to get away from your pain,

Efforts that might have helped you survive very difficult circumstances.

But those tactics,

Those strategies no longer serve us now.

And turning towards our pain,

There's a great freedom,

A freedom that grounds us in our core of being.

The energy we've invested in getting away from our pain,

Opposed to simply being with our pain,

Gets freed up.

And that freed up energy becomes available for us to use for truly life-giving purposes.

Turning towards our pain doesn't increase our pain for very long.

It actually decreases it relatively soon,

Mainly because we're no longer paining ourselves by putting so much energy into trying to get away from it.

Being with our pain doesn't mean passively submitting to it or letting it run us.

It's rather staying present with it,

Neither getting lost in it nor dissociating from it.

It is easy to get overwhelmed by pain,

Spinning down into it as if being drawn down an energetic funnel towards a darkly contracted vortex.

It's also easy to launch ourselves so far from it that we all but lose sight of it,

Settling into an exaggerated detachment.

The truth is though,

The more consistently present you are with your pain,

The less it will pain you.

Now there are many kinds of pain,

Physical,

Emotional,

Mental,

Psychological,

And even existential.

The essence of each kind of pain is a compellingly felt sense of unpleasantness,

A discomfort.

So it's natural to seek distraction from our pain.

These distractions can take many forms,

Ranging from intellectual to pharmaceutical to erotic,

Any of which can easily dominate us,

Thereby disconnecting us from living a deeper life,

If only by keeping us in the grip of our conditioning.

When you learn to relate to your pain,

Becoming intimate with it,

You start liberating yourself from your pain and the painful consequences of avoiding the pain to begin with.

When you keep distracting yourself,

You trap yourself in apparent solutions,

Getting overly attached or addicted to whatever is that pleasurable experience that reliably removes you from feeling your pain.

This however just generates even more pain and drains you of the energy reserves without at all resolving the original pain.

So I invite you to go to the heart of your pain,

Anything that you may be feeling,

And find out more about it.

Sit with it.

Now there's a difference between pain and suffering.

To suffer is to be in pain,

But to be in pain doesn't necessarily mean to suffer.

Pain is fundamentally just unpleasant,

Sometimes extremely unpleasant sensation of feeling.

Suffering on the other hand is something that we are doing with our pain.

For example,

If your husband just left you,

You may be feeling terribly hurt or heartbroken,

And that is pain.

But when you turn that into a narrative such as,

My husband just left me and I'm hurting terribly,

My life is over,

I'm never going to find love again,

My mother was right,

I should have never been born,

That is suffering.

When we can't sufficiently distract ourselves from our pain,

We often turn it into suffering.

And we do turn it into suffering by either resisting our pain,

That is what's in our shadow here is the raw reality of our pain,

And our lack of acceptance of it.

Or by dramatizing our pain,

We make a tail out of it.

In the center of our hurt,

The I,

It's surrounded by this investment that you've made in this drama,

And that causes suffering.

Your pain is consciously felt hurt,

Suffering is the myopic dramatization of that hurt,

Casting us in the role of the hurt one,

Binding us there.

We are occupied by our hurt role to such an extent that we have little or no motivation to see through or stand apart from it.

The degree to which we allow our pain to turn into suffering is the degree to which we obstruct our own healing and wellbeing.

When we're busy suffering,

We're avoiding simply being present with the rawness of our pain.

So how do you work through this?

To work effectively with your suffering,

You need to both stand apart from its script so that you can more clearly begin to bring it into focus and to cease distancing yourself from your pain.

As you step back from the dramatics of your suffering,

You don't not only start seeing through your role as the sufferer,

But also start seeing your investment in that role.

It's like turning on the lights.

When you turn on the lights,

The dramatics of the suffering become transparent and you begin to know it from the inside,

Noticing its fluxing weave and interplay of qualities.

And instead of just having a blanket sense of your pain,

You sense it in living detail and you stop resisting it.

And it's in this conscious and compassionate and unresisting entry into your pain that you begin to find some real freedom.

Freedom from the suffering.

So instead of fighting it,

You start holding it.

Suffering is a refusal to develop any intimacy with your pain.

Now pain doesn't necessarily obstruct happiness.

So you can be in pain and still be happy.

But suffering obstructs your happiness.

In fact,

Suffering puts your pain in prison,

Keeping it overly contained,

Tightly confined within you.

But as you turn away from the screens upon which your suffering projects its stories,

You begin to awaken.

And gradually that awareness,

That awakening,

Uproots the suffering,

Taking you into your heart,

The core,

The epicenter of your pain.

And there in that place of hurt,

You meet not more hurt,

But the more you.

The more healing,

More peace,

And more welcome.

You start freeing yourself from the suffering,

Bringing the raw reality of your pain completely out of the shadow.

And while you do that,

You increase the odds that your pain will serve rather than obstruct you.

Turning towards your pain reduces your suffering.

Entering your pain further reduces your suffering.

And moving through your pain ends or at least radically reduces your suffering,

Even if your pain remains.

The more intimate you are with your pain,

The less you will suffer.

I want you to bring your palms together at your heart center in prayer position.

And acknowledge how you feel right now.

I want you to go ahead and open up your palms and put them out facing outwards as if you're sending a blessing with both your palms.

And I want you to pick some person,

A group of people,

Or a place that could use a blessing right now.

Somebody or some people that are suffering.

And imagine as if there are beams of light that emerge from the center of your palms that shoot towards that place,

Giving them this healing energy,

This light,

This chi and blessing them.

May their obstacles be removed.

May their suffering be reduced.

And may they know the love that they are.

Now tuning into the Supreme Being,

The eternal source of love,

Light,

And power,

Imagine the Supreme Sun shining down upon you.

And you are a mirror that reflects the rays of the supreme love towards this entire planet.

This beautiful stage upon which we're here to play our part in this drama that we call life.

Let us reflect the grace of the Supreme Sun upon this planet and all of its inhabitants,

All species,

The elements.

May they be healing.

May they be love.

And may they be oneness.

And as you bring your palms back together in prayer position at your heart center,

And acknowledge for yourself,

How do I feel right now?

And if you could summarize how you feel right now in one word,

What would that be?

And I ask that you please go and drop that one word into the comments so that we may all know how you feel right now.

Reviews

Wow. Love.

Wonderful!!!

Thank you for this practice which has given me a feeling of calm acceptance of all aspects of my life.