Meditation On Becoming Intimate With & Emerging From 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

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 and 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.

Yesterday'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 little in control of this we are.

And 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.

When 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.

But 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.

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 eye,

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

And that causes suffering.

Where 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.

And 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 and 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 I ask 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.

Slipped.

You

Reviews

Thank you for this session on pain. Very healing. Namaste.

Thanks for clear understanding