Today we'll talk about pleasure and pain or it can also be thought of as like and dislike or kind of craving reversion.
This is an experience that is the nature of experience throughout life,
Both in our on the cushion and the meditation practice and more importantly throughout our daily life,
Every day until we die.
I'm going to start with a quote from Viktor Frankl which is,
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power and freedom to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
So we're going to talk about how recognizing that and coming into that space that the quote mentions gives us more insight into our lives and our experience and thus more agency in our daily lives.
So all responses in our lives fall into,
All responses to all life's experience fall into one of three general categories.
I like to think of them as like,
Dislike and neutral.
It can also be categorized as pleasure and pain or neutral or craving and aversion and kind of disconnection or neutrality.
This is the,
These kind of three general buckets describe kind of the initial feeling tone that precedes more developed emotional and thought reactions to an experience.
So there,
These things are so subtle that for the most part we don't usually notice them.
For most of us,
Most of the time our attention is not refined enough to notice these really,
Really subtle feeling tones that precede emotions,
Thoughts and actions.
I like to think about it as kind of like subsurface and I think a good,
A good kind of example of this is thinking about maybe like you're walking down the street and a,
There's a,
Maybe a car,
A small car crash that happens outside of your vision,
Kind of over to the side,
Not immediately next to you,
But definitely close and loud enough that it's going to elicit a response.
And it's this kind of extreme event and the,
If you slow down time and look at what,
What happens in milliseconds of time,
Initially your ear is going to take in the sound,
Right?
And it's going to take in the sound of like maybe some metal crunching,
Maybe some screeching,
Maybe some kind of crashing sounds of the cars colliding.
And so the,
You hear the ear registers those noises and very,
Very quickly the brain is making some categorizations of those sounds and saying,
Okay,
All of the other instances in which we've heard this sound,
It's been a,
It's a bad,
Been a bad thing,
Whether that's in personal life or in media that we've watched or movies,
It's going to say this,
This kind of falls into this category of potentially something that's going to harm me because it's,
It can be potentially something that's going to harm me because it's,
It can sound large and violent and potentially impacting our,
Threatening our life.
So that for the most part,
It's going to develop a negative response.
So an aversion,
A dislike,
You can also be called a pain or unpleasurable.
So that kind of initial gut reaction that our brain is going to really quickly make first and foremost,
And that's happening in absolutely just milliseconds of time,
Right?
So fast.
And then from there,
The,
The,
The body is going to develop a more,
A more developed response.
So it may elicit a feeling,
An emotional feeling of fear that may,
And may then also trigger emotion,
Some actual thoughts around,
Oh my gosh,
What's happening,
What just happened,
Things like that.
And then the final step is the physical manifestation of those thoughts and emotions.
So the body might turn to look at the car accident to determine if it is something that we need to take further action on.
Do we need to jump out of the way?
Do we need to run and help?
Or we may,
We may even have a actual jump,
An actual jump,
You know,
Physical jump reaction where we move out of the way because we're so scared.
But that,
The,
I hope this point illustrates that,
That physical action of moving is after a long chain of events that happens internal to our body,
Internal to our experience before,
Yeah,
So all of these events happen before this kind of physical response,
Which can also include speaking,
Speaking is a physical response,
Things we say.
So all of that for the most part is happening kind of subsurface level for most of us,
Most of the time.
And that obviously,
As you can see in this,
This example,
It illustrates that it's all of that stuff is what drives,
It was what proceeds,
What leads to physical action.
Including speech,
Including our speaking,
Our speaking action.
So the mindfulness,
The practice of mindfulness is so powerful because it brings our awareness down into that experience,
That,
That kind of step-by-step process I just walked you through before we physically turn to even look at the car.
Bring,
It allows us to see all of that in this,
In this really clear,
Almost like super goggles type of way.
It brings us down into that experience to inhabit it.
It also to me feels like,
In my,
In my personal experience,
Feels like,
It feels like a slowing down of time.
It feels like I have,
I'm seeing my reaction a few steps ahead before I actually physically react.
So as we mentioned in the quote that I,
That I said at the beginning of this talk,
That between stimulus and response,
There is a space,
Right?
And that's where,
That's what the,
One of the goals and one of the beautiful benefits of the practice of mindfulness is that it allows us to see that space.
To see the response,
The immediate response our body has before we actually take an actual physical response.
And that allows us to choose our response to the stimuli,
To the experience.
And this is true no matter how big or how small with,
You know,
There's,
There's little,
Every single little thing that we do,
We're able to see that space.
And that's what the,
With,
You know,
There's,
There's little,
Every single moment of our day,
Of our body is taking in all of its stimuli,
All of its experience.
And every moment is truly a free moment for us to react in any way that we want to.
So this can be little things like,
I don't know,
You're,
You realizing you're hungry and choosing to,
When you want to get up and make your food,
Do you want to keep working on something or probably a project that you want to finish?
Or do you want to get up right now?
And it's a really small,
Probably kind of an inconsequential thing.
And then these,
You know,
Really,
Really big things like,
You know,
Reading,
Reading a news report about another symptom,
Kind of global symptom of climate change,
Right?
Like,
What do we do with that stimuli?
How do we respond to that?
Or walking along the street and seeing our neighbors that are unhoused,
You know,
What that's,
That is an experience we're having that has a million range of,
A huge,
Huge,
Huge range of options of how to respond.
So the kind of simple way of describing this is responding versus reacting.
So if we are not clear on what we're feeling and what our internal experience is,
It's going to drive our reactions,
As we say,
Reactions without us having a lot of agency or control over it versus having more agency to truly respond in a way that we have more choice in.
And the feeling that can come from that,
From that increasing of choice is one of great freedom.
In my experience,
It's just a huge,
Huge freedom in our lives to not be an automatic pilot and to have agency in the moment,
From the moment to moment experience in all that we experience in our lives.
Thank you.
