Just for a moment,
I want you to consider the reality of suffering.
What is suffering specifically?
What is suffering for you?
I have a simple statement that I think encapsulates the essence of what it is to suffer.
And that is that suffering is the difference between our expectations and our reality.
Suffering is the difference between our expectations and our reality.
Now what I mean by that is that take a given day or an event or personal circumstance,
You'll have an idea,
An expectation,
An understanding of what you think should happen and what you want to happen.
But then life happens.
You get sick,
You have an injury.
Somebody acts rudely or in a certain way,
Different to how you expected them.
Perhaps someone's late or something needs to change.
And you're put out.
The expectation that you had is different from your reality.
And that incongruence causes pain.
That incongruence causes suffering.
So let's apply this to physical injuries.
You have an expectation that you'll be healthy.
That's the expectation that we all have.
So when we get sick or when we feel physical pain,
We break a bone or whatever,
Our reality is different from our expectations.
And thus,
That incongruence is the cause of a lot of emotional duress.
Now don't get me wrong,
Pain does hurt.
But pain in and of itself isn't necessarily negative.
I'm sure you've experienced times when you've been exercising perhaps,
Or there's other circumstances where you've experienced good pain.
You know,
The cliche example will be where because you were engaged in some activity,
The pain wasn't that intense.
Or indeed,
Some level of pain was actually pleasurable.
When you apply the lens of mindfulness onto pain as a stimulus,
You'll be able to see that it's just another sensation.
It's just another thing that you can observe mindfully.
The real issue,
The real emotional turmoil comes when you start applying emotionality to that pain.
You start worrying about the damage to your body.
You start worrying about the pain continuing on and on and on.
You start worrying about what it means for your life moving forward.
You start worrying that the reality you have to experience will be different from what you expected it and what you initially wanted it to be.
There's this idea that the enlightened person stubs their toe once,
Whereas the untrained person stubs it twice.
They stub it the first time on the rock,
And then they keep stubbing it every time they think about how much it hurts.
Just like extreme emotions,
Just like thoughts,
Pain is just another sensation to observe.
It might not be pleasurable,
But with practice we can start to detach and step back and see it for what it is.
See how big it is,
And see that it ebbs and flows,
Just like complex and challenging and overwhelming emotions.
And once again we can apply this same concept to emotional pain and challenging thoughts,
Like anxiety and depression and ruminations and all of those sort of things.
We can take a moment to step back,
Detach,
And mindfully observe those thoughts,
Those feelings,
Those mental phenomena,
And see how big they are,
See how they come and go,
See how strong they are,
See how they come with other emotions and other memories and other thoughts,
And just watch them.
They might not be pleasurable,
But once again we can develop the skill set to step back,
To detach,
And just embrace them like we would any other sensation.
Now obviously this is a bit of an advanced practice and it takes time,
And I would encourage you to start practicing this with less extreme versions of things.
So before you attempt to mindfully observe the pain coming from a broken arm,
Perhaps do it when you bang your leg into the wall,
Or rather than doing it when you face an extreme emotional situation,
Like the loss of a loved one,
Or a challenging argument,
Or something of that magnitude,
Perhaps just try and detach and mindfully observe your thoughts when you get cut off in traffic.
The idea is that we're practicing using our mindful awareness to see reality as it is for what it is,
To look at the contents of our consciousness and just look at them like they're separate from ourselves.
We're over here and the contents,
The stimulus,
The pain,
Physical or mental,
Is over there,
And we're looking at it like we would mindfully observe a candle,
Or listen to a sound,
Or feel our breath coming in and out of the nose.
Once again this takes time and this takes practice,
But committing yourself to that practice will provide you with ongoing benefits,
Ones that will transcend the meditation mat and help you throughout the rest of your life,
Particularly during extreme situations of pain or emotional duress.
Give it a try.
