Meditation’s best kept secret: learning how to open to and experience pain
Befriend your complete experience, the only way out is through
Broken bones, flesh wounds, and illnesses are one thing. But often it’s easier to just be with physical pain because the body can be so noisy when it’s suffering. Emotional, and psychological or cognitive pain can be far trickier. If not reckoned with and allowed to heal, reacting to pain in a million little ways will steer your path through life without your consent. That’s suffering.
Depending on who you’re talking to ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’ may be used differently. I think about the difference is in terms of choice and duration: pain is involuntary and temporary, suffering is voluntary and prolonged.
Ken McLeod’s distinction from a Western Buddhist perspective is more pragmatic:
“Pain is a sensation. It’s a sensation which can be physical, emotional or cognitive that arises in certain conditions.
Suffering is reacting to the experience of sensations. So you can have pain, but if you just experience the pain then there’s no suffering. If you react to the sensations, that’s when you suffer. People react in all kinds of ways. Our body tenses up and we try to stay away from it emotionally, and we get all kinds of stories about it.”
Suffering can hide from conscious awareness, and at first, only be glimpsed in the periphery of our experience. But it can have just as severe an impact on your wellbeing as leaning your forearm on a glowing oven element, or a haymaker to the jaw.
The ability to experience pain in attention is an incredibly valuable life skill but it’s not necessarily a new skill. In the following clip Jordan Peterson offers many useful ways to work with pain rooted in speech and actions. His iconic “clean up your room and put your house in order” is a great action-based instruction, and “stop saying things you know to be lies, then tell the truth” is also a helpful way to improve communication skills.
One thing I haven’t heard Peterson talk about much is ways of working with cognitive and emotional pain. How do you ‘pick up your suffering and bear it’ or ‘get over past experiences’ exactly? What are the steps to follow to ‘accept your suffering’?
Peterson also advocates to “pay attention to what you say and do,” and “accept your suffering and move on.” But in my experience, this practice of emotionally and psychologically “shining yourself up a little bit, then a little bit more” is really difficult. It takes patience, capacity, skill and hard work. But it is possible.
Experience pain in real-time to get an HD picture of your life
Luminous Ground’s principal teacher Paul Baranowski has been training me in some techniques to train attention for a few years now. So far they’ve been working. My hope is that sharing what I’ve learned will fill in some of the gaps for others too.
After a while, being with painful emotional reactivity–without taking action, giving it a voice, or buying into its stories–becomes easier, and that a good thing. It was literally all I could do at first. You cannot will yourself through force, coercion, or any other means to heal emotional and psychological pain. If all you can do is stop making things worse that’s a great start.
To the extent that you’re able to befriend and rest in your complete experience, moment by moment, suffering becomes optional. As you rest during particular reactive pattern’s operation, you will not unintentionally harm yourself and others as much. Then your options become:
- Stay in your body and open to pain in a given moment and allow yourself to completely experience it until it passes.
- Slide (or flee) into obsessive attraction, escapist aversion or numb indifference to cope.
In Buddhism, these strategies are known as ‘the three poisons’. If you can’t tell from their name, they don’t work, they just hurt more and produce more reactivity.
A word about hurt and harm from Ken:
“Hurt occurs in relationships. Whenever two people interact in a way which doesn’t fulfill the expectations, wishes, hopes, or aspirations of the other.
Harm is when relationships are damaged in some way.”
Harm happens when we make matters worse in spite of our best intentions.
Suffering arises from the discrepancy between what is actually happening in the present moment–each and every moment–and what we perceive through the filter of our hopes or wishes of what might happen, or our memories of what has happened.
The smells in the room you’re sitting in, the sensations on your skin, the tension in your muscles, the taste in your mouth, the light of your screen and the shadows dancing across your peripheral vision. When you notice these perceptions as they occur, you experience life in the present moment. It is what it is, sometimes its comfortable, sometimes its not.
The tendency is to compulsively and ignorantly cling to past experiences or expectations of future outcomes to guide ourselves through life’s challenges. But this is not the most reliable stance to make decisions or take action from. I’ve personally suffered from this habit most of my life, and its left me disconnected, overwhelmed, and confused.
When you’re in your body, the constant toggling between grasping at what has passed, being grounded in the present, and fantasizing about the future creates a sense of nausea. Suffering can feel something like a faint, uncomfortable low-frequency drone, or a screeching discord that utterly warps your being.
So why is all this good news again?
The closer your experience is to the latter, the easier the decision becomes to change your approach to how you manage suffering, stress, unsatisfactoriness–call it what you will. I made that decision four years ago in a moment of terror after quitting ADHD meds cold turkey and experiencing mania and uncontrollable hallucinations. It was a pretty easy decision at the time. Enough was enough.
When everyday life takes place buried in field of invisible, unbearable pain and chaos, there’s a chance to know it is there, to befriend it, to learn to pay attention to it, and to uncover and experience its source. Sometimes it takes a bit more pain than your used to, or a bit of distance, time and/or space to recognize the commonly recurring patterns of thought, speech and action keeping us anchored amid the chaos, and to be able to do something about them. But it is possible.
Realizing that I had (and have) views and beliefs, ways of talking, and habits of behaviour that come from a place of unacknowledged, unseen, suffering was tough to stare directly at for very long at first. And it may be for you too. Admitting it to yourself is the first step–that’s a big deal. Then the best way to get started is to squint at it, peer through the cracks of your fingers when hiding behind your hands for safety. It’s ok if you can’t bear it for too long, if you’ve never done this before, it’s going to take practice.
As you learn to stabilize real-time conscious awareness through mindfulness practices and anchoring your attention in your body, your ability and capacity to be with and experience pain in yourself and others will grow. Being present with and experiencing the full spectrum of emotion while interacting with people who haven’t been trained to, is a bit like watching a film in IMAX 3D with AVX surround sound while everyone else is staring at their phones using those crappy out-of-the-box earbuds.
Target reactive actions, thoughts, and words
Last time, I said that this post would dive into the specific actions, thoughts and speech habits I’d developed that kept my marriage stuck in a caustic feedback loop and the practices I used to transform them. But as I sat down to write, I thought it would be useful to first give a bit more detail around the mechanics of psychological and emotional pain and how I’ve worked with it.
In the next post, in practical terms, I’ll go through how I looked at the specific, observable patterns of reactivity in thoughts, speech and actions, and how they radiated out into my marriage, so you can compare and contrast them to your own experience and dig down to their roots.
I’ll show how I learned to do this by taking responsibility for my complete experience and how meditation has been a crucial support for and compliment to the positive masculinity practice that are bringing balance to my relationships with women.
