Awareness of Pain

As long as we have a body, pleasures are possible but pain is inevitable. As our natural and normal response to physical pain, we attempt to alleviate it: jerking our hand from the flame, seeking medical help when necessary. But pain attacks us regardless, minor and brief, intense or persistent. With pain that cannot immediately be salved, we avert our inward gaze, trying to avoid awareness of it; we fear, hate, and reject the experience of pain. Nevertheless, painful sensations do penetrate our consciousness. So we find ourselves inwardly running from our own body, an impossible venture.

As with other difficulties in life, we can bring our spiritual practice to the experience of pain, often with quite useful results. First, we take intelligent and prudent steps to ease the pain; never seeking pain per se, we do not follow the path of masochism or extreme asceticism. We care responsibly for our body and pursue medical treatment for any serious pain, be it temporary or chronic. But the inescapable pain that remains in this moment can become the object of our practice rather than a source of fear, loathing, and obsession. We simply bring our attention to the painful region, becoming aware of it as sensation, aware of our emotional reactions of fear, rejection, shrinking or sadness, aware of the thought patterns that label the sensations as pain. Localized or intense pain offers a strong focus for us, empowering our attention.

In time, we regard the painful sensations as just sensations, without the emotional and intellectual rejection, without reifying the simple sensations into something we call “pain.” We see the sensations change and evolve. We learn to watch them with an open and accepting awareness. We learn to let these sensations feed our consciousness, strengthening it. The process becomes a meditation on a particular cluster of sensations. The power of attention on these sensations can carry our awareness through inner barriers into very deep worlds.

Such practice of awareness of pain has profound ramifications on the whole of our spiritual life. In learning to accept painful sensations, we train ourselves to work with non-physical pain as well, to accept those aspects of ourselves that we reject. Acceptance should not stop us from seeking medical remedies for our physical pain nor from working to overcome the sources of our non-physical pain. But what we cannot change, we accept with grace. In learning to accept ourselves as we are, we learn to accept others as they are. If we can open our mind and heart to our own body in its pain, we become more able to open our hearts to ourselves and to others, to enter a radical all-accepting, all-embracing heartful awareness. This is the path toward true transformation.

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