Pain

Pain is one of those things the Buddha says we have to learn how to endure, but he gives remarkably little in terms of instructions on how to endure it. It’s not like painful words. We’re supposed to endure painful words, too, but the Canon gives detailed instructions on how to depersonalize the words, how to think about them in such a way that they don’t invade the mind and remain.

As for physical pains, the Buddha says similarly that we should try to keep the pains from invading the mind and remaining there. That should be our intention with regard to them. In other words, we don’t want them to go away necessarily—at least we don’t make that our primary purpose in dealing with them. We want to understand: What does it mean for them to invade? What does it mean for them to remain? That’s something we have to figure out.

But how do we do that?

The Buddha gives only a sketch on how we should deal with pain. It comes in as instructions on breath meditation under the section on feelings. Train yourself to breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to rapture. Breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to pleasure. Breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication, i.e., feelings and perceptions. Perceptions are the labels we put on things, the images we use to tell ourselves what something is, what it means. And finally, train yourself to breathe in and out calming mental fabrications. That’s about it.

For more detailed instructions in these areas, we have to look for the forest tradition. Ajaan Lee specializes in the first two steps: breathing in a way that gives rise to rapture and pleasure. As he says, when there’s a pain in part of the body, first you focus on other parts of the body that you can make comfortable by the way you breathe.

This serves several functions. One, it gives you a foundation to stand on as you deal with the pain. Two, it gives you a place to retreat. And three, it gives you some ammunition to use against the pain.

As we’ve noted, sometimes the simple fact that there is a pain in the body is something you’ve brought into being yourself by the way you’ve dealt with the raw material that comes from past karma. By breathing in a comfortable way, you’ve got some ammunition to, use against the physical pain. You can imagine that raw material, whatever it is as being permeated by the comfortable breath. Once the comfortable breath is established in the other part of the body, send it through the pain. See if that undoes some of the subconscious things you’re doing to aggravate the pain or maintain the pain.

Sometimes we put a wall up around the pain. It helps to confine it, but it also actually maintains it. The source of the pain may have gone away, but the wall is still there, and it’s still painful. So breathe through the pain, breathe through the wall. As the comfortable breath goes through, make sure it goes through and doesn’t stay stuck at the wall formed by the pain.

You may sense that as you breathe, you’re using the painful parts of the body to do the breathing. They’re the most obvious parts when there’s pain in different sections. So think of the more comfortable parts doing the breathing. The painful parts can get a free ride. Think of the breath permeating them and going out the other side. See what that does.

At the same time, you’re changing the balance of power. Instead of running away from the pain, you face it. And you’ve got some ammunition to help you face it.

The next steps are to try to understand and calm the perceptions you have around the pain. This is where Ajaan Maha Bua gives good advice. He talks about perceptions, which, of course, are mental fabrications. But mental fabrications come together with verbal fabrications—in other words, the way you talk to yourself. Fabrications also come together with the act of attention in the factor of name and form in dependent co-arising. Attention has to do with the questions you ask. Verbal fabrication has to do with the stories you tell yourself. You can also use it in the service of appropriate attention to start questioning your perceptions, questioning your stories around the pain.

One of the big stories you may have is that the pain has been here for such an amount of time, and it’s going to continue being here for such an amount of time, and all the sudden you’ve got the present weighed down by past and future pain. That’s a story you’ve got to stop. The past pain is gone. Tell yourself it’s nowhere to be found. You can’t go rummaging back in the past to find it. It’s gone. So the past pain is no longer there to weigh you down. Future pain hasn’t come yet. Why do you have this story where you stitch things together? “The pain was here and it’s going to be there.” Why do you do that? Just try to be with the pain as it is right now.

Then you can question your perceptions around it. Do you see the pain as being the same thing as the body? As we said, sometimes we use the painful parts of the body to do the breathing, as if they were one and the same thing. So can you see that the body is made out of the properties of earth, water, wind, fire; solidity, liquidity, energy, warmth, whereas the pain is something else? It may seem to be solid or seem to be hot, but those are perceptions we’ve glommed on to the pain. Can you separate them out?

Sometimes you try to separate them and they won’t go on their own, so you get at it in a more indirect way. Just ask yourself, “Where is the sharpest point of the pain right now?” Asking that question and following through changes the balance of power again. Instead of running away from the pain, you run at it. Like the stories of the forest ajaans doing walking meditation at night and getting more and more convinced that there’s a tiger crouching beside the path: Instead of running away from the tiger, they run at it. It turns out there was nothing there.

So maybe there’s nothing to run away from in the pain. And you find that if you start tracing down where the sharpest point of the pain is, it moves. It avoids you—especially if you learn to make your focus the kind of focus that doesn’t bear down on things. You want a focus that’s more open and diffuse.

As when you’ve been working with the breath: You’ve learned that if you want to keep the breath comfortable, you don’t put too much pressure on it. You stay steadily with one spot as your center. But you think of that spot as being wide open, connecting with everything else.

In the same way, you follow the sharpest point of the pain with that diffuse but steady focus, and the pain will move because you’re giving it a chance to move. You find that there will come a point where it suddenly separates out on its own, like cream separating out of milk when it hasn’t been homogenized.

Or you can ask yourself if the pain is a solid block. What’s its shape? What’s its color in your mind? And remind yourself that pain has no shape, it has no color. Those are just perceptions. Drop those perceptions. See what happens.

Is the pain a solid block or just momentary flashes of pain arising and passing away? If you have the perception of momentary flashes, ask yourself: When it comes flashing in, does it come at you or does it go away from you? Try to hold in mind the perception that as soon as you sense it, it’s already going away, so that you’re not a target.

These are calming perceptions.

At the same time, you’re asking questions that calm things down. You’re telling yourself stories that calm things down, all based on the intention of trying to keep the mind from being invaded by the pain—or if it has been invaded, not allowing the pain to remain there. That means you allow the pain to stay in the body. You’re not making it your purpose to make it go away. But you want to be aware of it so that you’re not sitting here waiting, “When will the pain go away? When will the pain go away?” You’re asking yourself, “No. How can I be right here next to the pain but not be pained by it? How can I be with the pain but not suffer from it?”

Sometimes, when you separate things out like this, the pain will go away. It’ll actually slip into the heart and disappear. Again, that’s because what you’ve been doing around the pain has actually been continuing to create the pain. Other times the pain will still be there. That’s the raw material coming in from your past karma right now. But even though it’s there in the body, it doesn’t have to be in the mind.

Remember the Buddha’s comment about wisdom. It’s not seeing the Oneness of all things. It’s seeing things as separate. Things that you’ve glommed together in the past, you begin to realize are separate things. And because they’re separate, they don’t have to weigh the mind down.

So remember, you want to maintain that original intention—not that the pain go away, but simply that it not invade the mind and remain. You’re here to find perceptions that calm the effect of the pain on the mind; ways of talking to yourself, questions that you want to ask, that calm the effect on the mind. That puts you in the driver’s seat. After all, the pain may come and go based on past karma, but the effect it has on this mind is something you can change right now.

We’ve got these tools. The Buddha points them out to you. The forest ajaans give you some ideas on how you can use them. It’s up to you now to develop these skills. When you have these skills, they put you in a much better position. You can treat the pain with less fear. And when you don’t have fear of pain, that’s one less thing that the world can use against you.

We see how people are driven, driven, driven by pain, and how some people take advantage of other people’s fear of pain to get them to do what they want them to do. When you can say, “The mind is not invaded by pain,” it’s not only for your well-being right now, but it’s also for your greater independence at large.