Pain

The topic this morning is pain. Pain is not one of the perfections. It is, however, a problem that everybody in the room is experiencing. If you understand how to deal with your pains, it’ll be easier to understand the Buddha’s teachings on discernment and right view. That’s because the teachings on right view deal specifically with how we create unnecessary suffering around pain, and how—if we can learn how to avoid fabricating ignorant thoughts and perceptions around pain—it’ll cause no suffering in the mind.

The first thing that you have to understand about pain is that some of it comes from your actions in the past—such as the way you’ve been using your body, the way you’ve been feeding it, the extent to which you have or haven’t been exercising it—but some of the causes for the pain are things you’re doing right now. These are things you can change, and in some cases changing what you’re doing can make the pain go away. But even if you can’t make the pain go away, there’s the question of the extent to which you have to suffer from the pain even when it’s present. Because what we’re aiming at is a state of mind that can be present to the inevitable facts of aging, illness, and death and yet still not suffer. So, the first line of business right now as we meditate is to learn how not to suffer around pain.

The ways to deal with pain are directly related to the Buddha’s instructions on how to use the breath as a topic for understanding feelings. There are four steps altogether.

The first step is to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture—and here the word “rapture,” pīti, can also mean fullness or refreshment.

The second step is to breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure or ease.

The third is to breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication, which means feelings and perceptions. The feelings here are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pain nor pleasure. Perceptions are the images or words you hold in mind by which you identify and label things. So, as I said, the third step is to be sensitive to these processes of mental fabrication.

The fourth step is to breathe in and out calming these mental fabrications.

Now, of the various forest ajaans, Ajaan Lee gives the most detailed instructions on the first two steps, and Ajaan Maha Boowa gives the most detailed instructions on the last two. Let’s look at what they have to say.

With regard to breathing in and out sensitive to rapture, Ajaan Lee recommends, when there are pains in the body, not to focus on the pains immediately. Focus instead on the parts of the body that you can make comfortable and refreshing with the breath.

As you try to give rise to feelings of rapture, it’s good to think of the different meanings of the Pāli term for rapture, pīti. When we translate it as “rapture,” it sounds like we’re trying to experience ecstasies, like Saint Theresa. In some cases, it actually can be that strong, but the term pīti can also mean refreshment or a sense of fullness, and for most people, that’s how we first experience this quality.

So, how do you breathe in and out sensitive to refreshment or fullness? One quick exercise is to find a spot in the body that’s especially sensitive—it might be the back of the hands, right at the diaphragm, or in the middle of the chest—and pay attention to that spot very carefully as you breathe in and breathe out. If there’s any sense of tension at all in that spot, disperse the tension. If you feel like you’re squeezing the breath out as you breathe out at that spot, stop the sensation of squeezing so that that spot can stay full even as you’re breathing out. If there’s any sense of pinching the breath or tensing up between the in-breath and the out-breath, allow the breath to dissolve that sense of pinching or tensing.

As you get so that you can maintain this sense of fullness while you breathe in and breathe out, and it feels pleasant, you can then think of the fullness and the pleasure spreading to the different parts of the body. You spread those feelings together with the breath energy. Now, we’ve already had some questions about what this breath energy is and how you sense it. Try another quick exercise. Hold your hand out in front of your body and keep your eyes closed. The sensations that let you know your hand is there: Those are breath sensations.

Now, sometimes as you breathe in and breathe out, there will be a sense of movement in the breath energy in different parts of the body. Other times, it will be still, but either way, it’s an energy. Hold that perception in mind. That’s the perception you’ll use in order to spread the breath energy, together with the fullness and pleasure, throughout the body.

There are different perceptions you can hold in mind to help you feel the sense of the breath energy moving. For instance, you can think of the body as being like a sponge: As you breathe in and out, the breath comes in and out through all the pores of the sponge. Another perception is that there’s a column of energy going down the middle of the body, and as you breathe in, energy comes in from the outside and goes into the column of energy, and as you breathe out, it goes out of the body in all directions from that column of energy. As you hold in mind the possibility that breath energy can do this, you will begin to sense that, yes, there is a movement.

Even though you use images to induce this sensitivity, that doesn’t mean that the energy is imaginary. It’s like telling a child that the world is round. As far as the child is concerned, the world doesn’t look round, so he has to imagine it as round. But as the child grows up, he begins to realize that, yes, the world is round. If you’re going to fly the quickest route from, say, Paris to Los Angeles, you have to fly over Greenland. If the world were flat, that wouldn’t work. But because the world is round, that’s the way you have to fly to save time. In the same way, you use your imagination to allow yourself to think that the breath energy does flow, and then as you get more and more sensitive to the body, you begin to realize that it actually does.

As you spread the comfortable sense of fullness along with the breath energy, you may run into pains. As I said, Ajaan Lee recommends that you not focus directly on the pain quite yet. Instead, keep your focus on the parts of the body where you can make the breath energy comfortable. This way, you give the mind a good foundation or a safe place to stay.

Then, when you feel secure in that good breath energy—accompanied by a sense of pleasure and fullness—the next step is to think of the energy radiating from the comfortable spot and going through the pain.

For instance, suppose you have a pain in your knee. Ajaan Lee recommends imagining the breath energy going down the leg and not stopping at the knee, but going through the knee and out the foot. If you think of the energy stopping right at the pain, that’ll reinforce the sense of tension around the pain, which is part of the problem. Maybe, when we were children, we sensed the breath energy moving through the body, and we were afraid that if it went through the pain it would spread the pain, so we subconsciously tensed up around the pain to stop it. But that actually makes the pain worse. So, to repeat, if there’s a pain in the knee, think of the breath energy going through the pain in the knee and then out the foot.

In some cases, you’ll find that the pain will actually go away. That’s a sign that the pain was caused by something you’re doing right now. In other cases, though, the pain will still be there, which is a sign that the pain is caused by something that you did before you sat here or simply by the fact that your body is not yet used to this posture. If you’re new to the meditation posture, there will inevitably be a period in which there’s pain in the legs as the blood is being blocked or being squeezed out of the part where the legs are folded. This forces the blood out of the main arteries into the capillaries. It’s as if there were a traffic jam on a main road, and the traffic has to go down through the small streets, where it gets even more jammed.

The difference with your body, though, is that if you keep forcing the blood through those capillaries by sitting in this posture again and again, the capillaries will eventually begin to expand. In other words, you’re turning them into new arteries. Streets can’t do this, but blood vessels can. If you have some patience with these kinds of pain, eventually they will go away over time as your body gets more adapted to the meditation posture.

You’ll notice that a large factor in making use of feelings of rapture and pleasure lies in the perceptions you bring to them, such as the image of the sponge or the column of energy, or of the energy being able to flow in different places and different directions. The same principle applies to feelings of pain. Your perceptions of pain play a huge role in the impact it has on the mind.

This brings us to the third and fourth steps in the tetrad, getting sensitive to mental fabrication and calming it. To sensitize yourself to how perceptions of pain may be affecting your mind, Ajaan Maha Boowa recommends that you ask questions about how you perceive the pain. For example, he says, suppose there’s a pain in your hip: Is the pain the same thing as the hip? Or are there two different kinds of sensations in the same place? In other words, the sensation of the body is one thing and the sensation of the pain is something else. Now, your rational mind knows that these are two separate things, but all too often in our direct experience of the pain, something in the mind says that the pain and the body have become one and the same thing. The pain has invaded the body, and you’re trying to push it out.

So here, to calm the perception, you have to change it. The body and the pain are two separate things even though they’re in the same spot. The sensations of the body are the four elementary physical properties of earth (solidity), water (liquidity), fire (warmth), and wind (energy), but the sensation of pain is none of these things. It’s as if it’s on a different frequency. We can make a comparison with radio waves going through the air. You put a radio in one spot, you adjust the dial to one frequency, and you get one station. If you adjust it to another frequency, there’s another station. You don’t have to move the radio to a different spot to get a different station, because the waves are all in the same place, and yet you can separate them out because their frequencies are different, and you’ve got something that can detect the difference. See if you can do the same thing with the sensations of the pain and sensations of the body in that one spot.

Another perception that might be playing a role in your experience of pain comes from the notion that we have to be responsible for our pains. In other words, right now you think you’ve got to warn the next moment in the future that there’s a pain right here. To correct that tendency, tell yourself, “I don’t have to tell the future. The future will find out on its own.” Otherwise, you use perceptions to keep sending a message from one moment to the next to the next, which stitches the pains together, adding to the pain and suffering.

A similar problem is when you’re sitting with some pain and you keep telling yourself, “I’ve been sitting with this pain for the past 15 minutes and the session’s going to last for another 25 minutes.” That’s 40 minutes of pain placed on top of one moment, and then, of course, the present moment will break down.

And here Ajaan Lee has a good image for problems of this sort: You’re plowing a field, and next to the plow you’ve attached a big bag. As the dirt falls off the plow, you put it in the bag. Of course, you’re going to get weighed down. So, simply get rid of the bag and let the pain fall off at the first moment. You don’t have to feel responsible for it; you don’t have to keep a record of it. Just stay with the sensation in the present moment.

Ajaan Maha Boowa notes that you can also ask yourself if the pain has a bad intention toward you. Your rational mind knows that the pain itself has no awareness, so it can’t have any intention to hurt you at all, but that perception may be lying around in your mind, the result of something you may have assumed about pain when you were a child, and it can still have an effect. So, try to bring it up into your conscious awareness by asking this question: “Does the pain mean to hurt me?” Then reason with any part of the mind that says, “Yes.”

Another series of questions you can ask about your perception of pain is this: “Is the pain one solid thing? Does it have a shape in your imagination or is it simply different moments of pain arising and passing way?” If you look very carefully, you see that it is made up of individual moments. So, try to drop the perception that the pain is solid or has a shape.

Then you look at those moments of pain and ask yourself: “As they appear, are they coming at me or are they going away?” If you have the perception they’re coming at you, that will make you suffer more from the pain. But if you can hold in mind the perception that as soon as they appear they’re going away, you’ll suffer a lot less.

Once, when I was in Singapore, I was taken to see a Chinese doctor to treat my back. He had me lie down on my stomach, and then he rubbed some oil in my back, at first gently, but then more and more roughly. Then he took out two bamboo sections that had been cut so that they were like whisks, and then he started beating on my back. My first thought was, “What bad kamma did I do to deserve this?” But because I couldn’t speak Chinese, I couldn’t ask him how much longer the treatment was going to last. So, I told myself I’d have to change my perceptions around the pain. I realized that if I could see the pains, as soon as they appeared, as going away from me instead of coming at me, I suffered a lot less. It’s like sitting on a truck facing backwards. As you go down the road, as soon as anything appears in your range of vision, it’s already going away from you. This perception can help make you suffer a lot less from the pain.

Another question Ajaan Maha Boowa recommends asking is, “Where is the sharpest point of the pain?” Then try to track it down. Or ask yourself, as you breathe in, “Which direction is the breath coming from as it goes through the pain? Can I switch the directions?” See what that does. The important thing, though, is that you show that you’re not afraid of the pain. You’ll find that even if you don’t change the direction of the breath, the spot of the most intense part of the pain keeps shifting around. This teaches you two lessons. One is that the pain is not as solid as you thought it was. The second is that as long as you keep at the questions about how you perceive the pain, the mind becomes a moving target. When you’re a moving target, it’s harder for the pain to hit you. If you just sit there and suffer from the pain, complaining to yourself about it, then you’re an easy target to hit. But if you make it your purpose to understand the pain, then you’re going to suffer a lot less from it.

This is precisely what the Buddha has you do. He says your duty with regard to pain is not just to endure it, and it’s not to make it go away. The duty is to comprehend it. You comprehend it by asking questions and being curious about it.

This requires that you be fearless of the pain, which requires in turn that you have a good foundation inside. This is why we first work to make the breath comfortable so that when the pain gets too intense for us, we know we have a comfortable place to retreat to. But as the Buddha said, if you really comprehend the suffering that you create around the pain, then you’ll find that you can locate the cause of suffering and abandon the cause. And the cause will be in the mind: right around the perceptions you have around the pain. When you find the mental act that causes the mind to suffer around the pain, you can drop it. That way, even though the pain may still be there, you don’t have to suffer from it. That’s the duty with regard to right view.

Ajaan Fuang told me a story about when he was a young monk. He was suffering from severe headaches that went on for months at a time. He tried Chinese medicine, Western medicine, Thai medicine: Nothing worked. Sometimes the headaches were so bad that younger monks arranged to stay with him at night to help look after him. One night, he woke up in the middle of the night. He sat up, and all the other monks were fast asleep. His first thought was, “Who’s looking after whom here?” But he thought, “Well, I’m not going to get any help from them.” So, he decided to meditate and he realized he had been trying to get rid of the headache, when the duty with regard to pain is to try to comprehend it. He focused on comprehending it and, as he told me, he got some of the most important insights in his meditation.

One of the insights you gain by trying to comprehend pain in this way is seeing the extent to which you’re making choices in the present moment that you normally are not aware of. In other words, the present moment is not simply given to you from the past. You’re also shaping it in the present moment as well. You come to see that if you shape it with ignorance, it’s going to cause suffering. If you shape it with knowledge, it becomes part of the path to the end of suffering. We suffer not because of our past kamma but because of our present kamma: what we’re doing right now. If you can see your present kamma clearly, you can get rid of the suffering with which you’re weighing your own mind down. And that’s the only suffering that places a weight on the mind.

One day, when a group of us were sitting at the monastery in California, Ajaan Suwat—my other teacher—pointed to the mountain across the valley and asked, “That mountain: Is it heavy?” Now you know, when an ajaan asks a question like this, it’s a trick question. So, nobody answered. He finally said, “Only if you try to pick it up is it going to be heavy. If you don’t try to pick it up, it may be heavy in and of itself, but it’s not heavy on you, and that’s all that matters.” In the same way, the suffering that we cause in the present moment is like picking up the mountain. If you stop creating that suffering, the other pains and disappointments in the world will not impinge on the mind. They may be heavy in and of themselves, but they’re not heavy on you. And that’s all you’re responsible for.

So, it’s important that you not be afraid of pain. But if you’re just getting started in meditation, don’t overdo your endurance. Don’t try to force your endurance too much. If the pain is so intense that you can’t focus on the breath, then very mindfully change your position. But if you find that you can stay with the breath in spite of the pain, then use the breath to create that foundation you need in order to understand the pain. And maybe you’ll gain some important insights of your own.

Questions

Q: In your instructions for meditation you advise us to imagine that we can breathe from the top of the head. I recoil greatly from this type of image. It’s a suggestion, isn’t it? Isn’t it an illusion? After all, when you meditate, don’t you see reality face-to-face? Thank you for your response.

A: Often, before you see something, you have to imagine that it’s possible. The reason I have you imagine these things is related to the fact that the way you perceive your body will have an impact on what you can actually do with your body. If you feel that there is no possibility that energy can flow in your head, then you will feel that there is nothing that you can do with the energy in your head. When I tell you that you can imagine that the energy can flow through the head, this opens up the possibility of doing something with that energy that’s already there. I say this just to open your mind to the possibility of something that is already there, so that you can do something skillful with the energy.

You can make a comparison with the ozone hole over Antarctica. For years, satellites were sending information about the ozone hole, but the computer program that analyzed the data threw out the information coming from the satellites, because the people who wrote the program couldn’t imagine that an ozone hole was possible. Only when they allowed themselves to imagine it could they accept the data.

Q: Could you say a little bit more about the topic of rapture?

A: The word rapture in Pāli, pīti, can mean refreshment and can also mean fullness. Some people experience it as a sense of intense satisfaction, just being in the present moment and not wanting anything else. In some cases, it’ll have some very strong manifestations. Some people find that their body starts moving. Some people feel that energy is flowing over the body in waves. Other people experience it in a much gentler form.

As you’re meditating, if you find that it’s getting too intense, find a spot in the body where the energy is milder and focus your attention there. Then let the sense of fullness go away. You might think of allowing it to spread out in all directions, with nothing to contain it. You might think of it going out the palms of your hands or the soles of your feet. It is a sign that the mind is settling down, but if you want to let your concentration get stronger, you have to get past that to a state of deep calm.

Q: On my very first retreat, on the second day I had a very strong experience of pīti, or rapture. In subsequent retreats it has gotten weaker, as has my concentration. I know I shouldn’t have expectations and I thought that I didn’t, but now I wonder if I’m doing something wrong in my meditation.

A: The intensity of the pīti is not a measure of your concentration. It’s like drinking a glass of water. If you’ve been walking across a desert for three days and you drink a glass of water, the intensity of the experience will be very strong. But if you’ve been drinking water every day and you drink another glass of water, it’s not that intense. So, maybe your body doesn’t need the pīti so much now. The important thing is not to measure your concentration by the pīti. Otherwise, you may tend to underestimate your concentration and then you throw it away, and so it won’t have an opportunity to develop.

When I was a young meditator, I thought a good meditation required having visions. I wasn’t having any visions, so I didn’t think I had any concentration. As a result, I didn’t nurture what concentration I had. I kept looking for something else. But once I realized that visions were not necessary, I learned to appreciate the concentration I had. When you appreciate it, you tend to it, and it has an opportunity to develop.

Q: Sometimes during meditation, my body seems to move on its own, in a circling movement. Is it normal? What should I do? Thank you.

A: This is a manifestation of rapture, and it is normal. When it happens, don’t encourage it, but don’t discourage it, either. Stay focused on your breath. The movement will give more energy to the body as needed and then it should stop on its own.

Q: I’ve been told that in vipassanā meditation, we should observe every sensation that occurs in the body and not control anything. If I’m controlling the rhythm of breathing in different parts of the body, isn’t that the opposite of what vipassanā meditation tells me to do? Could you say something about the sensation of electrical discharge in the body? Thank you.

A: There are two questions here. The easier one is the electrical discharge. As you open up the breath channels in the body, every now and then, when a blockage gets opened up, there will be a sense of an electric discharge. That’s nothing to be worried about.

Now about vipassanā: The object of vipassanā is to gain dispassion toward the fabrications with which we shape the present moment. There are two different ways of approaching vipassanā. One is just to try not to fabricate anything in the present moment. The other is to very consciously fabricate the present moment so that you can see the extent to which the present moment is fabricated, and the limitations on how far you can create pleasure and happiness through your fabrications.

In my experience, the problem with the first approach is that when you tell yourself not to control the present moment, a lot of the fabrication goes underground where you deny its existence. Also, when something really disturbing comes up in the present moment, you have no tools for alleviating it. We’re taking the second approach here because it does make you more sensitive to what you’re doing and it teaches you skills that you can use when something really disturbing does occur. If you look at the Buddha’s instructions on breath meditation—which are instructions on how to develop tranquility and vipassanā together—you’ll find that they involve consciously fabricating the breath in many different ways.