There Is Peace To Be Found Within Pain

Day five.

There is peace to be found within pain.

Since the days passed by,

We were sitting longer and longer with strong determination,

Sitting in meditation without moving,

Without opening our hands,

Without opening our legs,

Without opening our eyes,

Just sitting and observing the sensations on the body as they arose,

Without judgment,

Without filter,

Without expectation of them leaving or staying,

Being aware of our innate craving and aversion,

Looking for the spots of blankness and ignorance,

And just sitting,

Lots and lots of sitting.

And like I said in the previous session,

That sitting came with pain,

The body keeps the score.

And a lot of the time,

Despite being intent on sitting with the feelings that are arising with equanimity,

We nonetheless found ourselves,

Or at least I did,

Desperately desiring the pain to disappear.

Because there's sort of an inherent contradiction in the practice.

We're doing all of this to,

Well,

To reduce our suffering after all,

Right?

And it's very easy to fall into the trap of sitting,

Noticing a negative stimulus arising,

And really utterly and truly desiring it to just leave.

The whole practice of Vipassana is supposed to teach you that,

Well,

You develop your awareness and equanimity.

You notice that things arise and that they fall away.

The nature of everything is impermanence.

Every sensation ends,

Every life that starts,

Finishes.

Every structure,

Every system,

Every object,

Every everything arises and falls away.

Impermanence is the nature of everything.

That's all well and good.

And,

You know,

From an intellectual,

Philosophical perspective,

That's a wonderful concept.

But when you're sitting in writhing agony,

And it feels like someone is applying hot,

Burning irons to your back,

It's quite another thing to sit with it and just be equanimous about it,

To just be aware of it,

To just observe it objectively.

So after a significantly painful session,

I asked the instructor,

Look,

What can I do here?

Is it the fact that I'm,

Well,

Sitting for hours at a time?

Because I haven't done that before,

So obviously my body will be adjusting to it.

And he said,

Maybe,

But more than likely what you're feeling is,

You know,

Psychological pain,

So to speak,

Is your past body keeping the score,

Is the very nature of what we're working here.

And I was a bit skeptical,

Of course,

Because,

Well,

If you sit in a certain position,

Your body will feel certain things.

And for a couple of days in a row,

I kept coming back and saying,

You know,

I'm in a lot of pain here.

And the instructor gave me the instruction of,

Well,

Sit with it,

Continue the practice,

And use the subtle awareness that you're gaining in the non-painful parts of the body to train the awareness and the ability to dissect the painful parts of the body.

We've touched upon this in a previous session,

But I wanted to sort of use this one to go a bit deeper into this idea.

Because remember,

The practice of Vipassana is to sit with and systematically draw attention and awareness to the bodily sensations arriving and arising all over the body in order.

You know,

You go from your head to your neck,

To your arms,

To your front body,

Your back body,

And to your left leg,

And to your right leg,

And so forth.

You scan from head to toe,

And then from toes to head,

And you repeat that cycle.

And if there's big feelings in one part of the body,

Gross sensations,

You'd be there for it.

And then when you move on,

And there's perhaps more subtler sensations,

You'd be there for that.

And when there's significant pain or significant pleasure in another part of the body,

You acknowledge it,

But you stay where you are.

You don't just jump around.

And this practices and sort of hones your attention.

It's like a laser focusing its beams into one area,

Or maybe a magnifying glass focusing the light of the sun into a small point on the tissue paper and causing it to burst into flame with enough pinpoint focus.

You're developing awareness and equanimity.

But like I said,

When there is intense pain,

What do you do?

Because as I reported,

I intently don't want that pain.

And at times the pain became so fundamentally strong and overwhelming that I desperately wanted it to stop.

So I asked,

Well,

What do I do in these circumstances?

Because no matter how much I try to be equanimous about it,

No matter how much I try to just be with it,

The level of pain became such that it sort of overwhelmed me.

And I felt like I had to either break the strong determination and,

You know,

Move and relieve myself of the pain,

Or I felt myself,

Well,

Falling into this deep aversion to it.

And that went against the fundamental practice that we're working on.

So I was given two suggestions.

Number one was to develop a sort of meta-cognition,

A meta-awareness.

I might not be able to be totally detached from the physical sensations.

I might be having feelings of aversion to them.

But I could step back and detach and notice with detached equanimous observation,

My aversion to the tremendous pain that was arising,

Sort of adding a layer of observation to it.

And applying that,

It did work,

Which is interesting.

It's like,

Well,

I couldn't be completely equanimous about it.

But if I added a layer of noticing that lack of equanimity,

I could then be equanimous about it.

It was interesting.

And then,

Which is the real crux of this session,

What I really want to delve into was,

Rather than sort of feeling the totality of the pain,

Was to look at it under microscopic detail.

If you take a moment to focus on the sensations just above your upper lip,

You'll start to notice these tiny little tingling sensations in there.

And if you can't feel them,

That's okay.

I encourage you to sit with after this session and just sort of practice what we practiced in the first session,

The focusing on the breath,

And just focus on the sensation just above your upper lip.

And just notice that with practice,

You will develop an acute awareness of that part of your body.

And in turn,

Of every part of the body,

Should you continue to practice.

And with that deep,

Subtle awareness,

You can apply it to the gross sensations,

Big swathes of your body feeling painful.

You know,

This could be during a meditation session,

Or during a physical injury.

You injure your body and pain will arise.

But what you start to quickly realize is that pain is just a label.

Pain is aversion manifest.

Pain is a conglomerate of different sensations all arising and passing away in quick succession.

It's pressure,

It's tension,

It's heat.

It's a variety of other things all mushed together that our brain interprets as pain and makes us want to look away and not be there for it.

So the practice that was given was to sort of sit with the pain,

Sort of draw the edge of the pain around.

How big is the pain?

What are the borders of it?

What happens at the edge of the borders?

How high does it go?

How deep into the body does it go?

Where is the center of the pain?

Really drawing the attention to the center point of the pain.

What is there?

And in one session,

I was in a sitting of strong determination towards the end of the session and it was excruciating.

And I remembered this practice and I'm like,

Okay,

I'm going to find the pinpoint center of the pain.

I circled it,

I did the outsides,

I did the insides,

I looked at it in all areas,

Felt the combination of where it was,

What it was doing,

The component parts of it,

The vibrations of it and found the pinpoint center of the pain and just focused like a laser point in that area and sat with it and just tried to just sort of be there for it.

Yes,

It was intense,

More intense than most anything that I felt in my life,

But what was underneath that intensity?

What was,

To use a music analogy,

The underlying notes,

The words and the lyrics in this absolutely screaming heavy metal song?

And I started to see and I started to unpick and I started to note the component parts.

And then,

Almost instantly,

The pain disappeared and that point,

That pinpoint,

The center of this most profound,

Thorough,

Deep,

Intense pain disappeared and a growing and expanding circle of peace came.

And I noticed that there is peace to be found within pain,

That at the depths of what initially felt like profound,

Deep pain,

The act of observation,

The act of acute,

In-depth,

Intense awareness revealed that all of it was just a conglomerate of component parts and that within pain,

There is peace,

There is peace to be found within pain or rather,

Everything is truly impermanent.

What in one instant felt like deep,

Tremendous pain,

In the blink of an eye,

The click of a fingers can disappear and resolve into a feeling of peace.

To my dismay,

The session ended within a few seconds of this revelation,

So it's sort of like it jolted me out of it and I lost the moment,

So to speak.

But what I did sit with and what I did sort of end with or the wisdom that I was able to get was that there is peace to be found within pain.

And taking that and extending it into the everyday life,

The lesson is clear.

Life will cause us pain,

Physical,

Mental,

Relationship,

Work-based,

Money-based,

You know,

Life hurts,

There will be grief,

There will be suffering.

But if we can sit with it,

If we can be with it,

If we know that it will pass,

That there is impermanence,

If we can be equanimous about it,

To dissect the component parts,

Perhaps there will be peace to be found.

Now,

Of course,

There is an aspect of creating to this because the next time I was in pain,

And I'll talk a little bit about this in the next session as well,

There was a temptation to try and replicate this feeling.

The next session,

I tried to repeat it.

Oh,

Tremendous pain is arising,

Let's look into the pinpoint and it'll resolve itself.

And of course,

It didn't,

Because what I realized was that,

And like I said,

I'll talk about in this in the next session,

But if you try and force a feeling,

That feeling is,

Well,

Forced,

It's less likely to come.

You can't force impermanence,

You just have to be there for it and observe it.

So the technique that I want to do here is just an extension of the previous technique.

Once again,

To just sit with and be with whatever arises.

To focus on the sensations that are arising in our body.

And I want you to pick a place this time in the body,

Just one place,

You could pick the back,

You could pick the belly,

The groin,

The legs,

The nose,

The head,

A place,

The shoulders,

The jaw,

A place where you've felt pain before,

Where you have perhaps already feel pain,

A place of chronic pain,

A place of injury,

A place where you have suffered.

And rather than turning away from it and not wanting it,

Sort of trying to numb yourself from it,

Instead,

Turn your attention towards it and just investigate it,

Just be there for it.

What is the shape of the pain?

Where does it start?

Where does it end?

What are its component parts?

If you had to break it down and say,

Well,

There's pain,

But what does that pain consist of?

Tension,

Pressure,

Itchiness,

Burning,

What are the component parts?

And not running from it,

For just one minute,

Just being there for it,

Curiously,

Inquiringly,

With detachment,

Allowing things to arise and to pass away in their own time.

Let's give it a try.

So,

In this session,

We looked at the idea that there is peace to be found within pain.

I share the story of the intense feelings of pain by focusing upon the center of it,

By dissecting its component parts,

And by being there for its impermanence,

It opened up and a feeling of profound peace was to be found inside of it.

And then applying that life lesson to the physical pains,

But also the mental,

The emotional,

The spiritual,

The life-based stresses and pressures and things that arise,

That if we can be there,

Quantumously,

Be there from a detached perspective,

Be there for whatever is happening in the moment,

As it is for what it is right now,

We may too find some peace.

But also with the awareness that if we crave such peace,

We may be blocking it.

And the practice was to sit with the awareness of a part of our body that may be experiencing some pain or tension and just be there for it.

I encourage you to sit with any thoughts or feelings and insights that have arisen and take some time to explore this practice.

Do so with strong determination.

Set a time of a minute or five minutes or ten minutes or beyond and just sit and be there for it.

Sit with the determination not to move,

To just explore.

But obviously,

Look after yourself.

We don't need to torture.

If you have any questions,

Would like further clarification,

Or have an insight you wish to share,

Please do so in the classroom.

There I'll be able to give you a voice response and you'll be able to read the questions and answers from other students.

This is an opportunity for deep learning,

For the introspection and insight.

So please don't miss out.

I look forward to seeing you in the next session.

Thank you.

This track was taken from the course,

The Path Within.

Lessons from a 10-day Vipassana retreat.

It's out now on Insight Timer and available through my profile.

I invite you to check it out.