Pain

We all experience pain in our daily lives. It can take various forms such as accidentally hitting our little toe on the corner of our bed. All pain is caused by an accumulation of stress whether it be physical or mental and having too much pressure applied can lead to negative results. From a meditational point of view, we can view pain as an appearance in consciousness much like anything else we are experiencing. Pain can be viewed as something that is just there, just like our field of view, sounds or even the breath. From that point of view, pain is neither good nor bad and is simply just appearing in our observer’s mind. However, this is not the conventional idea that one may have regarding the subject. We mostly view pain as something that triggers a negative response from our body, something that hurts and that we want to stop.

The accumulation of these pains everyday shapes our personality. We do not want to feel those pains and consequently alter our perspective in order to minimize them. For example, if you suddenly are new to this world and decide to run across the street and get hit by a car, you will be more careful next time and look before crossing. You shaped yourself to be more careful because you do not want to feel that physical pain again. This self-evident example is used to show that this also happens at microscales in our everyday life and shapes us bit by bit. In some people, this can also restrict their mentality. For instance, if someone performs a bungee jump and breaks their leg while doing so, they might advise others that it is unsafe to do so even if it has been proven that it is perfectly safe. Because that pain happened to them, even if the odds of an injury reproducing itself is almost zero, they might not want to repeat the event and have a negative view on bungee jumping. This is to say that this is also true for microscale incidents.

People get “locked” into a mentality in order to minimize the pain or avoid any possibility of reproducibility. From my experience, this can be a good thing or a bad thing. It can lead to people taking safer decisions while taking more care for themselves and leading a longer and healthier life. However, it can also stop that person’s progress. They will be less willing to take risks, to expand out of their comfort zone and to develop themselves. Because they have experienced a negative feeling towards an experience, they might not want to ever repeat it again even if it can be beneficial to them. It would also be stupid to advise to completely ignore those negative feelings, then following that logic if we go back to the first example, we will just keep on getting hit by cars every time we want to run across the street. As everywhere else in life, these situations and how we interpret them require balance. The interpretations of these pains and how we chose to deal with them is what distinguishes adults from children. The accumulation of these pains that a child experiences through their life shapes their creativity, mood, personality, etc. We get locked into a mentality, slowly building it up and modifying it as time goes on. We can think of this as shown in the following diagram:

Each lump can be viewed as an experience and the cumulation of these lumps is what defines us. Initially when we are small, the experiences we have are our baselines and have a bigger impact on how we view the world. As time goes on the lumps are generally smaller but can still be large if something significant is experienced. The starting point is not necessarily the same for everyone and these lumps are a simple 2-dimensional representation, but it is more accurate to think of it as an infinite dimensional object representing an infinite number of random paths that one can converge to.

People have an undying need of wanting to be understood. We want others to feel what we feel and understand what we are feeling. We do not want to be alone in this world. Therefore, pain is a very powerful tool. If we feel the same pain as someone else and we understood all the hardships they have been through, we are more likely to connect with them. It is through shared pain that understanding, and compassion is achieved. If we go back to our diagram, we are more likely to accept and be friends with people who had similar interpretations of experiences as us (people whose lumps overlap with ours).

The power of pain is indeed non-negligible, but there should always be balance in how we perceive it. It is also important to not confuse pain and suffering. Pain is the experience itself, while suffering comes from our reaction to the experience. While pain is inevitable in our lives, how we chose to deal with it all depends on us. As mentioned in my first article: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”.