Are you aware of your pain?

Where is the pain? What is the pain? Are you even aware of the pain?
What actually is pain?

If you are like most humans, you’ve probably built throughout the course of your life a comprehensive and complex system of behaviours that all amount to either taking you away from pain or blunting the effects of it. Or ‘numbing’ yourself in some way.

But why? Can pain actually be one of the most fundamental building blocks to the formation of our reality, our experience as a human?

What is pain?

Pain isn’t just a physical sensation that can be explained in terms of sensation and nerves.
It’s interesting that the Oxford Dictionary definition says it is ‘severe physical OR MENTAL distress or discomfort’. So it is officially acknowledged that some pain (maybe all? More on this later) is what takes place in the mind.

If pain is psychological and therefore connected to the emotional domain, it’s easy to see its prevalence in our lives. Pain is everywhere, informing everything. But you wouldn’t know it. We present as though we are ok, don’t we? Pain is unnatural, it seems.

Where does it come from?

Since birth, we have reacted to any situation that threatened our survival or connection to our caregivers. Whether that be overt abandonment or subtle unacceptance. Pain is felt as a result of a threat to our safety.

All physical, mental, emotional, intellectual and spiritual harms do this and we can see that there is a huge spectrum of pain of different kinds and different intensities. Pain’s big older brother is known as TRAUMA. Any trauma has huge, lasting and life-defining effects.

With good reason we develop behavioural mechanisms that ensure that we don’t have those situations repeated. It makes perfect sense that we don’t want our sense of safety or connection threatened again and we don’t want the feelings that come with that.

What is painful is actually held in a space of potential.

Pain is actually a bit like pleasure. Oscar Wilde said the purest form of it (pleasure) is the anticipation. Similarly with pain or discomfort, the prospect of it is sometimes worse than the thing itself. A lot of the time it’s the prospect of it that causes us to act in the way we do. Anyone who knows anything about experiencing anxiety – I’ll wage I’ve had more than most people’s fair share – will know this all too well.

It’s in this space of holding off potential pain we have all kinds of emotional and psychological disturbance.

Pain & Fear

For me there is a huge link between pain and fear.
Situations that may ‘harm’ us are usually ones where we believe we will again feel unsafe, unloved or abandoned, like before. This is what we fear.

Aversion from pain is a fear based activity. It could even be said that pleasure seeking is fear based activity. We could even say that lots of our behaviour is fear based activity. Acting in ways to ward off the sense of loss, disconnection, feeling unloved, abandoned, abused or disliked.

Excuse the language, but how f****d up is that? That a lot of the behaviours we thought we enjoyed may be ways to suppress our deepest grievances or ward off uncomfortable truths about our state of being! Some of the pursuit of pleasure is a mask, covering the real urge to avoid pain or discomfort. 

Here we can recall what Buddha said, and why his wisdom has lasted this long: that the aversion to pain and attachment to pleasure are the two primary causes of suffering.

Where is the pain?

Pain, unless acknowledged and integrated, lives on in the body and the mind. It never goes away, continuing to inform our behaviours and personalities. In some cases, pain is inextricably linked to our whole identity. This makes it interesting to consider where the pain is. Is it physical? Is it restricted to a specific location? Or is it the uncomfortable thoughts we are having? Is it both at the same time? A lot of mental pain isn’t necessarily physical pain, although many physical conditions are linked to what’s happening in our minds. Again, there is nowhere near enough scope to address this here – the mind body connection. For now, it is important enough to know that pain can be located in the body or the mind or both. I will come back this…

Acknowledgment is the opposite of aversion

For what it’s worth, I will add my own experience in the many years I have spent in this field, in what we call the work of ‘integration’, which is a key term. I use the word ‘acknowledgement’ alongside it. When integration happens, there is the potential for the given pain or trauma not to produce the behaviours and actions that came into existence by trying to get away from that particular trauma. But, integration can only happen when we choose to feel the pain, or more to the point, experience the very thing we fear.

When I am able to do this work of integration, which at first requires suitable conditions (support from others, trusted guides, trusted principles and some privacy), it involves a range of activity: journalling, inventory (recalling and recounting what led me to act the way I did, with a view to a summation of my defects, resentments, harms against other people and much more), meditation and reflection but more than anything it requires a willingness to experience the pain, and the accompanying emotions.

Pain as energy in the body

Earlier I mentioned the mind-body connection. For me there is a third element, another thing that must be experienced for integration to occur, and that is the willingness to experience the energetic representation of the pain or emotions.

I think we have emotions inadequately understood. I am of the opinion that emotions are literal, physical, energetic sensations that can be felt in order that they may be integrated.

When I do this work of integration, sometimes my body, all the way down to my legs and feet, is only what I can describe as absolutely alive with the energy of my emotions. There is actual sensation – not the sensation of a physical pain from injury. I can only describe it as energetic but it is undeniable. During integration, the revisiting of pain, trauma or emotion of any kind that has not been acknowledged, I can feel the body in a completely unique way. What’s unusual is that it can sometimes be blissful. And I know that when this is happening, something is being corrected. Something is now flowing as it should, whereas previously it was blocked.

Pain as a gateway to bliss

Another of my experiences leads me to conclude once again that pain is largely tied up with our life story. I mentioned that pain can be fearful anticipation but it’s also sometimes a fearful reaction.

When I was on Vipassana retreat, silent meditation for 10 days straight, 10 hours a day, I was able to make a distinction between initial sensations and the mind’s reaction to it. On day 3 of that retreat, everyone is mostly contorted in excruciating leg and back pain from sitting so long in these positions.
From day 4, with introduction of some further teachings and practice, it is possible to distance one’s experience from one’s sensation. Sensation is actually neutral. By the end of the retreat, it was easy to sit so long, because I had made the breakthrough mentally. I was able, through much meditation and teachings, to witness the supposed sensations of pain but completely separate ‘myself’ from them and not actually feel any pain. What I actually felt was bliss. I then understood that pain is largely tied up in a subjective, biased interpretation of sensation, which makes sense if we equate it with survival and our ‘story’.
And I understood further that pain is in two parts; that which makes a pain, and our reaction to it.

Have you nurtured your relationship with pain?

It is of course with good reason we avoid pain. Why would anyone willingly want to feel pain or feel unsafe and unloved? The answer is given above: no, not as a shortcut to bliss, although that is a superb by-product. It is the doorway to freedom from the cycle of behaviours that cause us further misery.

This process of acknowledgment and integration is thus known as GROWTH. It becomes possible to overcome what seemed like barriers, roadblocks to wellbeing, by facilitating a change in the way we (re)act.

To grow, to feel connected, to feel love and to feel whole, the pain must once again be revisited, inspected, embraced and – that word again – integrated.

But even more important than that, we must become aware of, and alive to the possibility that we are in pain or have pain in us. 
This is why it’s important to know what pain is, so we know what to look for, and we can either wait until it announces itself in severe suffering, or we can choose not to look away and offer the olive branch.