Pain body🔗

Pain: The most frightening thing in the world is pain.

All living beings are afraid of one thing, and that is pain. If you look deeply, you will find that people don't fear even death as much as they fear the pain they will have to undergo at the time of death!

We have different types of fears: fear of poverty, fear of relationships, fear of disease, fear of losing health and so on. But the root cause of all these fears is pain. All the fears of man stem from the fear of pain. And that is why people will endure even a major disease which doesn't cause pain, but they can rarely endure a simple headache!

Pain can be physical, mental or emotional. Physical pain is the least of our worries! It is in a way a basic necessity for the body. Just imagine if we could feel no pain, we might start styling our faces and limbs the way we style our hair today! Pain is the symbol of bodily wisdom. Pain is what makes us integrated human beings.

Contrary to what we believe, most of us are not 'living' with our entire body. We 'live' only in the upper parts, neglecting the lower parts of the body. Just try this: close your eyes and imagine yourself, your being. Call your name. Which part of your body is being called to mind? It would most definitely be your face and upper limbs, certainly not the lower body parts. This shows that we are not fully alive in every cell, in every limb of ours.

Even in our minds, we make this distinction. The upper limbs are the masters, the lower limbs the servants. When you create this separation, unknowingly, your energy or life force is channeled only to those body parts that you focus on. Just touch your cheek. Doesn't it feel sensitive, alive? Now touch your foot. Does it feel the same? Notice that you are not as alive in your foot as in your cheek. Why is that? Though hard to believe, it is due to your lack of attention to that part.

On the emotional and mental level, pain is usually the result of some form of judgment. Pain is always born of resistance to the present moment. Every time you experience pain, it leaves behind a residue which becomes lodged in the body. By and by, this accumulated pain creates a negative energy field around you, which we call the 'pain body'. The 'pain body' is responsible for and controls most of our pain patterns.

Pain is always born of resistance to the present moment.

Research reveals that emotional imbalance can deeply disturb the physical body. For example, sexual repression can result in back pain, or the sense of shouldering too much responsibility can cause pain in the shoulder.

A real life incident:

In Calcutta there were two small ashrams whose presidents were not on good terms with each other.

One day a person of some authority arrived in one ashram and invited the president to join him in visiting the other ashram. The president was in distress. He could not refuse, but he didn't want to go either.

Suddenly the president developed a high fever which prevented him from leaving the place!

I saw this with my own eyes. As soon as the other person left, the temperature came back to normal again.

Haven't we all experienced 'Monday morning blues'? Even children display bodily symptoms of illness when forced to do what they don't want to do like going to school. This kind of illness is caused simply by un-ease, caused due to the mind and the body pulling you in opposite directions. This is what manifests itself as dis-ease.

The other day, a handsome young man belonging to an orthodox family was brought to our healing center. His complaint was sudden blindness. His parents started weeping and told me that the boy was in excellent health, and had turned blind just a week earlier.

All medical tests revealed perfect vision, but he couldn't see! After scanning his energy, I asked to spend a few moments alone with him. As soon as he was allowed to talk to me in private, the boy poured out his troubles to me. He said that he was deeply in love with a girl, but had been forced by his parents to stop seeing her.

I immediately figured out the root cause of the problem. I asked the boy to procure a photograph of the girl, and spend the next three days meditating upon it continuously. His parents were taken aback at this unconventional solution, that too from a spiritual man!

But you will be amazed: the technique worked a wonder. In 3 days, the boy regained his vision perfectly. Why did this happen?

When the boy was compelled not to see what he most wanted to see, his subconscious mind decided not to see anything at all. His blindness was deeply psychological. What tremendous power the mind has over the senses!

In the Bhagavata Purana, a grand epic of Hindu mythology, it is mentioned that Krishna and Radha took birth within a few moments of each other. Radha was a normal baby in every way except that she wouldn't open her eyes.

A few days later, Radha's mother visited Krishna's house to see the baby Krishna. She took her newborn daughter with her. The moment Radha was brought to Krishna's presence, she opened her eyes and beheld Krishna before her!

Later in life, when questioned by a friend, Radha remarked, 'What else was there to see? It is for Krishna that I have taken birth. So I waited till I was taken to his presence to open my eyes.'

This may be only a tale, but it illustrates the tremendous power of the mind over the body.

Actually, pain is a requisition letter written by the body to the mind saying, 'Please pay me some attention!' Understand: your attention is your energy. Wherever you direct your attention, there your energy is also directed, and in that direction you witness growth.

You invite pain upon yourself. Not many people will believe it if they are told that all they invite pain upon themselves, like honored guests into their household.

A small story: Once a man entered a restaurant and began ordering various food items. Platefuls of steaming food of various types made their way to his table. He ate with relish. After a hearty meal, the man finally signaled the waiter to stop bringing in the food. The waiter duly returned with a little white slip.

'What is this?' asked the man, looking at the bill innocently. 'Why have you brought me this? I haven't ordered anything like this!'

Same way, we invite pain and disease upon ourselves with our immoderate habits and stressful lifestyles, and then forget all about it and complain later when disease takes its toll.

And sometimes we do enjoy the disease too, though no one ever admits to that! Just as an organ asking for your attention develops a disease, you yourself fall ill in order to get the attention of others.

This is no wonder, for in the hectic pace of today's life, who has the time to pay attention to anyone else, unless they fall ill? Attention is a basic need. Psychology proves that normally a man can stay alive without food for up to 90 days, but without the attention of others he will lose his sanity in just 14 days. Attention is energy, it is a life-force.

Though we are unaware of it, the craving for attention is so great, that to gain it, we create our own low-energy pool and gladly suffer the disease.

In a relationship, you often notice that both parties are begging for each other's attention, begging bowls outstretched. Do you think two beggars can have a positive and fulfilling relationship? To truly attain freedom from disease, stop begging for attention. This is a subtle, psychological begging, which happens without our complete awareness, and which is ultimately far more damaging than physical begging. Life teaches us a lot of things. Understanding them is our responsibility. But we live in a constant sate of somnambulism, unaware of what we are inviting upon ourselves.

Let me illustrate with a small story: An engineer working in a large firm would bring the same dish for lunch everyday. Every day he would complain about how much he hated that particular dish, and his sympathetic friends would share their lunch with him.

One day, one of his friends finally asked him, 'Why don't you ask your wife to cook something you like, for a change? How can she not be aware that you hate this dish?' 'What wife?' the man asked in surprise. 'I'm a bachelor. I cook my own lunch!

This may sound funny, but it is true. We live our lives in much the same way. Through our lack of awareness, we first invite pain upon ourselves, and then complain about it and resort to painkillers.

We don't even mind getting afflicted by the same disease again and again, because we don't identify ourselves as the root cause of the problem. We throw the responsibility for the pain on others, never on ourselves.

If pain is perceived as the absence of your attention, then the remedy must be your presence. There is a simple and beautiful self-healing meditation technique that channels your 'presence' into the diseased limb. It is definitely a better option than painkillers, whose side-effects sometimes prove worse than the original complaint!

A meditation technique: Let us say that you have limb pain. Lie down in a dark room. Make a conscious effort to forget about your whole body, focusing only on the part which is causing you pain. As you experience your painful limb, deliberately drop the word 'pain' from your mind.

Your mental chatter will continue to tell you that you feel pain. Switch it off. Feel deeply; experience with an open mind. Look into what is happening inside your mind. You will soon see that your mind was just exaggerating the pain. Put all your awareness on the center of the pain, and it will soon shrink to become just a tiny pinpoint of pain. Concentrate completely on this point, and you will discover in a sudden moment that the pain has disappeared, and in its place is pleasure, bliss.

Pleasure is the opposite of pain - and like all opposites, they have no existence without each other. You cannot enjoy pleasure without suffering, without pain. It is significant that ancient Indian scriptures used the same word, pain, to imply both pleasure and pain - because pain is the ultimate result of both.

The root of pain and pleasure are the same; it is the same sensation with two names. If you have ever received a good massage from a friend or a professional, you will realize that the same massage would seem like sheer physical violence if you received it at the hands of a stranger!

Bliss is that which arises when you drop the ideas of both pleasure and pain. And you have to drop them both together; there is no other way. Bliss is what floods you when both and pain and pleasure have ceased to disturb you. Bliss is beyond pain and pleasure. It is perfect harmony, complete inner silence, total peace.

If you try to understand the truth of your experience, it will be that 'pain' does not exist at all. Pain has only a negative existence. Like darkness, it is only an absence - the absence of awareness. As darkness disappears of its own accord when light is brought into a room, pain dissolves automatically when the energy of your awareness is focused upon it.

You can use your pain as a tool to enter your being. You will find that pain itself can become a door to ananda - bliss.

A small story: Two men, one a wise man and the other an ordinary person, were traveling through a forest on a dark, moonless night. Suddenly, a shaft of lightning flashed in the sky.

The ordinary man began to tremble in fear. A storm! His mind was immediately caught in confusion: Should he continue to walk? Or should he find a safe place to stop till the storm was gone? He began wishing that he had never decided to undertake the journey. He cursed himself as foolish and unlucky. In other words, he fell headlong into suffering with just a few strokes of lightning!

The wise man, on the other hand, simply used the moments of lightning flashes to take a better look at the road ahead and kept moving. He ensured that he was traveling in the right direction, thanked the lightning for its help, and moved onward.

Pain is just like this flash of lightning. You have no control over its existence. But whether you suffer from it, or learn from it, is entirely up to you! Then, you will realize that you are the cause of your own pain, and only you can be the solution.

When you observe your pain deeply, innocence opens up in you. For the first time, you become aware that you are not the body. No pain can touch the real ‘you’. Once you realize that you are beyond pain, you transcend pain to become a dukkha ateeta (one who has gone beyond suffering).

You experience the rare freedom that arises with non-attachment to the body which you will carry all your life. You transcend your mundane life and enter into a spiritual plane. You then exist in the world as an atman, an enlightened master. The whole material world disappears and another world arises – of incomparable beauty, innocence, joy and compassion.

As the Bhagavad Gita says:

Sama dukkha sukha swastha sama loshtaashma kaanchana Tulya priyaapriyo dheerasthulya nindaatma samstuti

(He who is ever established in the self, takes woe and joy alike, regards a clod of earth, a stone and a piece of gold equal in value, is possessed by wisdom, receives the pleasant and the unpleasant in the same spirit, and views censure and praise alike.)

With awareness and practice, pain can become the magic portal to enter into Nithyananda - eternal bliss.

Just to see with intense inner clarity the nature and cause of pain, will cause pain to evaporate of its own accord - because it no longer has a reason to exist in you. And this realization brings with it a state of absolute bliss, which is the state of enlightenment.

Enlightenment allows you to see, for the first time, that what you called happiness and contentment earlier were not true happiness and true contentment. Enlightenment showers upon you real bliss, real ecstasy. It gives you a taste of the real.

If you look little deep, you need to be thankful for the pain and suffering you experience, because they are the catalysts that set you upon your quest for truth and transcendence.

Just look at your life. When you were happy about something, did you ever wonder about the meaning of life? Did you look inwards to see who you are, what life is all about? Did you feel the need to deeply know about the Ultimate Truth? No! When things are going smoothly, you can live from day to day following the same rut, the same routine blindly with minimal consciousness. There is nothing to disturb you from the routine you see.

On the other hand, if you are in pain, if you look at it objectively, what does it show you? It forces you to look deeper into life, what its mystery is all about. It is the key which can opens the door to the world of reality; the choice is yours to open the door. It can simply shake you out from both the dream state and the ‘waking dream’ state we are in.

Understand, even if you are awake, you are not completely in touch with reality. You live in a world of your desires and fears and hence see things in the same light. Pain can be a great teacher which can simply jolt you out of the dream and put you in touch with reality as is.

With your usual thought patterns shattered, you begin to see things as they actually are. You begin to recognize a subtle distance between you and the pain and that it is not ‘your’ pain, not something that is a part of you by nature.

In fact, pain is simply the response you have chosen to that particular situation. And once you see that, how can you suffer anymore? In consciously accepting your pain, you truly let go of it.

Many people come and ask me, ‘I get easily angry and hurt when someone insults me. How can I avoid this?’

I tell them, ‘Why do you try to avoid it? To suppress pain, anger and humiliation will only cause it to stay in your system in a repressed form. Suppressed emotions can be dangerous - a little anger, a small feeling of hurt, can fester over time into a deep and lasting hatred.

Try accepting your emotions without judging yourself.

Are you feeling hurt? Ok, now enter completely into the feeling of hurt. Don’t avoid it, don’t reject it. Don’t sympathize with yourself either, and don’t direct it against the person who hurt you. Simply watch the emotion as it plays in your system.

This may take a while - maybe a few hours, even a few days. And then you will see a transformation you never imagined. After all, emotion is energy, tremendous energy. Just how long can so much raw energy circulate in your system?

The moment you accept your pain with no rejection, welcoming its role in your life, the whole quality of pain changes. The same energy that was pain, anger or suffering, is transformed into the blessed emotions of love and bliss. This is compassion, the silent force that moves in each of us, the force that transforms the ugly into the beautiful. And compassion brings its own reward. Just give yourself a chance and you can experience what I am saying! I don’t speak philosophy; I speak out of experience.

Why do love and pain always seem to go hand in hand?

In the first place, isn’t your idea of ‘giving freedom’ to your beloved a very wrong one? Love itself implies giving the other total freedom, unconditional freedom. To say that you are giving a certain amount of freedom to the other itself shows that you are holding back something in your giving.

It is natural to want to possess your beloved; that is the play of the ego. It is difficult to imagine that your beloved may need space and time away from you, isn’t it? You try to do the right thing by ‘giving freedom’ to your lover. But when she actually uses that freedom, you end up feeling exploited. Actually, you never expected that she would ever use that freedom to do what she wants, be with whom she wants. When you see her giving time and energy to something or somebody else other than you, you start feeling possessive and cheated.

The reason that love usually brings with it so much pain is that lovers unknowingly force each other into the golden cage of their own expectations. But true love can never blossom in captivity. You try and imprison your lover and she does the same, time after time, until you end up feeling that love is so much misery that perhaps it is better not to love at all.

Love can be a door to joy and freedom, or it can become a living hell. To experience love as pain is to miss the whole point of love. There is a saying, ‘If you love someone, set him free. If he is yours, he will come back to you. If he doesn’t come back, he never was yours anyway.’ This is the freedom any relationship deserves.

To start with, we need to understand that suffering is not a state of life, it is a state of mind. It is not an event in your life; it is your response to some event. Whether you suffer or not in a particular situation depends entirely on your reaction to that situation.

When do you undergo suffering? Maybe when you fall ill or when your neighbor gets a new car or when your loved one leaves you or when your boss fires you etc.

Suppose you decided to just accept these situations without anger or resentment just as they are, would you still suffer as much? After all, there is nothing inherently painful about your neighbor getting a new car. Even if there is pain in the moment, as when a loved one leaves, you cannot wish it away.

Try to accept, to welcome the inevitability of the moment without reaction. It is only your negative response to an experience that allows it to hurt you.

No one or nothing can make you suffer without your silent permission.

Make a habit of witnessing experiences minus your personal judgment. Learn to recognize with clarity the causes of your suffering, both the obvious and the subtle.

An important thing you should know: one of the most deeply hidden reasons for suffering is that you could be enjoying it. For example, falling ill can become a source of pleasure if it fetches you the attention and care you have been craving for. Look deeply why it sometimes gives you pleasure to inflict pain on yourself or on others. Is there a better channel through which you can receive the same pleasure without the suffering?

Become aware - this is the first step.

The second is to accept totally the here and now, without question and without reaction.

Acceptance with awareness - this is the only way out of suffering.

In a way suffering is essential because suffering can be a powerful catalyst to growth. Just like a seed first has to rupture before a plant can grow and blossom, intense suffering can break down the defenses of your ego, leaving you open and vulnerable to existence.

In the Mahabharata, there is a beautiful quote by Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas. She says, ‘Oh Krishna! Let pain and suffering come from all sides in my life. They will constantly remind me about you, my Lord.’

Suffering is not necessarily the key to bliss. But if you learn your lesson well, suffering can certainly open your eyes to the unreality of suffering. It can teach you how unnecessary it is to suffer at all. This is what I call ‘necessary suffering’!

A small story: Once the pope sent a message to the chief of the African tribe, asking how their missionaries were doing. The chief wrote, ‘Oh they are great, so loving, so compassionate, so much of service they offer, and they’re very tasty also!’

We are also continuously eaten, we do not know, we are eaten by the pain. Our whole life we are just swallowed by pain. If you have heard of the concept of pralaya, it is the total destruction of the earth. The real pralaya that happens to our life is pain.

Just see, it starts with the pain, the pain of the birth, the excruciating pain that you have to undergo at the time of taking birth. Because you have to cross a very small passage, such a big body has to come out of a small passage. Excruciating pain, you actually enter into a coma when you come out. According to energy, according to the mystics, before entering into the world, you are consciousness. You enter into coma and come out, that is why you forget the past life, the past births. It starts with the excruciating pain and there is excruciating pain in the end, the death.

Almost life is like the bridge between pain and pain. If you see the Golden Gate Bridge, in USA, just as the Golden Gate Bridge connects two places, life is nothing but the pain to the pain.

This body can teach you a lot of things. If you can work on this body this body can teach a lot of things to you in life. The pain is not only the physical pains but more importantly the psychological pains and emotional pains also. Physical injuries can be healed just by a little bit of medicine. But psychological injuries take a long time to get healed. When you fight with each other, you actually get psychological injuries.

If you see the pain from a positive angle it can teach you a lot of things. There is one thing you need to understand, when the Kali age took birth, the age of darkness, when it happened to the world, all the sages and rishis were praying to the Lord, ‘Oh Lord! Now the Kali age has entered, the enlightened masters will not be available to the society. Living masters will not be available to the society, only very few will be there, then how can society maintain the equilibrium? How can we save the society? How can humanity be saved? Only with the living master’s grace people can learn and people can live according to spirituality or according to the real life. Now that Kali has entered, how can the people be saved? Who will teach them? Who is the master?’

Then Bhagavan said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll teach the whole world continuously in the form of pain. Whenever the pain happens to you, if you look at it, either physical or psychological or emotional, any pain if you work on it, whenever the pain happens to you, you can see if you approach the pain with the love and the mood to look into it, you will see it is the greatest teacher. It can just teach you and it can transform your life.’

A small story: There was a big marriage ceremony between two lions. Suddenly in the centre of the stage, one rat came up and started dancing. So much of music was going on, and suddenly one rat jumped up and started dancing. After a few minutes, somebody interfered and said , ‘Hey, this is the marriage of lions. How dare you come up here and dance?’ The rat raised his head and said, ‘Hey, before marriage I was also a lion.’

If you can learn from one pain, you can learn from all the pains. You see existence is continually teaching you.

Whenever pains come, you will see the pain will teach you, will transform your life. Every pain teaches you. If you don’t learn the lesson, if you are insensitive, if you simply don’t learn, you continue to live in the same pain.

When you feel others’ pain, you really expand. When somebody’s pain is really felt by you, not in a way of sympathy, in a way of empathy, you expand. That is why when you give consolation to others you feel so consoled. For example, after you console somebody, say a friend who is in depression, you will feel totally relieved. Something in your being is being consoled. When you share others’ suffering, you expand to go beyond.

One more thing, never hit the kids. They are Gods from the other worlds. They chose you on their journey; they trusted you to be their guardians. I chose my parents. Last birth when I died, I was totally in a meditative mood. So I had the conscious choice, I chose my parents as people who will help me, who will not disturb me in my growth or progress, who will let me walk in my path.

Same way every kid chooses you, trusts you that you will be their guardians, so never try to hit them. They are Gods from the other world, keep them as flowers. It is their life, just keep them as flowers. Never suppress them, never disturb them. Teach them more by your life, instead of giving regulations. By compassion and love a lot can be healed now itself.

Sit straight and tie the head bands. Bring all the sufferings in, the sufferings of you, the sufferings of others.

Visualize you are just breathing all the pains, all the sufferings of others. When you breathe out, visualize you are just emitting bliss, your heart has got the capacity to transform pain to bliss.

Very deeply visualize you are breathing in darkness, you are breathing out gold light, you are taking the darkness in, you are breathing the gold out.

Visualize not only your pain but the whole world's pain and sufferings in the color black you are taking in. Now continue to immediately start breathing out, when you breath out feel you are breathing out the golden light, the bliss, joy, ecstasy. Put your whole consciousness and visualize .

After the meditation Om shanti shanti, shantihi! Relax.