Pain is a great teacher🔗

Often, fear manifests itself as 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 and agony they will undergo at the time of death! Many are afraid of poverty, many of relationships, and many others fear disease. The root cause of all these fears is the pain that happens while going through these things. All these fears are because of the fear of pain.

Pain can be physical, mental or emotional. Physical pain is a basic necessity for the body. Just imagine, if we could feel no pain in our body we might accidentally hurt ourselves or start styling our faces, hands, and legs the way we style our hair today! Actually, pain is a letter of request, written by the body to the mind, saying, 'Please pay attention to me!' because attention is energy. When attention is given to a particular area, that attention becomes energy for that area. When the body communicates pain, it is actually asking for attention or energy, which will help it heal. Mental or emotional pain is the psychological feeling that arises when you are faced with something you don't like. Research shows that emotional pain can deeply disturb the physical body. For example, the psychological feelings that arise with sexual repression can result in lower back disorders, or the pain of shouldering too much responsibility can cause pain in the shoulders. Whether physical or emotional pain, an important thing you need to understand is that pain is always born from resistance to the present moment.

If a painful incident happens in one's life – the loss of a child, the husband or wife leaving the spouse, the breakup of a close friendship – one suffers, but slowly accepts it over time. One may cry and brood many days and nights, but then one comes to accept what happened. Time heals. It is a common saying. Understand that time is needed for healing only because you were not ready to face the pain and suffering in a conscious and aware manner at the time the incident happened. If you can just look at the pain, if you can witness the emotion with awareness and see the play of the mind while experiencing pain, then the understanding dawns and instant healing happens. Time is needed because you are not ready to have the understanding. So you suffer a great deal. Over time, after some weeks, months, or even years, the incident fades and becomes a distant memory. However, the pain is not completely gone from your system. If you come across a person who even distantly reminds you of your lost child or husband, it comes up. For example, if the person has a similar style of talking, walking, or laughing, the wound reopens. It hurts because you carry the memory of the past. Because of this, you feel life is too heavy a burden to bear. You choose to hold onto your entire past: when you were a child, when you were a teenager, when you first went to work. You hold onto all the stages of life with all the experiences, pains, and mistakes. That burden and load of your emotions associated with the past, is what causes you pain every time you experience it. If you decide to drop the past and look at every situation with a fresh perspective, then you will not have so much pain. You will heal instantly. You will not need so much time.

The root of pain and pleasure are the same. It is the same sensation with two names. It is like this: two people receive a body massage from the same person. One concludes that it was a beautiful rejuvenating process while the other decided that it hurt! The same massage will appear like pain or pleasure depending on the person receiving it. Life has both of these opposites – pleasure and pain. Both pleasure and pain are from the mind. The mind always moves from one extreme to the other. It rarely falls into the middle path. From pleasure you move to pain, from pain you move to pleasure. As we saw earlier, pleasure and pain are completely dependent on the person feeling the pleasure or pain. Something may seem like pleasure to you while the same experience may be painful to someone else.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the great scripture that teaches the various paths to Self realization, the enlightened master Krishna says beautifully, ‘He who regards alike pleasure and pain, and looks on a lump of earth, a stone, and a piece of gold with an equal eye, who is wise and holds praise and blame to be the same, who is unchanged in honor and dishonor, and who treats friend and foe alike, is said to have gone beyond the modes of nature. Pleasure and pain are the same to him and he is ready for enlightenment.’

Buddha, an enlightened master, says, ‘Free yourself from both pleasure and pain.’ Craving for pleasure and nursing pain are both different aspects of the same experience. Both are chains. Pain may look like an ugly chain and pleasure a beautiful chain. Just as the day follows night and night follows day, pain and pleasure will always follow each other. When you understand that pleasure and pain are both creations of the mind, you will realize that they are both temporary, they come and go like soap bubbles. Nobody is needed to take away your pleasure, because your mind by its very nature will move like a pendulum to the other extreme called pain! The only way is to go beyond both pleasure and pain. This doesn’t mean suppressing pleasure or forgetting about pain. It is an awareness that transforms pain to bliss – the energy that exists no matter what the external situation may be. Bliss is your very nature and cannot be lost. Just because of your resistance to what is happening, you feel pain and your natural bliss is forgotten.

Pain, whether physical, mental, or emotional, has only a negative existence like darkness. Darkness exists only in the absence of light. As such, it has no positive existence of its own. In the same way, pain exists only in the absence of awareness. Just as darkness disappears automatically when light is brought into a room, pain dissolves automatically when the energy of your awareness is focused on it. Any mental or emotional pain that you carry is just the tip of the iceberg. You need to go into the root where it starts. You need to work on the root cause for it and heal it. Otherwise, there is a distinct danger that you will inflict that pain on someone else or hurt yourself more with it. I always tell people, ‘If you have pain, just drop everything and work on it. See that its root is healed. Only then you can be in a safe zone. Otherwise neither you nor the people living around you are in a safe zone.’ When you face any pain with awareness you become aware that you are not just the body. You become aware that no pain can touch the real ‘you’. Once you realize that you are beyond pain, you rise above 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. You will carry this freedom all your life. You leave mundane life behind and enter into a spiritual plane. The whole material world disappears and another world arises, one of incomparable beauty, innocence, joy and compassion. The pain will evaporate of its own accord when you see the nature and cause of pain with intense inner clarity because the clarity evaporates the reasons for the pain to exist in you. This realization brings with it a state of absolute bliss, which is the state of enlightenment.

There have been recorded instances of ‘phantom pain’ which is pain in a part of the body that does not exist. Once in the Second World War, a soldier’s leg had to be amputated because it was badly damaged. The strange thing was that when he became conscious again he was still complaining about the pain in the leg. He was covered with a blanket so he had no idea that the leg had been removed. The blanket was removed and he was shown that his leg was not there anymore. He was shocked! Further research then showed that each part of the body is related to a certain part of the brain. When a certain part of the body feels pain, the corresponding brain center shows activity. In this case, the related brain center was still vibrating in the same way it was vibrating when the leg was a part of the body. There are many such instances of people who feel pain in the empty space where their limbs were amputated. This is called ‘phantom pain’.

The mind has tremendous influence over the body. Even the perception of physical pain can be changed by the mind. In science they call it the ‘placebo effect’ when a simple sugar pill gives the same effect as a painkiller, just because the person is made to believe that the sugar pill is a painkiller! The other day, I was reading about research done at the University of Michigan in the USA that appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research was done on a group of young men who agreed to let researchers inject their jaw muscles with a concentrated saline solution, causing pain. The brain’s response to the pain was studied using PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans that showed the activity of the body’s natural painkillers, called endorphins. In one scan, the men were told they were being given a painkiller but actually what was given was just a placebo – a substance that had no painkilling properties. Then they were asked to rate the intensity of the pain they felt on a scale of 0 to 100. Also, the PET scan would indicate the brain activity related to pain. The researchers were able to study both the response of the brain and what the men actually felt. The amazing observation was that when the men were given a placebo, meaning not a painkiller but just a neutral substance, the pain they felt was actually less. It was as if they had been given the painkiller itself! The PET scans indicated that the endorphin (natural painkiller) system in the brain was activated.