Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
-Khalil Gibran (https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/pain)
Hmm! A little more on judging pain.
One of the things we often judge and then do whatever we can to avoid is pain, right? We don't like pain, discomfort, suffering or any of those thoughts and feelings that go with it. We resist experiencing it and we resist thinking about it. We fear it! We may come to meditation practice with the intention even of 'escaping pain'.
I know that was one of the reasons why I began meditating. I wanted to put an end to all those nasty thoughts in my head. Meditation was going to 'clear out the clutter' wasn't it? It was going to make my mind a blank slate?
How realistic is that? Really?
I learned very quickly that I couldn't end thinking simply by wanting to. So I told myself I would selectively think, only allowing the good thoughts, the positive thoughts in my mind during meditation practice as well as through the rest of my day. I put a little guard with a stop sign in my head that would actively halt any negative thoughts that tried to enter. The poor guy got trampled within seconds of starting his new job.
The basis of meditation training is not to get caught up in the fruitless mind activity of resisting thinking but to simply become aware of it and bring self back to an experience of less thought. As soon as we tell ourselves not to think painful thoughts, what happens? Our heads get flooded with them. If I told you right now not to think of monkeys, what do you think you would suddenly think about? Monkeys, right? Resisting anything makes it persist. Resistance of painful thoughts creates even more painful thoughts. Resisting the experience of pain creates more pain. Hmmm!
What determines a painful thought or experience and the need for resistance? Perception!!! A Course in Miracles teaches, I see all things as I would have them be. (ACIM-W-312). I will see and experience things as I think they are. It goes on to say,Perception follows judgment. Having judged, we therefore see what we would look upon. (ACIM-W-312:1:1-2) . The real problem with perception is judgment. We are judging things as bad or good, acceptable to our experience of living or not acceptable. "Pain" is a judgment.
Breaking Down the Judgment
Let's examine the judgment we made about pain that determines our perception and experience of it. What is pain anyway? Is it really something to be avoided? Is pain really the opposite of happiness?
I watched a wonderful little video of a lecture yesterday on meditation by a Buddhist monk named Gelong Thubeton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vTviVkFJzM). In that video he stressed that the discomfort we feel is actually the key to happiness and compassion rather than something to be avoided in meditation practice as well as daily life. When we embrace pain as we do all our emotions we open up to something big. By expanding our awareness around all feelings, dropping the story line and relating with compassion to that emotion we will meet a feeling of kindness and love toward self and others. Allowing pain can actually take us to happiness.
His biggest piece of wisdom offered in that video was to meet pain with love.
Meeting Pain with Love
How do we meet pain with love instead of fear? By dropping the judgment of it as something that should be avoided, we allow pain and painful thoughts to be. We become observers of those things, aware of them like maternal figures watching children.
In our meditation practice we can allow all thoughts to be without resistance, without fighting or struggling against them. Just let them enter our moment knowing they can bring us into that place where we really want to be. They bring us back again and again with our awareness, our gentle maternal observance.The more we allow pain the more we learn we are not the pain but simply observers of it.
If pain (and painful thinking) is met with love rather than resistance we make friends with reality and that brings us joy. (Gelong Thubeton). If we all could simply allow pain and learn from it the world would be a better place.
I have no purpose for today except to look upon a liberated world, set free from all the judgments I have made. (ACIM-W-312: 2:1)
All is well.
References
ACIM
The Power of Conscious Awareness/Gelong Thubeton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vTviVkFJzM
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