Passing the pain?
We do not appreciate how strong we are, we think that we can not handle anymore, that there is a pain that is too much for us, this fear of the unknown terrifies us and yet, it bares no relation to our actual experience. Remember for a moment the worst pain that you have ever endured, do not linger there, just touch on the darkest night of your life and then feel blessed that not just that you are no longer feeling that pain, that is gratitude, instead pay attention to the importance of the word, you endured it, you survived. It was not pleasant, you do not have any desire to return to that state, but you endured it, you lived with the worst pain of your life and you got through it, that is proof that you can take pain. For most of us there was a moment at the peak of the pain when you just surrendered to it, you had the faith that you just had to accept it until it went away, and as all things change you knew the pain would change and pass, when you pass the hopelessness that you were going to be in pain for the rest of your life and that you could endure it until it passed.
You are strong, you can take the pain, it is the fear of uncertainty that is unbearable, so stop, give up your fear, once something is certain, you can take it, that is the way it is. No one fears not being the fastest runner in the world, we know we have to work for that, be naturally gifted and then dedicate your life to the pursuit of excellence. Why is it then that we fear the opposite so much, we do not want it, it is not our preference, but we can accept if it happens and we know this because we have in the past as we accepted that we were not the greatest, we will accept the worst as well. We do not complain that we can not go out dancing when we have the flu, we would take not being ill and going for a walk to get coffee, that would be enough, and yet if we are bored on a Friday night it might be the source of agony and anxiety that spoils a perfectly good film and cup of tea. There is always pleasure and pain present at any moment the trick of life is always to pay attention to the pleasure.
Not that you ignore the pain or cling to the pleasure, they are not things to hold, they are for having presence with, not possession of, we do not own or even rent them, we just get to have their company, we can pay attention to them or let them pass by. When we do not cling to pain and the fears that it generates, it just moves through, especially the fears that comes from our reactions to it, we know the world through either our awareness or attention, if we have control over our attention, we can choose if we want something to stay in our awareness rather than bring it in to our attention, not by ignoring it, but by the habit of listening without our reaction. In slow motion it is when we bring our attention to a source of suffering, start thinking about the suffering that is when we have already had a reaction, the thought is the reaction happening, and then that one thought we give birth to more thoughts and feelings (which produces a chain reaction of feeling leading to thoughts and back again).
However each thought is a new opportunity to practice listening without a reaction, it is a training period that can last for years before you can listen to the source of the thought without generating a reactive thought. You are unpicking an old habit of reacting and trying to form a new habit of listening, and if you are asking who is listening, that is a great question that you should keep on asking it. Who is it? The one that listens, you can keep on asking that question in your mind for as long as you like, and it will always be the one that listens to the question, the witnessing presence, it never speaks or answers, it just listens. Hopefully it will be a relief to know the answer even if you can not explain it in words, it is the experience of listening, the feeling, the sense, it is almost a ghost except for the fact that it the whole of who you really, however we think that we are the thoughts, if that was true they would be consistent and steady, rather than all over the place.
Who you are, is the moral core, the sense of what is right and wrong, that which knows without logic or words, that is the realm of the consciousness, that space where we have thoughts that we try on, like a mirror where we see whether a thought suits us, is it the right cut, does the colour feel like us, is the material comfortable, but underneath it we are entirely invisible, the clothes are real it is just the person underneath that we can not see and is not there. It is better to think of thoughts as suggestions, random ideas, they happen to you, you do not have them, that is the illusion of self that is generated, they are the shadows on the wall that you mistake for a mirror.
It would be a mistake to think that just because there is no one inside the personality that you wear like a suit, that it is just empty space in there, because that emptiness is where everything is created from and it is utterly interdependent not just with the suit that you are wearing but everything else in the universe, as everything came from the same place, it is not part of the whole, it is the whole. It is oneness, the gate to the infinity, the ever present, it has been experienced by people from every part of the planet and at every time of our history, it is the only truly universal experience that has never changed through every social, technological and cultural development that we have had, someone talking about the experience today could talk to someone from three thousand years ago and understand that they were talking about the same thing without reference to any other common experience. If space aliens were to land tomorrow it is this experience that we would have in common, and that is why the Buddhist should be our ambassadors, they speak the langague of the only universal experience.
That others have had the experience of truly listening is not important except as a source of hope and evidence of expectation that it will be worthwhile to follow the same path as so many others (there are even maps as it is such a well-trodden path). You will need it because it is not easy, and whilst there are early benefits (within the first ten hours of practise) it can in fact increase your awareness of your pain as you have so much stored up, that you have not allowed to pass and have been cling on to like a life boat, when in reality it was an anchor. Passing the pain is not easy as it is not your habit, and letting the pain come, letting it be and then letting it go, is not a pain free experience, it is well, painful, but that passes every time, as long as you carry on listening without reaction, and it so easy to fall back into old habits the moment that you stop making the effort, that is because your habit are things that take no effort and when you are changing the habit of a lifetime, you have to carry on until it takes less energy to just listen rather than react.
The more you do something the easier it becomes, you start to have faith that it works, you see the evidence in your life, you start to feel pain as it is rather than what you have made it into with your reactions, you see how short your suffering actually is, and how long your reaction was, the narrative that you created with your thoughts. Those same thoughts blocked the flow of energy that was is the path of pain through your body, flowing towards your heart where it burns away, that same place where the witness rests, pain can only flow or be blocked and trapped by your resistance, when we allow it to pass, we are only getting out of it way by listening to it, we are allowing it to complete it's journey so that we can leave it behind and continue on our path to finding our way to ourselves and when we find ourselves, we find everyone, the journey starts on your own but it finishes in the company of heroes, who will you be?
