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This Is How I Suffer
A deep and honest dive into pain
When I suffer, it is because I am not identifying with myself, apparently splitting myself in two. For example, when there is pain in my body, and I believe the thought that “I am in pain” or even “I have pain” and stop there, without recognizing what is actually happening, then I suffer. “This is my pain” cascades into beliefs that say things like, “I don’t want this pain,” “What can I do to make this pain go away,” and “What if this pain never goes away.”
In reality, there is just something happening inside my body, an experience that I am labeling “pain.” Pain is a word, a concept, a label for something that is alive and real. Instead of being caught up in a cascade of concepts about pain, I sometimes find myself exploring the experience that I have been labeling “pain” directly.
When I explore an appearance like this directly, it’s very clear that it is not happening to anyone. The story that “I am in pain” or “I have pain” is false. There is just pain, and there is clearly no one that the pain is happening to. In that moment, the false identification with the bag of concepts that I imagine to be “me” instantly vanishes, and all that is left is this experience that was labeled as pain.
As the phenomenon that has been labeled pain fills awareness, there seems to be a cycling…
