Acceptance Of Pain And Transcending Suffering

September 29th, 2009

Suffering is not necessary but pain is. Can you see the difference here? Suffering is when you become attached to the pain and pain is the physical or mental issue. Pain will always be in your life but you can learn to change the way that you react to it and avoid suffering.

What is suffering? Suffering is the process of being in a state that you do not want to be and not feeling that you can get out of it. You suffer because you are not accepting what ‘is’ at this moment. If you have this mindset of non-acceptance then you will always suffer. Christianity and Buddhism both mention that acceptance of what. You are not quitting and throwing in the towel here, it is a more powerful way to manage pain.

Toothache

As a man, one of the worse pains that can happen to me is toothache. I once got this terrible toothache and had to take off a week from university due to the pain. I lay down all week complaining about it, how unfair it was, how the circumstances were unfair etc and then I thought back to principles taught in the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and remembered the principle of acceptance. I started to stop complaining and be totally accepting of the circumstances that I was in. Not that I could not change them, just that I had to accept what was at thatcurrent moment.

Instead of fighting against the pain, I observed it. Completely without judgement. Its hold over me decreased. I no longer complained, the suffering disappeared and the pain reduced massively. We feed our physical and mental pains and when the source is cut off, they run dry.

You have to experience this to understand it. How could you ever explain what the world looked like to a person who was blind since birth. It is impossible.

What does this mean for you?

Acceptance of physical and mental pain is the first step towards managing your pain. Totally accept what circumstances are at this moment. Whatever pain you have. Observe the pain without judgement and observe your minds tendancy to judge it and attach blame to objects. Once you do, you will start to see that your mind is creating most of the trouble.

This story shows this. Imagine a bank official told you that your bank account had been somehow logged into and` somebody had run up a bill of £10000 on the internet. You would feel terrible wouldn’t you? Well what if it was a mistake and instead a kind generous person had actually PUT  £10000 into your account. Your initial feelings of anger were not reflections of reality. The money had not even gone from your account, the opposite had happened. This could only mean that it is your reaction to the situation that matters rather than the situation itself.

If you are in pain, you can change your reaction and suffer less of the physical pain. Have you ever noticed how some people claim that a common cold is going to kill them whereas some people get cancer and it seems not such a big deal to them? It is all about the reaction.

Cultivate acceptance, surrender to this moment and observe your mind working over time whenever you feel pain and you can get over suffering once and for all. If it is back pain then start by becoming aware of how your back feels for 5 minutes with no metal commentary at all. If habitual thoughts come up then just observe them. Then start to

Pain and Pleasure

You can actually train yourself to associate pain with certain states. Your default state might be “anger, anguish and frustration” etc. But you can make back pain lead to more positive and useful states like feeling unstoppable, happy and analytical.

what you firstly need to do is find something in your mind that comes up when you mention these states. A specific song or situation that has occurred in your life and brings back those emotions. These states should make you feel more empowered to do something on the outside world as well as changing your inside world.

Start thinking about that physical pain and then quickly switch to that positive state by remebering the situation we talked about quickly. Do this several times. your mind will start to associate the pain with that state and whenever you think of the pain your mind will start to automatically go to that state.

“Spiders webs united tie up a Lion” – African Proverb

From now on, you have to condition that state, the same way that someone conditions their muscles to grow larger. Whenever you catch yourself slipping back into those old negative emotional states, do something to interrupt that pattern that is really silly like doing a push up and reciting the alphabet backwards. This stops the old pattern. Then you have to remind yourself of how fantastic your life will be with the new pattern and eventually this will become your default state and life will become effortless.