What Pain Makes Possible: A Meditation

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of Mindfulness+

A few years ago I was at a tough retreat where I was in a lot of physical pain. I mentioned my pain to my teacher, Shinzen Young, and he said something in his characteristically strange way. (By the way, when a teacher says something in a funny way, pay really close attention to it because they are probably saying it in that way for a very specific reason.) Shinzen said, “Have gratitude for what this pain is making possible.” 

Have gratitude for what this pain is making possible.

I want to unpack this a little bit. You might already have an immediate sense of the power of that teaching in your body right now, but let’s get to the basics of Buddhist practice. Essentially pain and discomfort, when we’re willing to really investigate it deeply, when we’re willing to just like hold a microscope over our discomfort, we start to have an insight into how we process pain, how we relate to pain. We realize that we would prefer not to be in pain. It doesn’t take a deep, adept meditator to figure that one out.  

But as we look closer and closer, we realize something subtle happening, that it’s our reactivity to pain, it’s our rejection of pain, our unwillingness to actually feel what we’re actually feeling that creates suffering in our experience. And when we pay attention to pain, we realize, “Ah, I would rather not feel this way.” And then we feel reactivity in our system, we feel resistance in our system, and it’s that resistance to the full of our experience that generates suffering. 

If we’re lucky and if we have a little guidance or if we just have an inclination to stick with it, get curious and stay open, we stay open, we relax, we let that reactivity kind of unwind, we soften even though what we want to do is run screaming from the pain, what we actually do is relax, soften, escape into the pain.

This, for most of us, doesn’t happen all at once, it happens over the course of many encounters with pain. We re-train ourselves at the deepest level of the body-mind. Rather than tense up and react to pain, we actually soften and escape into pain. And the more we do that, the more closely we observe in the moment, our suffering diminishes. We realize that our pain can be increasing exponentially even as our suffering is decreasing to nil. Not just practically nothing, but we start to have the experience of what life is like as a human being with absolutely no suffering whatsoever. It’s remarkable, it’s absolutely remarkable. 

So pain actually, as inconvenient as it can feel to us, is a grace because it reliably illuminates our very personal patterns of resistance and reactivity to all experiences in life. And if we’re willing to go through that door, over time it leads us down a path of letting go of reactivity and resistance. Very powerful.

So that teaching, just that single instruction turned that whole retreat around and I found myself in a state of gratitude for what the pain was making possible. And the good news is, well maybe it’s good news, you don’t have to do a solitary retreat, although I highly recommend it. This is not about doing a solitary retreat or any retreat, it’s about right now, that right now in this moment there is some degree of discomfort in your experience, probably. There is almost certainly some degree of reactivity, resistance in your system. You might say, “No, I’m feeling amazing, I’ve got my bubble tea here, the temperature’s perfect and I’m chilling with my podcast, I couldn’t be better.”  

You think you’re comfortable, but really the more closely you investigate, the more you realize that at more and more levels of your beings, there is resistance and it is generating significant suffering. Really, in these COVID times, how far do we have to look for suffering, right?  We all have preferences in life and many of those preferences have been frustrated. So reflect on this a moment, how would you  prefer things to be today? Like imagine: “Well, I’d prefer that a virus weren’t ravaging the world right now, and that I didn’t have to quarantine.” I would prefer that. That would be wonderful if people weren’t dying, and if it just felt safe to go out my front door and say hello to my neighbor up close where I can feel his or her heart next to my heart, I would prefer that strongly. I would strongly prefer that I could spend more time with my brother who’s been hit really hard by this pandemic, who lost both of his jobs and doesn’t have his own transportation, so he’s kind of been crawling up the walls with figuring out how to manage all this time in the world? And we used to spend a lot of time together before COVID, but we haven’t been able to do that because it’s not safe in our quarantine situation with our baby.

Well, let me just throw in another preference here that my newborn son’s grandparents can’t come into our house and hold him because they both have their own risk factors in exposures to COVID, and I am watching like every moment of every day and this being is changing and he’s becoming a new person and his grandparents are missing out on that and that’s painful to me. So hopefully, I’ve primed the pump there with some of my preferences. Notice what you prefer right now, notice how your preferences aren’t being met perfectly, which is just the condition of human life. And then notice the reactivity you have to that. Notice how you’d like things to be different and the very distinct feeling of being a human being having an experience that you would like to be different. Let that sink in a little bit, and then have gratitude for what this pain is making possible.

I’m going to transition us into some practice here.

Meditation

Take a moment to settle in. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing. Let your body support the practice. Let your posture support clarity of awareness, focused awareness.

And pay special attention to any discomfort. Of course there will be a lot of comfort and pleasure in the body for most of us. I want you to really pay attention to discomfort, even pain. The pain could be physical, it could be emotional, mental, psychological, even a very rarefied kind of pain, kind of spiritual angst. There are different densities of pain, you could say. Just notice any discomfort whatsoever in your being and as you do this, have gratitude for what this pain is making possible.

What does that mean?  Gratitude for what this pain makes possible. Pain and discomfort illuminate where we stick, where we hold fast to our preferences. And if we’re present enough, if we’re sensitive enough, we start to realize that relaxing with the pain diminishes our suffering exponentially. Our habit is to brace against pain, to want to escape it. The body wants to be comfortable, the mind wants to have certainty and answers, and sometimes physical comfort is just not available. Oftentimes, certainty, answers in the mind aren’t available. What can we do but escape into this pain?  

And as we do this, the pain becomes sweet. Pain shows us exactly where we are generating suffering. If we loosen our grip, if we let go, let flow with our experience, we can remain completely open and present to amounts of intensity. We don’t need the objective situation, the world, to be any different than it is. We don’t need to get rid of our preferences, we all have preferences as human beings. But we learn to let go of our need to make the world conform to our preferences. And doing this, practicing in this way, our access to freedom and love deepens exponentially.

Beyond any conditions, this freedom, this love that you access, that you become, this freedom and love that you ultimately are has nothing to do with conditions inside or out. You can cultivate an attitude of willingness to be fully informed by this moment, the experience of this moment — all that’s arising in the body, mind, all that’s arising in the entire world. Of course this doesn’t mean you don’t respond. You’ll always respond to your own feelings, your own conscience, what the world calls you to do. But it’s in open and full awareness that we become fully responsive to life. In collapsed and compromised awareness, we can only be reactive, thrashing around, trying to change circumstances desperately, just to get back to some fragile sense of comfort. What happens when pain takes you beyond any need to cling to comfort?  What happens when your practice, when your life no longer requires that you constantly seek comfort?

Rather, more and more you learn to open up fully to what is, the truth of what is, just this. Opening up fully to what is, you respond to life as a full human being. Have gratitude for what this pain makes possible.

For more, check out the Mindfulness Essentials course.