PainVersusSuffering

meditation, philosophy

Pain and suffering are two separate concepts. Pain, either physical or emotional, is unavoidable. If you're a human being, you'll feel pain many times in your life.

But suffering is optional. Suffering is, in part, the story we tell ourselves after experiencing the pain in the first place.

For example, after stubbing your toe on a chair, you'll naturally feel surprise and pain. This is normal and unavoidable: if you're human, you're going to experience pain, both physical and emotional.

But immediately after, many people say "Not again!" By doing that, they've immediately summoned a multitude of emotions:

  1. Regret, for the past several occasions of stubbing their toes.
  2. Disappointment, for having done it again.
  3. Self-pity, for having experienced it again.
  4. Maybe a bit of anger at themselves, or at the chair.

Notice that the initial feelings -- surprise and pain -- are quite simple to deal with. But with this whole slew of new emotions, we're tossed into a complex web of narrative ("Wow, I'm such a klutz!") and possibly also a whole set of problematic motivations that did not exist before ("I'm going to break this stupid chair!").

Instead of allowing ourselves to endlessly proliferate our emotional and narrative thought patterns, we should strive to reduce proliferation. By reducing proliferation, we clean our minds of problematic patterns that cause further issues in our lives.

A simple way to reduce proliferation is to pay full attention to the primary experience of pain, and to be with it completely. In doing so, we familiarize ourselves with the experience of pain so that we can experience less surprise next time. This also lets us more completely understand the experience of pain.

This is hard to do, of course. The natural tendency is to run away from the painful experience. So instead, you can focus on the breath, or count to 100, or chant a word or sentence over and over again. These techniques fill the mind and prevent proliferation; although, they are not as effective as just being fully with the painful experience and processing it.

TODO