Dealing with physical pain — Thanissaro Bhikkhu, also known as Ajahn Geoff.
This Dhamma talk is worth a listen from time to time since pain is many times our savage enemy that can easily grind you into dust and ruin you life. So, dealing with it takes some skill, which Ajahn Geoff from Thai forest Buddhist tradition talks about all the time. Listen during meditation. Try the technique. It’s all about where you set your awareness. This takes practice. But don’t worry. Since the pain isn’t going away you have plenty of time to learn and get it right.
The Buddha’s core instruction on physical pain is pretty brief. The most important part is to keep the pain from invading your mind and letting it take up residence. The goal is not necessarily to eliminate pain but instead to change your relationship with it.
Ajahn Geoff talks about the famous forest teacher Ajahn Lee who offers a practical guide. When pain arises, first focus on the comfortable parts of the body and breathe into those areas. That comfort can grow into a kind of foundation or a place to stand and eventually into a resource to direct through the pain itself. Rather than walling off the pain, you breathe through it because walls often maintain the very thing they were meant to contain.
The next step is to examine the stories and perceptions we build around pain. We tell ourselves the pain has been here for a long time and will continue, and in doing so we drag past and future suffering into the present moment. Dropping the stories can lighten the pain considerably.
You can also question whether the pain is as solid or permanent as it seems. Move your awareness toward the sharpest point of the pain, rather than away from it. This can sometimes reveal that the pain shifts and dissolves under close attention. The fact that it moves at all is many times revealing. I’ve noticed this many times. It’s obvious. I’ve also questioned whether I’m feeling the pain when my attention is directed entirely out of my body to other matters, such as a phone call, a story from a friend, or a TV program.
The larger point is that while pain may arise from causes beyond our control, what the mind does with it is very much under our control. With practice, that distinction can be seen and understood. Remember, everything in Buddhist mediation is a skill. You get good only with many years of practice.
That’s just one of Ajahn Geoff’s Dhamma talks. Here are hundreds more. It’s an absolutely amazing archive of Pāli Canon content. I visit daily.
Full Transcript
Pain is one of those things the Buddha says we have to learn how to endure. But he gives remarkably little instructions on how to endure it.
It’s not like painful words. We’re supposed to endure painful words, too. And we do get instructions on how to depersonalize the words, how to think about them in such a way that they don’t invade the mind and remain.
As for physical pains, the Buddha says that similarly we should try to keep the pains from invading the mind and remaining there. That should be our intention with regard to them. In other words, we don’t want them to go away necessarily. At least we don’t make that our purpose in dealing with them.
We want to understand what does it mean for them to invade, what does it mean for them to remain. This is something we have to figure out. And how does it happen?
The Buddha gives only a sketch on how we should deal with pain. It comes in as instructions on breath meditation under the section on feelings. Try to breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to rapture. Breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to pleasure. Breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication — feelings and perceptions. Perceptions are the labels we put on things, the images we use to tell ourselves what something is, what it means. And finally, calming mental fabrications as we breathe in and breathe out.
That’s about it.
For more detailed instructions in these areas, we have to look to the forest tradition. And Ajahn Lee specializes in those first two steps. Breathing in a way that gives rise to rapture and pleasure.
As he says, when there’s a pain in part of the body, first you focus on other parts of the body that you can make comfortable by the way you breathe. This serves several functions. One, it gives you a foundation to stand on as you deal with the pain. It also gives you a place to retreat. And it gives you some ammunition to use against the pain.
Because as we’ve noted, sometimes the simple fact that there is a pain there is something that you’ve brought into being yourself by the way you’ve worked with the raw material that comes from past karma. And by breathing in a comfortable way, you’ve got some ammunition to use against the physical pain, in that you can imagine whatever that raw material is being permeated by the comfortable breath.
Once the comfortable breath is established in the other part of the body, send it through the pain. See if that undoes some of the subconscious things you’re doing to aggravate the pain or even maintain the pain.
Sometimes we put a wall up around the pain in hopes of confining it, but that actually maintains it. The source of the pain may have gone away, but the wall is still there and it’s still painful. So breathe through the pain as the comfortable breath goes through. Make sure it goes through and doesn’t stay stopped at the wall formed by the pain.
You may sense that as you breathe, you’re using the painful parts of the body to do the breathing. They’re the most obvious parts when there’s pain in different sections. So think of the more comfortable parts doing the breathing. The painful parts get a free ride. Think of the breath permeating them and going out to the other side. See what that does.
At the same time, you’re changing the balance of power. Instead of running away from the pain, you face it, and you’ve got some ammunition to face it with.
Then the next steps are to try to understand what are the perceptions that you have around the pain. This is where Ajahn Maha Bua was good. When he talks about perceptions, that’s mental fabrication. But mental fabrications come together with verbal fabrications. In other words, the way you talk to yourself. It also comes together with the act of attention and the factor of name and form in dependent co-arising. So attention has to do with the questions you ask. Verbal fabrication has to do with the stories you tell yourself.
You start questioning your perceptions, questioning your stories around the pain. One of the big stories you may have is that the pain has been here for such an amount of time and it’s going to continue being here for such an amount of time. All of a sudden you’ve got the present moment weighed down by past and future pain. So that’s a story you’ve got to stop.
The past pain is gone. Tell yourself it’s nowhere to be found. You can’t go rummaging back in the past to find it. It’s gone. It’s no longer there to weigh you down. Future pain hasn’t come yet. Why do you have this story where you stitch things together — the pain was here and it’s going to be there? Why do you do that? Just try to be with the pain as it is right now.
Then you can question your perceptions. Do you see the pain as being the same thing as the body? As I said, sometimes we use the painful parts of the body to do the breathing, as if they were one and the same thing. So can you see that the body is made of the properties of earth, water, wind, fire — solidity, liquidity, energy, warmth? The pain is something else. It may seem to be solid or it may seem to be hot. But those are perceptions that we’ve attached to the pain. Can you separate them out?
Sometimes you try to separate them and they go on their own. So you get at it in a more indirect way. Just ask yourself, where is the sharpest point of the pain right now? Asking that question and following through changes the balance of power again. Instead of running away from the pain, you run at it.
Like the stories of the forest ajahns doing walking meditation at night and getting more and more convinced that there’s a tiger crouching beside the path. Instead of running away from the tiger, they run at it. It turns out there was nothing there.
So maybe there’s nothing to run away from in the pain. And you find that if you start tracing down where the sharpest point of the pain is, it moves. It avoids you. Especially if you learn to make your focus the kind of focus that doesn’t bear down on things. The focus is more open.
That’s when you’ve been working with the breath, you’ve learned that if you want to keep the breath comfortable, you don’t put too much pressure on it. You stay steadily with one spot as your center, but you think of that spot as being wide open, connecting with everything else. The same way you follow the sharpest point of the pain with that soft but steady focus. And it’ll move, because you’re giving it a chance to move.
You find that there will come a point where it suddenly separates out on its own like cream separating out of milk when it hasn’t been homogenized.
You can ask yourself if the pain is a solid block. What’s its shape? What’s its color in your mind? Remind yourself pain has no shape, it has no color. Those are just perceptions. Drop those perceptions. See what happens.
Is it just momentary flashes of pain arising, passing away? If you have that perception, ask yourself when it comes flashing in, does it come at you or does it go away from you? Try to hold in mind the perception that as soon as you sense it, it’s already going away. So you’re not a target.
These are calming perceptions. At the same time you’re asking questions that calm things down. You’re telling yourself stories that calm things down. All based on that intention. Trying to see how to keep the mind from being invaded by the pain. Or if it has invaded, not allowing it to remain in the mind.
That means you allow the pain to stay in the body. You’re not making it your purpose to make it go away. But you want to be aware of it. So you’re not sitting here waiting, when will the pain go away? When will the pain go away? You’re asking yourself now, how can I be right here, next to the pain, but not pained by it? Be with the pain, but not suffer from it.
Sometimes when you separate things out like this, the pain will go away. Again, that’s because what you’ve been doing around the pain has actually been continuing to create the pain. Other times it’ll still be there. That’s the raw material coming in from your past karma right now. But it’s there in the body. It doesn’t have to be in the mind.
Remember the Buddhist comment about wisdom — it’s not seeing the oneness of all things, it’s seeing things as separate. Things that you’ve held together in the past, you begin to realize they are separate things. Because they’re separate, they don’t have to weigh things down.
So remember, you want to maintain that original intention. Not that the pain go away, but simply that it not invade the mind and remain. And you’re here to find perceptions that calm the effect of the pain on the mind. Ways of talking to yourself, questions that you want to ask that calm the effect on the mind.
That puts you in the driver’s seat. Because the pain may come and go based on past karma. But the effect it has on the mind is something you can change right now.
We’ve got these tools. The Buddha points them out to you. The forest ajahns give you some ideas on how you can use them. It’s up to you now to develop these skills.
When you have these skills, it puts you in a much better position. You can treat the pain with a little less fear. And when you don’t have fear of pain, that’s one less thing that the world can use against you.
We see how people are driven, driven, driven by pain. And how people take advantage of other people’s fear of pain. When the mind is not invaded by pain, it’s not only for your well-being right now, but it’s also for your greater independence at large.