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 the world’s most savage enemy that can easily grind you into dust and ruin your life. Remember, life doesn’t care about you. In fact, pretty much everything out there is trying to kill you, so wake up and realize that this is a fight to the death. So, dealing with daily pain 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. It takes an insane amount of practice. But don’t worry. Since the pain has absolutely no intention of 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. That right there is far too much for most people to accept, which, of course, only leads to more pain.
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 your energy through the pain itself. Rather than walling off the pain, you breathe through and punch holes through it.
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. Get tough. Go right at 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, in fact. 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 based on mind states. You get good at accessing those mind states only with many years of practice. If you don’t practice you suffer the consequences.
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.
