Forest Sangha Newsletter January 2001
THIS ISSUE Cover:
Articles:

Editorial:
 Touching the Meaning; Ajahn Sucitto
Working with Pain; Sister Thanasanti
View from the Hill; Ajahn Munindo
House Builder; Ajahn Candasiri
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Working with Pain
 From a talk given by Sister Thanasanti during a retreat at the Angela Center in Santa Rosa, California.

Having spent the day speaking with different people and getting a little bit of a sense where people are in their practice, there are some themes which emerge. One of the themes which emerges is pain: how to work with pain, how to be at ease with pain. A fundamental problem is that we have the expectation that there shouldn’t be any pain; and that when there is, something has gone wrong.

Most of our lives we’re very good at being able to move and to adjust and to shift around, so that we don’t have to feel pain acutely. So when we put ourselves in a situation like a retreat we can get a little bit stuck. We come into the shrine room and we sit, and the idea is not to move until the bell rings. So there’s the pain in the body to work with -- or the pain of the heart; and how can we work with that?

There are many skilful means that we can come up with. There’s the skilful means of working with the breath -- relaxing in the breath. There’s the skilful means of knowing where to place one’s attention. We may be experiencing something that feels extremely unpleasant -- yet there are ways of placing the attention that support a gentle embracing of that experience.
 
We wake up and we see the relationship between the body and mind, between the body and the breath.
 
Sometimes one can put one’s attention right in the very centre of the pain and, after a period of time, discover that it’s not pain -- it’s just sensation. The quality of unpleasantness can completely disappear, one’s just dealing with the energy. When that happens there’s a nice sense of freedom because there isn’t the resistance that’s associated with pain because it isn’t pain any longer -- it’s just experience.
Sometimes we can see that the pain isn’t actually connected to the body, even though that’s where we experience it. It’s actually coming from a place of tightening, of resistance or fear. So then we explore the mind, and look and see how the mind is actually manifesting itself into the body -- how we’re experiencing the mind, in the body, as pain. There are all these things that we can know, that we can discover. In the discovery of opening to something like this, there’s a waking up. We wake up and we see the relationship between the body and mind, between the body and the breath. We see the relationship around things that are fearful, or that we resist.

So there’s a freedom that comes with just hanging out with knees that hurt. The freedom is that one doesn’t need to be threatened by pain, or to be bullied by it, or to be pushed around by it. It’s OK. We can just experience it. It’s not a problem. So pain is something that we can take as a curse, or something we can take as a teacher. It can be an opportunity to open our hearts to something that is difficult.

When we’re meditating we sometimes have this feeling that we can just block out the pain. We can do that with physical pain -- and also with the pain in our heart. However, when we do that, meditation can become a way of dissociating from life.

So learning how to open up to that which is difficult, and that which is frightening, and that which is unpleasant is part of the work we’re doing. It’s not inspiring work; it’s not the kind of stuff that one gets all jazzed up about -- but it is very powerful work, and very liberating. When we’re able to live in the world in a way where we’re not frightened and we’re not pushed around by fear, and we don’t resist pain, then we have the courage to stand and face whatever it is that we need to face.

That’s a wonderful freedom -- and there are times when it can actually make a difference.