Pain, Resilience, and Protecting the Sense Doors

Hello friends, welcome to Wednesday Wake Up, a podcast hosted by Gregory Maloof, Buddhist

Dharma teacher in the lineage of Ruth Denison, Mental Health Therapist, and Mindfulness

Coach. Wednesday Wake Up explores the ancient teachings of Buddhism through the lens

of Western psychology, neuroscience, and the modern human potential movement. Our commitment

is for these teachings to educate, challenge, and inspire you to awaken to your deepest

potential to live a truly fulfilling life of wisdom, joy, and compassion. Thank you for

joining us, May these teachings serve you well.

Alright, acceptance. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I want to, the next few

weeks, talk about acceptance. Part of the reason it came up in conversation I had with

a couple of students, we were talking about acceptance, and it became quite clear in

the conversation that acceptance in the Dharma actually has several different meanings,

which leaves us sometimes confused by what we mean by acceptance. Similar to the concept

of letting go, we throw around that term, oh, let go, let go, and then on occasion someone

will say, yeah, but what does that mean? And I'm like, I don't know, you know, let go.

You start to realize acceptance. I'm like, what exactly are we talking about with acceptance?

So I wanted to distinguish several different kinds of acceptance in the Dharma, which I

think can be helpful, and then I'm going to talk a little bit about a few things the Buddha

tells us that we actually do need to accept. And then there's things he says that we are

not going to accept, and to balance those two. So today I really want to focus in on the

fact that there's a couple different types of acceptance in the Dharma. So the first

type of acceptance often gets mistaken for mindfulness. So sometimes when we think of

the word mindfulness, it's defined as being mindful of something and accepting it just

as it is. That's kind of how it's defined in the West. The Buddha actually takes those

two qualities and divides them up into mindfulness and equanimity. So mindfulness just means

our ability to intentionally take an object and sustain attention around that object long

enough to be able to fuse into the object so it stays, our awareness stays with the object

without moving, right? It doesn't wander off and do the monkey mind. So that's mindfulness.

The accepting part is equanimity. Equanimity is more of an accepting quality. So mindfulness

in and of itself just means to be awake and aware intentionally to an object. The object

could be the sensations in your knees. It could be a feeling of sadness or joy. It could

be any internal or external object that we can be awake and aware of and sustain attention

on. So that's our mindfulness. We can be mindful and not be accepting. There's plenty

of things that we can feel like, oh, I'm mindful of that and I hate it. So just because

you're mindful doesn't mean you're accepting. Mindfulness isn't necessarily accepting. It

is nice when it is if you're going to practice meditation, but it can be separated. You

could be very mindful and hugely averse to something. So that's why the Buddha separates

them as qualities because you can be mindful but not accepting. So when we talk about acceptance,

what the Buddha initially means is we bring mindfulness to an object and we need to most

of the time bring acceptance to things we dislike long enough to understand their nature.

So the acceptance part in the Dharma has a very specific request. The request is bring

awareness to what's happening in the present moment. Accept what is arising or passing

long enough to see why it's arising and passing and the role we play in our relationship

with what's going on. We're not accepting carte blanche. The idea is not just to be in

meditation and watch things arise and pass and arise and pass. We can do that kind of

practice, but that's a very particular type of meditation. The idea of acceptance most

of the time refers to the fact that when you sit on the cushion, the first thing that

happens is the mind does something other than being mindful. Something distracts us or there's

a pain that happens or there's an energy that we dislike and the mind's just frantically

moving all over the place. So what the Buddha says is you have to be mindful of what's

arising and just accept that, okay, this is what's so in the present moment. Whether I

like it or dislike it, not relevant, I'm going to allow the mind to settle in, going to

hold the object or the space part of the body, and I'm going to accept what's arising even

if I don't like it there. Maybe it's an emotion, maybe it's anger, maybe it's fatigue, and

you're like, eh, don't like. And the Buddha says, well, we're going to accept this so we can hold

it in awareness long enough to start to see its nature. The reason mindfulness and acceptance

have to be paired is that the mind is trained from the moment it comes online, that when we

don't like something, we just push it. The first thing we do is like, no, I don't want this.

We'll notice with children. When they don't like something, their first response is, maybe

I should lean into the dislike and see its nature. It's not what happens. Never, never happens.

And when it does, parents are like, whoa, what is going on with this? Right? Other parents

are jealous because they're like, that's not my child's mind. It doesn't, our mind,

when it doesn't like something, the first thing is it, and then we just, we deny it, we

repress it, we run away from it. And what the Buddha says is, because of that, you have

to start by bringing mindfulness to things that are just quieting, in order to start to

see, oh, they have a nature. Suffering has a nature. And by being mindful and combining

mindfulness with acceptance, we can begin to see the nature of what's actually going

on. As long as we give in to the monkey mind and let the mind wander, it's really difficult

to see what's happening. So some acceptance has to be fused with wakefulness in order

to start getting the wisdom. That's our enlightenment factor of discernment. We have to be able

to bring mindfulness to the experiences we don't like in order to understand their

nature. Now, the Buddha says we do that with happiness as well. Like when we're feeling

joyful states, we don't just relish in them. We bring them into mindfulness. Then we

bring some sustained acceptance to start to see, huh, what is this clinging I have to

this pleasant sense? Am I this sensation? Is this self? What is its nature? What is my

contribution to creating this sense of joy? So whether it's pleasure or pain, our first

step is to accept so we can get to know what's happening, whatever that might be. So the

idea is to bring acceptance to the present moment so we can suspend two different energies.

One is a version which includes disliking and one is craving, which is grasping and

wanting more. Both of those things prevent us from seeing clearly what's actually happening

because now we're like, oh, I like this. I want more. We're not thinking what's the

nature of the cookie? We're just like, yum, more. We don't think maybe I should take this

pleasure and notice it in awareness and then see it rising and passing and that's not how we

normally approach pleasure. So acceptance means tolerating something long enough to begin to

pierce into its nature and understand what it's doing. That's what we mean by acceptance on one

hand. There's another type of acceptance that the Buddha talks about which is acceptance of

things that are innate in human experience. Basically birth, aging, illness and death. Those

are the main categories and he's just giving those as example of things everyone experiences to

say, look, there is some stuff in life that will always bring pain. All of us are going to

experience them and we just have to accept. There has to be a sense of basic acceptance. The more

we kick back against our nature, the more suffering arises. So what he says is there's acceptance in

the meditation practice but then there's a bigger acceptance of the fact that, look, there is going

to be stuff coming our way that we dislike and there's no way of stopping. Death is coming,

sickness is coming. Anyone been sick this year yet? I have not been sick this year and I feel like,

yeah, in part of me thinks I'm going to avoid it. I'm like, I haven't had the flu yet. It's not

coming this year. We still that time. I'm like, oh, I missed it. It's like it's January. What do you

say? So there's this idea that we can somehow bypass the bigger dukas and we can't. So that's

another way the Buddha says his use of acceptance. Now, there's another quality to this tool of

acceptance, this heartmine quality that the Buddha talks about. And the thing that he says is in the

Dharma, our meditation practice is changing the way that we relate to ourselves and the way we

relate to the world, meaning ourselves, the world and others. And as you practice Fapasana, as we

talked about a few weeks ago with that YouTube video, the brain is literally evolving. It's not

like there's a person that meditates. The meditating self changes over time. It's not the same

self that you were when you began meditation practice. Mindfulness becomes an actual quality of you

at a biological level. So when we're talking about acceptance, acceptance is not something we do.

It's something we become. We become accepting and it becomes a literal quality of the heart. And so

then we live in the world more accepting. And that's a different person that shows up in that

acceptance. Rather than looking at it as there's this solid self that does this thing called acceptance,

we train the heartmine to accept and we become a person who is accepting literally at the biological

level. The reason I mentioned that because the Buddha says there are certain heartmine qualities

that we don't want to accept, that we want to get to know them long enough, but then we want to

change them. Ilwill, hatred, violence, right? We don't want to accept those as qualities. We don't

want to say, well, the nature of the mind is to hate. So we're just going to let that go. He says,

no, we are going to onboard kindness, compassion, generosity, and we are going to replace those

tendencies with open-heartedness. And he actually says, your goal in your Vipassana practice is not

to accept Ilwill and hatred. Your instructions are to replace them with different attitudes,

different orientations, and different qualities. So we accept them long enough to feel them and to

know them. And then we literally train the heartmine to let them go, like completely. And there's

a quote that the Buddha actually says, let's see, I got it. He says, for unskillful states, we don't

accept it. We abandon it, destroy it, dispel it, and wipe it out of existence. So if you're wondering

what he means by letting go, he says, Ilwill, the awakened heartmind, doesn't just have Ilwill

in a back room. Ilwill is gone. That's the part of the awakening that we literally evolve to be

a being that does not have Ilwill, does not have hatred anymore. So in some sense, we're going to

accept it to understand it. But then we're training to onboard different qualities and let go of

ones that tend to cause harm to ourselves and others. Now, going into what he says, we need to

accept. Those are negative mind states. He says, there's three things. And actually, what I found out,

and I didn't know this, there's actually only three places in all of the sutras where accepting of

something is meant only three times. He says, we have to accept physical pain. Can't do anything

about it. You're not going to eradicate it the way you would Ilwill or hatred. You're not going

to eradicate pain. It's a human biological factor. And that's not possible pain is just, well,

let's not say it's not possible because some people have conditions where they can't feel pain.

And it's not pleasant, pleasant, because you can't, you injure yourself. So we're not going to

get rid of pain. We're not going to transcend the grief of losing a loved one. Awakened being

still experiences loss of like someone's gone. Like, you grief is a human thing and we can lose

people. And you're not going to eradicate the experience of loss. The way you would eradicate

hatred as a heart, mind, quality. We're not going to eradicate. We're all going to have loss of

folks we love. And it's grief and it doesn't feel great. We can transcend the suffering of it.

But the pain of it is going to be a thing. That's the thing. Now, the third one to me is so

surprising and I didn't know this until a few weeks ago. And this really makes sense in these

times. He says another thing that is a fact of human experience is human beings will say harsh

and unkind things to each other. And you cannot stop it. The Buddha says that's the nature of human

beings. That people are going to say things that are unkind, untimely, mean, rude, whatever,

all of the rules of skillful speech that we try and keep in our precepts. He says that is going

to happen. So of the three things in all like the 10,000 pages or so of Suta's, he only says those

things you really do have to accept are part of what we have. You are not getting rid of those

things. So I think that's interesting that 3,000 years ago. This is before Twitter. This is before

human beings invented a vehicle to disparage each other all the time and it runs all the time.

He was like, yep, nope, that's going to happen. People are going to be like, just get ready.

There's going to be heart, like harsh speech is going to be a thing. People are going to lie.

You're not going to eradicate dishonesty, right? You're not going to eradicate people calling you names.

It's not going to happen. But he does give advice on how to decrease the suffering of them. So

I'll go into that. So those are the three things the Buddha says, you've got to just,

well, what he actually says is you have to be bigger than those problems. You have to know

that in order to be happy in this life, those three things you need to come to terms with as part

of the human experience, we are all going to have that process go by. So there are two general

attitudes. You and I have talked about attitudes that I'm trying to come up with a different word.

We need to have another conversation about attitudes. There are two fabrications. There are two

mental fabrications that the Buddha talks about that he encourages all meditators to do for

things that we are finding painful, no matter what they are. So the first one is he talks about

being resilient. He talks about being resilient. And he said the first image is this.

If you take a big piece of salt and put it in a small cup of water,

water is not drinkable. But if you take that same salt and put it into a river,

you can still drink the water. So what he says is you want to practice imagining yourself

literally larger than the offense, larger than the sorrow, larger than the suffering. And so he

says visualization practice, imagine that you are a huge, wide, deep river. And when someone does

something that you dislike, you imagine that it just goes into the water and the water just keeps

flowing. Imagine yourself as big as the earth. Imagine it bouncing off the earth. And he uses the

elements often. He says imagine your fire. If someone says something mean, does it hurt fire? No,

imagine that your fire. Imagine that your water. Imagine you're something bigger than the contracted

state of I am. Because when someone comes at us with physical pain, does something that causes

physical pain or verbal at the ear sense door, there's this practice that the Buddha invites us to

do, which is to be bigger than the harm. Imagine now from a practice perspective, we have to remember

that these practices rehearse the mind in a particular way. We talked about this a couple

weeks ago with the YouTube video that when the mind visualizes and rehearses being able to

overcome something, the brain literally encourages that circuit to begin to create resilience.

So this is not like, well, I'm just going to imagine being the earth and you're like, well, that's

dumb. Like, what if someone says something really harsh? I'm going to imagine being the earth,

like that's ridiculous. That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is by literally practicing

a visualization where you picture yourself to be sturdy and strong. It does actually impact the

resilient part of the brain so that when someone then does the act, the brain has this sense of like,

well, I'm as big as the earth, bring it on. Like, this is really a literal practice. He really invites

you to visualize in your meditation as a rehearsal, being the elements and imagining things coming

towards you that are hurtful and sad making and painful and imagine them bouncing off,

being in a water. Imagine them as salt and imagine them going and really doing the visualization

work will help. I was practicing the other day and I, oh man, I had his back pain. It was so bad.

And it came early in the sit. So I was kind of resentful because I'm like, I'm kind of like half

way through my sit. Now I had to spend the rest of my sit fabricating this dumb back pain.

And so I remembered these practices and I was like, okay, let's just try it. Let's just try

the visualization. And so I did. I put my awareness to the place on my back and then I imagined

that I was the earth and feeling the back pain. I imagined it bouncing off the earth and it

definitely decreased the pain. And I was like, oh, I see what he means. Because when pain is

happening, whether it's emotional pain or physical pain, we already tell a story about the pain.

There's already a story present with the Buddha is saying, try a different story.

And in trying a different story, you begin to realize, oh wait, there's already a story there

that I may not have noticed it, but there's already a perception about the pain or about the

emotional hurt that I'm already telling myself that's making it worse. Now if I imagine myself bigger

versus feeling myself contracted, that has a different emotional sense. So these are literal

practices that I would invite you to and to take them on as a serious visualization practice.

It's not meant as a trite thing like you're a kid in school and you come to your teacher and

it's like this person's bullying you and they're like, well, imagine you're like their earth and

don't worry about it. It's really a meditation practice. It's really training the mind towards

resilience and noticing that visualization and fabrication are already happening and we can choose

to fabricate a different reality. So it's very serious like recommendation. It's not kind of like

your friend comes to you and is like, oh, I'm having a bad day and it's like, we'll be like fire.

Does fire worry about bad days? Like, you don't want to be dismissive about people.

Everyone goes around gaslighting their friends and be like fire. Jesus, it's that easy.

Okay. The second one, that's a generalization for all of these things that we just have to tolerate

as humans. The Buddha says we want to do two things. Normalize and universalize. Normalize and

universalize. So the normalizing, this idea is to remind ourselves when something happens, what

usually happens when we experience pain, it's my pain. It's my suffering and there's this contracted

identity and almost an ownership. Like, when you stub your toe, you don't think lots of people

stub their toe. You immediately are like, ow, my toe. There's an immediate identity. There's

immediate personalization of the experience. Now, that's a mild one, of course. But the idea is

that when we impact things we don't like, there is an immediate sense of mine. This is happening

to me and that contraction creates more suffering. This idea that this thing is happening to me versus

is this a thing that happens to all humans? If we shift the perception, suddenly it's like, well,

yeah, am I the first one to be called something or am I the first one to be lied to? Is this something

that's only happening to me or is this a reality of being human? So what he says is you have to first

normalize it across all beings. Remind yourself that this is not just about you because the more you

make it about you, the more it hurts because it's a contracted consciousness. So the Buddha says

that my pain is a contracted state of mind. All beings experience this pain is much more spacious.

It's much more open. It's much more accepting. The other thing it does is the moment you go from,

I can't believe this person hurt me in this way, when you go to, wow, all of us of humans experience

being betrayed in this way, harmed in this way, lied to, made to feel scared, whatever that thing is,

immediately empathy and compassion arises. And suddenly that empathy, compassion can be directed

towards yourself as well. It's hard to have self empathy when we're like, this shouldn't be

happening to me. Why am I being singled out? So what the Buddha encourages is this idea that when

pain happens, you don't get to own it. It's not yours. It's not your pain. And as soon as you can

let go of the ownership of it, then the heart softens in particular ways. There is the famous

Suta where a woman comes to the Buddha and her child has passed away. And she comes to the Buddha

thinking the Buddha has magical powers and says, I need you to resurrect my child. And she's been in

grief. She still has the dead child. It's a pretty intense kind of image. So she has the dead

child. It's like, I need you to resurrect my child. And the Buddha says, okay, I'll do it. And I

can't remember his instructions, but I'm going to paraphrase here the basic instructions where I

need you to go into town. And I need you to get a cup of salt from a family in town that is never

experienced death or doesn't know anyone who knows someone who's experienced death or loss.

Great. So she starts going door to door and keeps going door to door. And then it's like, oh,

right. Yeah, this is not my suffering. This is our suffering. This is our predicament as human beings.

So it encourages a decrease in your own attachment, encourages compassion. And I did some research

on this Suta and some other Sutas. And it's really interesting. The Buddha actually says, look,

one of the most painful things a human can experience is like the loss of someone we love. And he

actually says, it feels like something's been ripped out. And he says, grief, do your rituals,

funeral, eulogies, like he says, he doesn't say, oh, just be equanimous and awakened. He's like,

this hurts. And he says, accept that this is a part of the human experience. And it's our pain.

You're experiencing that thing that so many before you. And this is your time to have that

universal experience. It's not a punishment. It's just humanity. So again, we're just changing the

story to give some spaciousness in our experience. So it's not like we're just accepting the fact of

loss. We're practicing becoming accepting so that when we step out into the world, that's the

relationship we have. So when other things come up and they will, we're softer and more resilient.

Remember, we talked about resilience from a Western psychology perspective is the amount of time

it takes to bounce back from having something happen that you don't like. How quickly can we

bounce back? And so these images that we see, the Buddha was like, yeah, we have to create

resilience. Vapasana will do a lot, but eventually someone passes away that we care about. And

then we just grieve with each other. And we also don't add fuel to the fire by acknowledging,

yeah, there's loss here. And let's see if we can bring some love to the experience without

repressing it or pretending that it's not hurtful because it will be.

So making it normal and universalizing it is an energy towards things that we have to tolerate,

and that's the other part of this. So making yourself bigger than your problems is what we say in

the West, but what he's talking about is imagining yourself larger than the situation. The river

and the salt is, I like that one a lot. The earth I like too, because I actually, when I do it,

I imagine myself the earth and I imagine the earth like with my little hands, like I am the earth

kind of in space. And then I imagine like the thing bouncing off me and I'm like, oh, I got this.

So do you and however it works for you, but that's how I've done it. And to me, kind of the humor of

it makes it like, right, it's like, am I going to be small and the problem is going to be the earth,

or can I be the earth in this situation can be? And it really does impact. So a couple things the

Buddha talks about as far as practices, hurtful speech. What he talks about with hurtful speech.

Again, you can use the imagining of the elements or however you want to imagine yourself larger

than the experience that you're having, but he also says with speech, what you want to do is

notice contact at the ear. And he says, remind yourself that anytime someone says something that

hurts your feelings, that's because you've let it pass the ear. Don't let it go into the mind.

He's like, you can't stop it from hitting the ear. That's why he says, look, you have to accept,

stuff's going to come here. He's like, but you don't have to let it all the way in, which I think

is a beautiful idea, right? You can hear it. And then when he says, he doesn't say that you accept

that people are speaking harshly. The reason he says, don't let it get past the ear is he says,

look, if you don't let it get past the ear, you will have a clear mind to know what is skillful

in that moment. You'll be able to react versus react, capital R. You'll be able to respond

with kindness and compassion. And he says, if you don't let it get past the ear, your tendency to

retaliate will decrease. So he's not saying, oh, let's just pretend that hurtful speech is cool.

He's just saying, it's going to be inevitable. And if you can't accept that, life is going to

suck. Don't let it through the mind. Get it at the ear. Hear it as vibration or sound. And that's

where you start. Don't let it further into there. So I thought that was kind of a helpful.

This is what he says is the quote from the Suta. He says, a painful feeling.

This is so Buddhism. A painful feeling, born of ear contact, has a risen within me.

And that is dependent, not independent. Dependent on what? Dependent on contact.

So next time you want to post something on a social media, someone has said something offensive,

you can say a painful feeling. Born of eye contact has a risen within me. And then you can do

something skillful, maybe. So you know, we can tone it down a bit, right? It gets kind of hot.

It gets kind of hot in here in this planet. So stop it. Don't let it into the mind. So that's one.

Let's see what else he says. Oh, another one that was new that I hadn't seen before was.

He says, imagine that you are space, infinite space. And he says, if someone says something,

imagine them trying to write that offense in space. And he's like, there's no place for it to land.

No place for it to land. Your space. Imagine it being written in space. There's no place for it to stick,

which I thought I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. That's another one. So that's the hurtful speech one.

At the ear, that's the big one, is remember that it's sound and it has meaning. Another thing to

remember about speech, he doesn't say this, but this is a Western psychology thing that probably

we already, most of us already know in a sense, but I'm going to remind us of it because it is important.

When we take speech, which the Buddha is saying is like, obviously people are going to say things

that are not cool. And they can go from not cool to, you know, obviously. There's a broad

gradation of what can be offensive in speech. But one thing that we remember for resilience is that

when someone says something that's hurtful, if we can change the meaning of it, but still understand

that there's a value judgment and still do something to protect ourselves, it really helps because

what happens is if we find something offensive and we continue to fuel the offense, the person with

the power is the person offending. The more offended we get by a particular verbal vice, the more power

that person has. So the more we recoil from the word spoken, the more that person knows, oh,

got it, this is going to hurt you. But if you leave it at the ear, the power of the offense

completely evaporates. So social media, I'm not going to my high horse here, but like trolling on

social media as a therapist every time I see this where people are like, oh, people are doing all this

stuff on social media. My first thing is stop watching it. Second, like people keep saying these

things to me on Instagram. Don't go on Instagram. Anyway, don't stop it. Stop it here. Don't take it

off your phone. Anyway, that's my high horse getting off. But there's the other part of it. The other

part of it though is the more we try to stop the offensive speech, the more people are like, oh,

now they're really offended. Now I'm going to use this all the time to poke at you because I know

you find this really hurtful. And the person that doesn't get relieved of the hurt is the person

that's offended. The person doing the offense gains power. The more we find the word or the phrase

or the thing offensive. So it's this psychological double bind where we say, well, I have to stop them

from saying it. So I'll stop them from saying it by censoring the word or shutting it down in some

way or like trying to cover it up. But the more we do that, as you see, the more it inflames because we

think if we stop the offense that we don't then do something to protect ourselves. So in the Dharma,

well, the first thing we're doing, stop the suffering. In power the heart and mind to transcend

the offense while still keeping an attitude of precepts where we're like, look, I don't want that

in my community. That's fine. But you don't have to let it go in and pierce, right? So you can change

without the offense. And that's what I love about the Buddha. He's like, don't let it get past this.

That's bad for everyone. Just let it bounce off. Then you can do something about it. But going

after the words and trying to stop them, oh my, there's a billion people on the planet. Good luck.

We're never going to shut people up. So instead, let's keep it at the sin store.

I'll go into pain. We talked about loss a bit about universalizing it. The last one is pain.

Pain is similar with what the Buddha says is that most of what we call pain is actually the

suffering from our reaction to the pain. Pain hurts. He's not saying it's comfortable and you're

pretending or something. But what he's saying is pain is a signal that something's going on that

most of the time we're supposed to change in some way, right? It's a flare that goes up. It's like,

hey, this hurts. Okay, let me attend to it. But what he said is if you could eliminate

the reaction to the pain, pain would simply be a signal that something needs to be attended to.

And then you would move on. There wouldn't be suffering. There wouldn't be the duke from the pain.

It's the suffering we don't like. We think it's the pain, but actually it's the reaction and the

friction between pain, signal, heart, mind, qualities that respond. Then this other layer of duke comes

up. This is what we don't like. This is the part we actually are trying to get rid of. So there's

a few mental fabrications that the Buddha encourages us to practice. And I want to clarify this by

saying these fabrications only work to the degree that mindfulness is present. If your mind is

all over the place, these mental fabrications are not going to be strong enough to decrease your

reaction to pain because pain is such a primitive feeling in the body. The ouch is not going to go

away until you can really establish mindfulness and establish concentration really being present.

From that place, if you hold pain in awareness and change the perception, it will, you will experience

a decrease in the ouch of it. And you'll be able to sit with discomfort and have all kinds of

other things where you're like, it's just pain. I don't have to do anything about it. I don't like it,

but it's not causing suffering. So one thing he says is that when we're in pain, we think it's a thing.

I am in pain. And he says what's actually happening is pain is arising and pain is passing.

Pain is arising and pain is passing. He says if you can see pain as discrete moments, you'll

realize that as pain goes up, it also comes down. In this moment, there's no pain. But because it's

happened so quickly, we say pain is happening. When it actually, it's pain, not pain, pain, not pain.

And he says with mindfulness, if you can see discrete moments of pain, when you have a knee pain,

bring mindfulness to it. Try and find it. You can't find it because it's pulsating, it's moving.

It's not even in the same, the pain isn't even in the same spot. And when you can start to see that

it's a plethora of sensations that are impermanent and changing just in watching that, you stop the

reaction. And now you're like, oh wait, I've been watching the pain for a while and it hasn't

disturbed me because now it's just the arising and passing. So that's one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it, he says, when we feel pain, there's a psychological tendency

to feel it coming at us. Like there's this sense inside, naturally, of trying to get away from it.

And he says, what would happen if you imagine the pain moving away from the body,

rather than thinking that it's coming towards you? And he says, hold the sensation of pain

and imagine it radiating out from your body. That can be a powerful reflection. That's a different

way because our natural perception is like, it's coming towards me in this way. And he says,

flip the script and imagine pain radiating out away from the body. He says, imagine that it bubbles

of discontent and they're fluttering out from the body. So that's another way to look at pain.

The last one he says is to remember that he says, part of our discontent with pain is that

because it's happening so quickly, we basically get tired of it. So you ever get tired of pain?

Like we know what it means when there's an ache and the ache has been happening long enough and

you're like, oh my god, I'm so tired of this toothache or this knee pain or whatever the

angst is, this itch, whatever the pain is, there is this sense, it's been going on too long and

I've had enough. That's the energy. And what he said is, that's a perception because pain,

each pain is different. So the pain you're experiencing is brand new. It's just one pain, the pain

of the present moment. And he's like, you need to remind yourself that each pain you're experiencing

total new pain. It's not there's no continuity of pain. This pain now is not the pain you had

five minutes ago, completely different. So starting to see it as present moment pain is there's

no past pain, there's no future pain. Pain only occurs in the present moment and it's a brand new

pain for you to get to know. So you don't have this sense of, oh my gosh, this has been going on

for so long, which we all know that experience of like, ah, enough already. So these, if you look

at all of these practices, these are the types of practices where we're not trying to eradicate

the experience in the same way that we are with like ill will or emotional states. Pain is going

to happen. The idea is to manage it and to not suffer from it. We're not going to find some

fabricated state we're pain. We're not going to find a place in the world where death or

loss or grief from losing someone is going to happen. That stuff is going to be there. People are

always going to say things lie, deceive. We can't legislate that kind of kindness, but we can

be bigger, right? We can be as big as earth and then we can do what we can without

letting it pierce the heart in that way. So thank you for your kind attention. That's one version

of acceptance. Let us plop into presence. Let's do some loving kindness as we close for the evening.

Let's just take a few intentional breaths.

Notice the aliveness of the body in this moment. Notice how it feels to breathe.

And see with each breath if you can find a place on the body where there's a sense of ease,

perhaps some levity or lightness of sensations, prickling, tingling, little bit of energy movement,

perhaps. Just finding a place on the body, sometimes the palms are a good place or the face,

just noticing some lightness of sensations. And see if you can gently rest awareness there.

And grounded in that awareness attuned to the body. Let us ask this question. If you could wish

anything for all beings and know that wish would come to pass, what might you wish for all beings

with each breath? Allow that sentiment of meta to radiate out in all directions to all beings without

being. May all beings share in the merits of our practice this evening.

And may we remind ourselves that our highest aspiration is for all beings to be free from suffering.

And that we may aspire to show up in this world as kind, generous, and loving beings.

Thanks for joining us here at Wednesday Wake Up. We honor the traditional Buddhist practice of

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