The Pain Beneath the Fear
El Dolor Bajo el Miedo
A question about the relationship between fear and pain, and how tracing fear to its root reveals a deeper layer of sensation connected to love and loss.
The Pain Beneath the Fear
A question about the relationship between fear and pain, and how tracing fear to its root reveals a deeper layer of sensation connected to love and loss.
As I was listening, I was trying to see not only how I relate to fear and pain, but what I actually understand by those words. Could you talk more about the relationship between the two?
As I started looking at it, it seemed like fear has more of a mind-label quality to it. When I really follow the branches of fear down to the root, what I arrive at is that the fear of disappearance, for me, is isolation and loneliness. The sense of already disappearing brings a lot of fear, and I can trace fear like that. But then I looked at pain, and I realized I have no labels for it. It's as if pain only exists in the body, in a way. I can identify the triggers for pain, but the experience itself is slightly different. Does what I'm saying make sense?
You say pain in the body, but you don't mean only physical pain.
Right. I know that triggers have labels, but the experience of pain itself is just sensation. The relationship to it is without any, I want to say without any understanding, but it's a different kind of understanding. Without any mental understanding, as if it is just sensation-understanding.
What I was really curious about is the emphasis you place on the idea that, in the end, we're trying to avoid feeling these two core feelings: fear and pain. I just started looking at it and thought I'd love to hear you talk more about it. What is fear? What is pain?
I simplify it with those two words because it can get tricky if it becomes a big map of all these sensations, all these forms of fear and forms of pain. Then it becomes too involved, too much thinking.
But usually you could think of fear as the fear of pain. And pain is the loss of what you love.
Fear as a response, pain as the root
That really moved me. I think I was trying to grasp exactly that. It's as if fear comes on top, like an explanation or a response to a separation. But pain is the actual experience of something that seems lost, something that seems disconnected. Ultimately, pain is the root.
Yes. But it's always through fear to pain, because fear is a kind of despair of trying to avoid a pain.
That has such beauty because it has such clarity.
Love tainted by fear
And pain is, I would say, the same thing as love, but tainted by fear.
Love tainted by fear is pain, or we experience it as pain.
When something you love is either going away, or gone, or could be gone, and you want to avoid that, there is a clinging. That's the word attachment. When you are invested in stopping that loss, then love gets perceived as pain. It's actually an interpretation of a sensation. And even physical pain works this way. You can think of it intellectually: physical pain is the love of the physical body.
So in relationship to physical pain, the attachment is the belief of us as this physical body, the physical body as our reality?
But it's really just a sensation that the body produces to let you know something that you love is asking for your attention. That's a more intellectual way of looking at it. But if you are fully, fully, fully present with physical pain, to a point where there is no fear, the sensation can feel very loving.
Is all pain physical?
Could we say that ultimately every pain has a form of physical pain, because it always involves body sensation? When we experience pain, the series of contractions in the body, the overwhelming sense that it's too much, that it's overpowering, it always comes with fear, right? That overwhelming sense is the fear on top of a sensation. But then that sensation is still part of a pain in the body. Is there any pain that is not physical?
You say body, but then we can talk about the emotional body, the thought body. I wouldn't say "physical body." That seems like claiming to know something you cannot know.
I think I get it. And I'm not actually looking for the answers or the map. What I was grasping is how I have a better map for fear and less of a map for pain. That was my whole point.
Getting intimate with sensation
Pain is a sensation. By that I mean it's the same as fear: there's a texture to it. When you hear a sound, the sound of a cat or a bird, they have a different texture. The sound of an instrument, the sound of a voice.
It's important to be able to name it: "I'm feeling loneliness." But then not stay in the story of loneliness. Instead, directly experience the sensation, what it actually is. You naturally have a better understanding of fear because it's more superficial. It's what covers the sensations of pain. And by pain, I mean loneliness, shame, all of what I would call pain.
When you notice a fear, it's a fear of something. It's a fear of a sensation. The invitation is to get very intimate with the texture of that sensation. And by intimate, I mean like when you're in a concert hall listening to music and you close your eyes and just let it touch you directly, where you're not thinking about it. The texture of the sound is so direct, you're so close to it. That's the kind of relationship you can practice with pain.
The closer you get to it, the more you are acting in courage. And so the fear starts to calm. Because once you're able to touch the sensation you've been wanting to get rid of, the mechanism of wanting to get rid of it starts to calm down. And the sensation of wanting to get rid of it is fear.
The heartbreak of waking up
Something really resonated when you said that fear covers the pain, and that it's directed toward the loss of something you love. A couple of sessions ago, at one point it was super clear. It was not a physical pain, but after I finished letting go and crying, it was the pain of knowing myself, the attachment to the idea of myself as an isolated being. That belief generated so much. When you said what you just said, I was thinking: was it the pain of losing this self-image that I love? This version of myself? As if the attachment is that you're in love with that image, in love with that separate being and all that it implies.
Exactly. But the love is narcissistic: you're in love with being that exclusively. The waking up is a heartbreak, because not only do you realize you're not only that (because you are still that), but you're not that. You are so much more than that. In a sense, it is a death. Because you are so attached to the whole universe of you being that. And it is a beautiful thing. We do truly love that. So it is a real heartbreak.
But there is also the realizing that you loved it in a way that assumed you were the one who created it. Speaking about myself: I loved it as if I was the one responsible for it. It's hard to describe. And the realization is that it never came from me. It was given.