When the Drama Is the Pain
Cuando el drama es el dolor
The teacher reflects on how mental drama around physical pain creates most of our suffering, and how surrender is not a choice but something that happens when there is nothing else left to do.
When the Drama Is the Pain
The teacher reflects on how mental drama around physical pain creates most of our suffering, and how surrender is not a choice but something that happens when there is nothing else left to do.
There was this sense, almost as if by creating all that drama, I had some control over the pain. And actually, the drama was 98% of the pain. The direct physical sensation of pain, without the drama of "how horrible this is, how shitty this is," plus "how stupid I am, how dumb what I did, I can't believe it," and all the guilt and self-shaming: that was what was creating the suffering.
The raw sensation versus the story
The sensation itself, without all of that, is something you could meet with a kind of curiosity: "Wow, that's a really interesting sensation of pain." But with the drama, it becomes suffering. That's a fairly obvious, simple example, but it was happening constantly. It used to happen every waking minute of my life, with anything that was happening. And if there wasn't anything happening, I was imagining it. I was expecting it. I was thinking about what could happen.
What surrender actually means
People talk about surrendering. Nobody surrenders if they can choose not to. You only surrender when you literally cannot do anything else. In that sense, surrendering is something that happens to you. I know the metaphor from war: you are the captain of an army and you can make a choice. That is not what surrendering means in this work. It is more like acceptance.