Pain, Interpretation, and the Veil of Resistance
Dolor, interpretación y el velo de la resistencia
A discussion about the relationship between physical pain, psychological resistance, and the discovery that raw sensation, stripped of mental overlay, can reveal something unexpectedly alive and even loving.
Pain, Interpretation, and the Veil of Resistance
A discussion about the relationship between physical pain, psychological resistance, and the discovery that raw sensation, stripped of mental overlay, can reveal something unexpectedly alive and even loving.
From my perspective, you had quite a strong sensitivity to sensation in general. I remember one of the first weekends we spent together, and at the end of it we both noted that I was really focused on psychological problems while you were really focused on the physical. You're the kind of person who, if you stubbed your toe, would be screaming, not necessarily in pain but in protest. And because I'm Canadian, we would go swim in the ocean up here, and it's freezing. You weren't used to that, and you'd be literally screaming.
I would actually cramp up. A lot of my body would get cramps: my whole back, my legs, my arms.
Which is a real condition that has a name.
It has a name, and it was very painful.
But then, after the shift, one day we were in the kitchen. We have these really sharp kitchen knives, and you accidentally drew one across your fingertips. And you're a pianist, so your fingertips matter a lot. You were just looking at it, like, "Oh, wow." And I thought, this is extremely different for you.
The cold water and the fire
Yes. I used to hate cold water. It was absolute torture. Living here, we would go to the beach on the one day of summer when it's 32 degrees, just that one day of the year. I would put myself through the process of getting into the ocean and end up cramping in agony.
Strangers would come up and say, "You're gonna be okay, man."
Then I read a sign saying people can cramp up and drown, and I thought, this is what it feels like could happen to me. But one day, completely to my surprise, I went into the ocean, and my partner went in with her daughter. They would always stay in for about five minutes and come out. I would go in for maybe forty seconds and come out all cramped up. But this time I just stayed there for twenty or twenty-five minutes. What happened was there was this immense cold, this deep cold, and then I started to feel fire and heat. Where there used to be cramping and pain, it was just heat, heat, heat. I felt like I was boiling up. I stayed in the water until I got tired and came out completely shocked.
The fever in Mexico
There have been other really mysterious things too. Remember when we were in Mexico and you were feeling sick? You vomited, went to work, came home, and said you didn't feel well. I'm not used to the tropics, so I panicked, thinking maybe it was some tropical disease. Then, over maybe forty minutes, you started joking and laughing, which was strange. You didn't seem to have a temperature, but if I put my hand on your belly it was boiling hot while your head was cool. It was really weird. I asked what you felt like you needed, and you said, "I think I need to dance." And I thought, this is not normal.
I actually started shaking. I was in bed, curled up in some kind of pain, and I started shaking my arms, my body, my legs. I started to feel this big release.
And I'm thinking, is this a symptom of dengue? Does it make you shake?
She was looking at me worried, and I said, "No, this is feeling good." Five minutes later I was dancing and started to feel incredibly high, this deep bliss. I asked to be alone, skipped our dinner plans, and just danced for hours, completely blazed out.
The point I want to make is that some of it was very physical. He did vomit, he did have this heat in the belly, and then it switched. It's just very mysterious. But you also have the kind of mind-body that tends to cramp, and you had a lot of facial tics.
A lot. There's still a lot of releasing in my jaw. I used to be the kind of person where I could lift my leg to go over a staircase and get stabbing pain in my back, and I'd have to be taken to the hospital for injections. It was really bad.
And you also used to have this facial thing, this sort of involuntary movement. People who know you would ask what you were doing, and I'd say I didn't know, but it seemed like some sort of unwinding. So you have a non-normal body thing happening.
But chronic pain was a core part of that. Not sure if that answers your question.
The mental interpretation of pain
The big thing was this deep belief that if only the pain would stop, I would be okay. Now it literally is just sensation. It's a sensation we call pain, different kinds, but I only experience it as just another kind of sensation. Obviously when it's intense, there's a reaction, like, "Wow, that's a lot." There can be an expression: "Damn, that's painful." But there isn't any of what there used to be, which is this very deep sense of not-okayness.
It's really interesting because, for a lot of us women, there's this monthly pain. I've heard it described as something like an ego death, where just before it starts, everything ramps up with headaches, tension, irritation, and anxiety, and then there's a kind of release where everything actually feels quite blissful. The mental chatter goes much faster, everything is annoying and painful, and then suddenly a few days later you can't remember what you were annoyed about, and the physical sensation shifts as well. I used to think the experience was attached to what was going on in the body, but the second or third day can be a completely different experience even though what's going on in the body is the same. I'm wondering whether the mental resistance to it starting is actually creating the physical suffering. There are different degrees of mental and physical suffering with it, and it seems to affect different women differently, but there's a pattern there for a lot of people.
The veil of interpretation
I obviously can't speak to the process as women experience it. But if I speak to it as a form of pain, which I imagine is physical and has the hormonal shifts that change moods and thoughts, I'm pretty sure there will be an aggravation related to psychological resistance. That aggravation might not only turn what is there as real sensation into something worse, but might even intensify the real sensation itself. So I can imagine it's possible that a layer of that can be cleared. Not all of it, obviously, but to a degree where there's a period that is uncomfortable with all the kinds of unpleasant sensations, but without the layer that actually makes it truly unpleasant: the psychological resistance.
It's hard to describe, because I have to be clear from my own experience. There is pain that is real pain. It's the same sensation fired by the nerves, and the experience of it is the same. But then there are changes in how that's interpreted, and before, it didn't look like an interpretation. It seemed like I was relating to the thing itself, but I was relating to the interpretation. The problem seemed to be the sensation itself, but it was the interpretation. Without that, I could say I have no problem with the sensation itself.
Obviously, if I had a disease, if I got cancer and was in agonizing pain every day and night, I would have a problem with it. I don't know how I would relate to that. But in hindsight, looking at all the pain I've gone through, I see clearly how so much of it, let's say ninety-five percent of what was the problem with the experience, was psychological.
What lies beneath the fear
By psychological, I mean there's a mental overlay, a thought process. Something feels intense and unpleasant, but when the layer of interpretation clears (and this happened to me very many times, where it was an instant clearing and I could see the veil of the interpretation lift), then the intensity that was there originally became experienced differently. There was a certain kind of pleasure in it, not a masochistic pleasure in the pain, but a certain aliveness and energy. At times even something that I could feel as loving.
But when the overlay of resistance was there, there was fear. And the fear is this narrative: this is bad, something is wrong, it's going to get worse, when is this going to end. A very visceral resistance, which is the fear of it. With that fear on it, the experience of that intensity, which without the fear was a loving aliveness, became agonizing pain. That was all I knew it as: agonizing pain, something bad that shouldn't be there, and if only it were gone, everything would be better.
But without that mental overlay, without that fear, it was just this intense aliveness, and there was a lovingness to it. That was really shocking to me when I started to have these glimpses of the overlay clearing and the fear vanishing. The actual sensation, the pure, raw, direct sensation, was nothing like what it had seemed to be with that veil, with that interpretation.
What I'm looking for is here
That's why in the meditations, when I say something like "what we're looking for is here," it's that extreme: no matter what is happening, if the thought is "it shouldn't be this way, it should be different," then what I'm looking for seems to be somewhere else, tomorrow, or later when this stops. That is actually the misunderstanding. To be able to see so clearly that even in the deepest pain, what I'm looking for is here.
This happened to me with enormous spikes of pain. It also happened with emotional pain. In the moments where I would return to the places of deepest emotional pain, there was a moment where this kind of seeing-through was happening. I would find myself again in deep, agonizing pain because of the circumstances of life. And then, naturally, my attention went directly into the pain. The same thing happened: the veil of "this is bad, this shouldn't be this way, this has to stop" was seen through. When that cleared and there was just the pain, in a sense it vanished. There was only this heartful aliveness, and I could say love.
The collapse of the belief system
The more this happened, the more the key triggers of the underlying belief that well-being, peace, and happiness depend on a certain circumstance, that I need to control and get more of, less pain, more pleasure, all of that started to become undermined. I couldn't keep that belief system in place, because when I went through the deepest pains, the deepest fears, the deepest circumstances and situations, and they were seen and experienced as loving and okay, then that whole mechanism of looking for something somewhere else just stopped.
But it did require, at least in my case, for me to go through those experiences and see through the illusion that was converting them into something so miserable, something I needed to avoid.
Mind and body are not separate
It's almost like every cell has its own kind of thought process. When I think of autoimmune conditions, the cells attack each other by mistake, thinking something is wrong. This feels like that, where the body is going, "This is really wrong, this needs to change, we need to act," and it's like the cells are doing what the mind is doing. I've been compartmentalizing, treating the mind as one thing and the cells as another, but the cells are doing the same thing the mind is doing: deciding there's something really wrong here that needs to change, rather than just being with it.
You're right that there is no separation between mind and body. It's a lot more complex and mysterious than we can imagine, and there's still a lot of scientific learning and progress on that. Some parts of the process are healthy and work well. The body is constantly killing organisms that are unwanted, and that maintains a state of health. But sometimes disease takes hold.
One of my teachers was a medical doctor who had an awakening and started doing retreats. Many of the people who came to him were his patients, coming from deep illness. For many years he worked with people who were very diseased, and to his surprise, he saw a lot of cancer remissions through what we could call meditation. He was doing various kinds of energetic practices, and to this day he is still very surprised and does not know exactly why it happened. He's written about it in many books and also published a medical article on the spontaneous remission of cancer.
He even identified the type of person more likely to be prone to cancer, and it was a type of mental structure. He saw that there were different psychological types: one more likely to get cancer, the other more likely to become schizophrenic. He would put the schizophrenic patients and the cancer patients together, and they would balance each other out. The schizophrenics were able to get off medication, and the cancer patients became less symptomatic, with some going into full remission. He didn't fully understand how it happened, but he knew it was real. I'm telling you this because it shows that the connection between mind and body is a lot more powerful than we think.