The Veil Over Pain
El Velo Sobre el Dolor
A conversation about the relationship between physical pain, psychological resistance, and the discovery that raw sensation, stripped of interpretation, can reveal something entirely unexpected.
The Veil Over Pain
A conversation about the relationship between physical pain, psychological resistance, and the discovery that raw sensation, stripped of interpretation, can reveal something entirely unexpected.
From my perspective, you had quite a strong sensitivity to sensation in general. I remember one of the first weekends we spent together, we both said at the end of it that I was really focused on psychological problems and you were really focused on the physical. You were the kind of person who, if you stubbed your toe, would be screaming. Not necessarily screaming in pain, but screaming in protest, angry about it. And because I'm Canadian, we would go swim in the ocean up here, and it's freezing. You're not used to that, and you'd be literally screaming, "I'm going to die."
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, and you accidentally drew one of our really sharp kitchen knives 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 ocean
I used to hate cold water. It was just torture, absolute torture. Living here, we would go to the beach, and maybe one day of the summer when it's 32 degrees, just the one day of the year, I would put myself through the process of getting into the ocean and end up cramping up in agony.
Strangers would come over and say, "You're going to be okay, man."
Then I read a sign that said people can cramp up and drown, and I thought, this is what it feels like could happen to me. But then one day, completely surprising to me, I went into the ocean and just stayed. Others went in with us and would always be in there for about five minutes and come out. I would usually go in for 40 seconds and then come out all cramped up. But this time I stayed for 20 to 25 minutes. What happened 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 I came out completely shocked.
The sickness in Mexico
There have been other really mysterious things too. Remember when we were in Mexico and one day you were feeling sick? You vomited, went to work, came home, and said, "I don't feel well." I'm not used to the tropics, so I panicked, thinking maybe you had some tropical disease. Then over the course of about 40 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, all curled up in some kind of pain, and I started shaking my arms and my body and my legs, and I started to feel this big energy.
And I'm wondering, 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." Then five minutes later I was dancing and I started to get just so high, this deep elation.
And then you kicked me out of the house. Not really, but you said, "I just want to be alone."
We had a dinner planned, and I skipped it. I said I was going to stay and dance. I was just blazed out for hours.
The point I want to make is that some of it was very physical. You did vomit, you did have that heat in the belly, and then it switched. It's very mysterious. But you also have the type of body where you tend 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 have episodes where I would lift my leg to go over a staircase and get stabbing pain in my back. I would have to be taken to the hospital and get injections. It was really bad.
You also used to have this facial thing, a kind of involuntary movement. People around you would ask, "What is he doing?" And I'd say, "I don't know, but it's 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 monthly cycle as a window into resistance
It's really interesting because a lot of us women have this monthly pain, and I've heard it described as something like an ego death. Just before it starts, it ramps up with headaches, tension, irritation, and anxiety. Then there's a kind of release where everything actually feels quite blissful. It's interesting that this happens in a cycle where the mental chatter goes much faster and everything is annoying and painful, and then suddenly a few days later you can't remember what you were annoyed about. The physical sensation shifts as well.
I used to think the suffering was attached to what was going on in the body, but actually 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, because there are different degrees of mental and physical suffering with it. It seems to affect different women differently, but there is a pattern for a lot of people.
Sensation versus 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 may even amplify it in the sense of intensifying the real sensation. So I can imagine it being possible that a layer of that can be cleared. Obviously not all of it, but to a degree where there's a period that is uncomfortable, with all the kinds of sensations that are difficult or unpleasant, but without the layer that is actually the only thing making it truly unpleasant: the psychological resistance.
It's hard to describe, because from my own personal experience, I have to be clear: there is pain that can be 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 actually relating to the interpretation. The problem seemed to be the sensation, but it was the interpretation.
Without that, the sensation itself, I could say I have no problem with it. Obviously, if you have a disease, if you get cancer and you're in agonizing pain every day and night, you're going to 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 95% of what was the problem with the experience, was psychological. And by psychological, I mean there's a mental overlay, a thought process.
When the veil clears
Something feels intense and unpleasant. But when the layer of interpretation clears, and this happened to me many times where it was an instant clearing and I would see the veil of interpretation lift, then the intensity that was there originally became seen or experienced as having a certain kind of pleasure in it. Not a masochistic pleasure in the pain, but a certain kind of 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's bad, and it's going to get worse. When is this going to end?" A very visceral fear, a resistance to it. With the fear on it, the experience of that intensity, which without the fear was a loving aliveness, became agonizing pain. All I knew it as was agonizing pain, something that was bad, that shouldn't be there, and everything would be better if it were gone.
But without that mental overlay, without that fear, it was just this intense aliveness. And this is hard to put into words clearly, but there was a lovingness to it. That was really shocking to me when I started to have these glimpses of the overlay clearing, the fear vanishing, and the actual sensation, the pure, raw, direct sensation, being nothing like what it seemed to be under that veil, under 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 in enormous spikes of pain. It happened to me also with emotional pain, where in the moments I would recur to the places of deepest emotional pain, there was a moment of this kind of seeing through. Here I am again in this deep, agonizing pain because of the circumstances of life right now. And then, quite 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" cleared. 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 belief system collapses
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, that whole thing started to become undermined. I couldn't keep that belief system in place, because the deepest pains, the deepest fears, the deepest circumstances and situations and experiences that I had needed to control and avoid, when I was there and they were seen and experienced as loving and okay, that whole mechanism of "I'm looking for something somewhere else" just stopped.
But it didn't require, at least in my case, it didn't happen abstractly. It required me to go through those experiences and see through the illusion that was converting them into something so miserable and that I needed to avoid.