The Pain That Is the Love You're Seeking
El dolor que es el amor que buscas
A student describes a deep pain emerging as defenses dissolve, and the teacher explores how the very pain we avoid may be indistinguishable from the love we seek, distinguished only by the fear through which we approach it.
The Pain That Is the Love You're Seeking
A student describes a deep pain emerging as defenses dissolve, and the teacher explores how the very pain we avoid may be indistinguishable from the love we seek, distinguished only by the fear through which we approach it.
The meditation was beautiful. I felt inner laughter, a vibration of laughter, and it was very beautiful. But what's present for me now is pain. It started to come up during the sharing, emerging with things I was hearing, and I just felt a lot of pain. In a session last week, the teacher said something like, "Are you willing to die to love?" And I felt so much pain, as all the stories started to dissolve. It was compressed in my chest when I started sharing, though right now it's actually really soft and expansive. When I'm in it like this, it's okay, but it feels like an ocean. I just realized how I've been avoiding this in life. It's amazing to realize. And there's a constant desire for it to have an ending. The paradox is that when I feel it now, I don't mind it. It was also very clear when you spoke about expansion and contraction. I've been experiencing that: moments of vastness and openness, then feeling uncomfortable, going into contraction. The other day I had the thought that maybe pain arises and I'm just going into control. I started to notice that pattern.
The pain of avoidance vs. the deeper wound
There are pains and there are pains. There are pains that are the consequence of avoiding the pain, and fear that is a consequence of avoiding. When the work succeeds, you become unable to really avoid. All of the defenses start to fail. You also stop having the interest in avoiding. That interest starts to feel unappealing. It's a back and forth, but the interest in avoidance starts to feel like, "I've been down that road, and it doesn't work, and it's not good."
Yes, the discomfort in those moments of going back into avoidance.
Exactly. Then what happens is that the pain, this deep wound, which is the consequence of believing in something or not, reveals itself. This pain is like the nectar of God. It is what connects you directly to that. It is only distinguishable from love in the way you approach it, touch it, relate to it. What if this pain is the love you're seeking?
I felt it the other day. It's actually my feeling now. Just the truth of it.
The wound as a door
What was asked of you invites you to invoke the bleeding heart of Christ. And any sense of it being never-ending, or this sense of expansion and contraction: how do you know something is expanding and contracting? What are you calling that?
It's an experience in the body, I think.
Yes. And that's the wave. What if you stopped, in a sense, caring, in the sense of giving attention to the wave? Notice it in the same way as the interest in the pain ending. What if that would be a loss?
Yeah, it's a loss.
What if the pain ending would be a loss? What if the pain is a door, and the ending is you retreating?
I think I realized something around that. This pain, the one I never allowed, there was so much confusion. I was attached to other pains.
Attached to the pains that are the reactivity, which is what you can control, what you can use to avoid, what you create a storm with.
When inquiry is not the right tool
This relates to the earlier question about when to look for identification. I can tell that my visit with my family is still vivid for me even now. I feel it experientially, in sensations. There were moments of wanting to run away, because it felt like either whatever I'm feeling exists, or I do, but both cannot exist at once. But the reality is, if I look back at those moments, there was no space to ask myself, "Who is feeling all of this?" It was just happening. Now, looking at it, I can see how I felt like something limited that was going to be overcome, taken over by the fear and the pain. But when I was in it, inquiry was impossible in a way. Does that make sense?
In those situations, there's no rule, but it sounds like that's when to go into sensation, not look for identification.
Say that again?
In that situation where you're on a family trip, there's a lot happening, a lot of feelings, a lot of energetics. You could take moments to go into your space and meditate, to ground. But that situation seems more like the right approach is to go into the experience, not to withdraw and look for who is feeling it.
Right. But now, even though it's been weeks, it still feels fresh sometimes. And I do have the space now to say, "Oh, I see it is a fear that I will be ended if these things come too close." But I guess it goes back to the question of when is the good time, and your answer is that we're not always looking for identification. We can look for when we resist the sensation.
Exactly. In that situation, with that challenge you're describing, it's not one or the other exclusively all the time. But it seems more appropriate to call your family and relate with what comes up. Be of the flesh. Go into that. Because this does not happen by pulling away and dissociating from the flesh.
Through the body, not away from it
We separate from thought in that we stop believing we are an image. But that takes us into the body. If we then avoid the body, we get into a real no man's land. Do you follow? If you disidentify from thought and then pull away from sensation, you get tight. The journey there is through sensation, through the body, into the sensation. You can then disidentify from the body, but not by pulling away from it. Because the identification with the body is never really with the body. You cannot really identify with the body. You identify with an image of the body. It's with a thought. There is no such thing as a body that you can identify with. There is only the image of the body.
And a series of sensations.
The sensations are the excuse that the mind can use to feel real, to feel like "I am here, this is real." But you can't really identify with sensation. You can only anchor the image to the body to make it appear more real than it is. It's like a VR headset that sprinkles mist in your face, so it seems really wet, but it's not actually rain. Then, into the body, there is formlessness. In the sensation, if you go really into the body, it is never-ending formlessness. It is just movement, like an ocean of movement without boundaries.