From the forthcoming book: Love, Lust and Enlightenment:
Pain vs Suffering
If someone dies,
you are going to feel a physical pang, a real pain in your chest and your life.
This is part of life. This is built in.
We had a person. They are gone. That emptiness is real and we
can feel it. AS SENSATION.
Loving that sensation, loving that we are alive to feel that
sensation, missing that person AS SENSATION is the breaking open of the heart
that makes us bigger and better and more loving than ever.
And then there is the suffering: words in our head, aka
“thinking,” and in reality, auditory hallucination, the words saying we needed
to do this more, needed to do that more, they shouldn’t have died, this isn’t
the right time, it’s not fair, the end wasn’t as good as it should have been,
regrets about how thing should have been different.
And in a relationship, say something goes wrong, and someone
gives you some grief.
Say yesterday your love gave you a hard time, and that’s that.
They said something a bit mean, and being human, it might have
been one remark of five seconds out of six hours together. And you can feel
bad.
Again, as SENSATION, you gave feel the pain of not connection.
We are designed to be close and to love and when that doesn’t
happen there is real pain.
Feeling that, AS SENSATION, not only honors your real grief that
connection and love were missed, but honors the present of your sensations
right now.
Suffering on the other hand is all the words on how they should
have been different, how they “always” are this, how they “never” are that.
As we have examined before: our choice of making ourselves
unhappy by arguing with what is.
Notice the deal;
AS SENSATION, something real and present is happening in us.
As words in our head/ thinking/ auditory hallucination we are
creating suffering for ourselves.
And let’s take real pain.
Physical pain, which is a pain.
Let’s take a headache.
AS SENSATION, we can feel the exact shape of the pain, is it
round, oblong, how big. It’s usually grape size, but no matter how much, it
isn’t infinite, which is how we often imagine it when we don’t go for the
sensation in reality.
And in reality, the headache is only so big and we can sense
were the pain eases off, and then the whole rest of our body and notice how
much bigger than the headache is our whole body.
As we can notice that the awareness that can notice this is who
we really are.
And, if we want to suffer?
Have a bunch of words in our head about: it should go away, I should have done
this different so this won’t happen, poor me, I have to take this and this and
this to get rid of this, life sucks until this pain goes away, when is it going
to go away.
And so on.
Reality, as sensation.
Suffering as words in our head arguing with reality.
A huge and super crucial choice we all have at any moment when
pain does what pain is supposed to do: wake us up.
So, with your mate
Talk:
As yesterday.
Sit near. Look in the eye. Breathe together. Have two chairs
each.
Have the suffering chair. Sit there and complain in gibberish
about how something should have been different yesterday or in some past.
Move to the reality chair. Be vulnerable. Talk of the
closeness and connection you are missing and what you’d like to do as a couple
to remedy this.
The other partner listen and feedback as you’ve learned
throughout this book.
Go back and forth several times.
As always. Pause and take 3-10 breaths together between rounds,
and when things shift.
Touch:
Explore the other person’s arm, in reality two ways:
One with no moment to moment comments about your now.
Two : with moment to moment comments about your now.
Take turns.
Share how it was.
