Pains & Perceptions

Take a couple of good long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. When we focus on the breath, that’s the topic we’re focusing on: not so much the air coming in and out through the nose, but the feeling of energy flowing through the body as you breathe in and as you breathe out.

There are lots of different places where you can feel that energy—in the shoulders, in the torso, in the head. Wherever it’s most prominent, focus your attention there. Then watch it for a while, trying to be as steady as you can in observing the breath. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change.

In fact, an important part of meditation is learning how to adjust the breath to be in line with the needs of the body, in line with the needs of the mind so that you keep the two of them together.

Sometimes calm breathing feels good for the body but it gets boring for the mind. In a case like that, ask yourself what kind of breathing would keep you awake, keep you here, interested in the breath. After all, the breath is the energy of the body. If the energy flows well, it’s going to be good for the body. If it doesn’t flow well, it’s not going to be good.

So as you’re training the mind, you’re also helping the body. That should be interesting in and of itself.

If your mind wanders off, just bring it right back. Wanders off again, bring it back again. Learn the skill of allowing thoughts to wander through the mind but without your paying attention to them.

Think of your mind as like a window with a screen. Thoughts can come through like a breeze comes through the screen. The breeze doesn’t get caught by the screen, so it can go right through. And it doesn’t disturb the screen. Try to keep your awareness right here, undisturbed and not disturbing the thoughts coming through.

The breath is still there, even as the thoughts are coming and going. They don’t destroy the breath. It’s only when you get interested in them that they obscure the breath.

Think of yourself as being outside of your thoughts. It’s when you get into the thoughts that they carry you away. Stay outside them. They can come through, but you don’t get into them. They don’t disturb you.

If you find yourself getting drowsy, deepen the breath. Emphasize the in-breath to get more energy. And you can make a survey of the whole body. This is especially important as the breath gets comfortable, and there’s a tendency to focus on the comfort and forget about the breath, in which case you’re going to drift off.

To counteract that tendency, tell yourself, “The breath is flowing through the whole body, all through all the nerves. There has to be energy flowing through the nerves, energy flowing through the blood vessels. And they’re everywhere in the body.”

So survey. As you breathe in, how does it feel in your stomach? How does it feel in your chest? How does it feel in your neck? How does it feel in the head? How about going down the shoulders and the arms? Going down the back, going down the legs? Go around and around like this.

You find that there are lots of interesting things going on. In some parts of the body, it’s obvious that energy is flowing. In other parts, it’s not obvious at all. In some parts, it seems to be blocked. If there’s any sense of blockage, any tension or tightness, allow it to relax so that you’re surrounded by good breathing. See if you can maintain that state of being surrounded by good breath.

One of the main obstacles you run into as you meditate is that you’re not used to sitting here in one position for a long time. There are going to be pains in different parts of the body.

As the Buddha said, one of the important things about pains is that even though they’re there, you have to learn how not to let them invade your mind and stay.

How does that happen? How can you counteract it? The way you counteract it first is to breathe in ways that are comfortable—like we’re doing right now—and to focus on the parts of the body you make comfortable by the way you breathe.

One of our big problems is that whenever there’s a little pain here or pain there, we just focus immediately on the pain. We forget the rest of the body.

But here you’re learning to develop a sense of well-being in your arms, in your torso, in your head, your legs. Let that give you strength. Focus there. And for the time being—say, there’s a pain in your knee or a pain in your hip, a pain in the back—you don’t have to move in with the pain.

Ajaan Lee, my teacher’s teacher, said, “Think of the body as being like a mango.” Sometimes you cut open a mango and you find there’s a worm or a rotten spot. You cut out that section of the mango. You don’t eat that section of the mango. You eat just the part that’s remaining.

Or it’s like going to a house where there are a few rotten spots in the floorboards. Don’t lie down on the rotten spots. Lie down on the good spots. You can’t wait for the whole body to be totally perfect before you settle down.

After all, we live in an imperfect world. You’re trying to develop what are called the perfections of the mind, the good qualities in the mind, and it’s in the midst of imperfection that you’ve got to do this. So you work around the imperfections to begin with.

Then, when you feel solidly based, you can begin to look into the pains to see what it is that makes them invade the mind. After all, the pains just sit there. They have no intention of invading your mind.

It’s more the case that you pull them in through your perceptions. Perceptions are the ways you label things, the images or words you have in mind that identify and give meaning to things. As the Buddha said, it’s this combination of perceptions and feelings that has a big impact on the mind.

So say there’s a pain in your knee. What is your perception of that pain? Does it have a color? Does it have a shape? Is it the same thing as your knee? Sometimes there’s a real feeling that that’s the case—the pain seems to saturate the knee.

But if you look really carefully at your sensation of the knee, you realize there are bodily sensations and pain sensations, and they’re two different kinds of things.

The bodily sensations are the solidity and the warmth or the coolness: the fact that there’s a liquid flowing through there; the fact that there’s energy flowing through there. The pain is none of these things. The pain is a sharpness that’s unpleasant.

See if you can make these distinctions.

Or you can ask yourself: Is the pain a solid block? Is it totally unrelenting? Or does it come and go in moments? If you look really carefully, you see that there are moments of pain. Hold that perception in mind for a while: It’s not as solid or as steady as you thought. And when those moments come, are they coming at you or are they going away?

The Buddha’s image for feelings like this is the bubbles that appear on the surface of a river when there’s rain. They appear and disappear immediately. Then they appear again and disappear, appear and disappear. If you have the perception they’re coming at you when they appear, change the perception. See that they’re actually going away from you.

It’s like sitting in the back of one of those old station wagons where the back seat faced back. As you rode along the road as somebody else was driving, anything that came into your range of vision was already going away from you as soon as it appeared. Applying that perception to the moments of pain, you find that you feel a lot less oppressed by the pain.

Or you can ask yourself: Where is the sharpest point of the pain? Instead of cringing and running away from the pain, you face it. And as you’re trying to chase down the sharpest point, you see that it moves around. It disappears for a while, then pops up someplace else.

Keep chasing it down like that. As you’re chasing it, you provide less of a target for the pain to hit you. You feel less suppressed by it. It doesn’t invade your mind. There come points where it actually seems that the body and the pain separate out from each other. It’s as if the pain is not actually in the body.

You begin to realize that your perception of the location of the pain is something the mind put onto the pain to begin with. This is an important lesson of the meditation.

We live in a world of our perceptions, the labels we put on things. The things themselves don’t have any name for themselves. We’re the ones who put the labels on them, and then we suffer from our labels, telling ourselves, “These labels are true, so I have to hold on to them.”

But a perception is just a sketch of reality. There are lots of different ways that you can sketch reality. It’s like having lots of different maps. We have a book over in the library, maps of the province of Saskatchewan. There are maps that show the roads, maps that show the mineral deposits, maps that show the climate areas, maps that show the rock and soil types—lots of different maps of the same place, different maps for different purposes.

And your perceptions are like a series of maps. So what’s the purpose of your perceptions? Why do you have to pin down the pain, saying that it’s located here or there? Especially when you notice that if you try to chase down the sharpest point of the pain, it moves, it runs away from you, that’s an opportunity to loosen up some of your perceptions. There are perceptions with which you’re making yourself suffer. There are other perceptions that are equally true but don’t make you suffer. Learning about them requires some imagination and some experimentation. This is a really important lesson in the meditation now.

We put together our experience in the present moment, yet all too often we put it together in a way that we’re causing ourselves pain, stress, worry. But we can put it together using the same raw materials and get something else out of it. There can be unpleasant things there, but you can learn how not to suffer from them—either by changing your perceptions or by changing the way you talk to yourself about these things.

You have more power than you usually think. So learn how to use it well. Because it can make a huge difference in your life.