The Karma of Pain

Yesterday morning we talked about how to treat the problem of distraction in light of the Buddha’s teachings on karma. This morning I’d like to talk about using the same approach to dealing with pain.

As with distraction, pain can arise either from past karma or from present karma. Whether you suffer from it or not will depend on the choices you make right now, along with the skills you’ve developed in terms of fashioning the present moment with acts of attention, intention, and the three fabrications. Sometimes you can use these present-moment actions to make the pain go away. But even if you can’t make the pain go away, you can still learn not to let it invade your mind and remain. In fact, that’s the ideal intention to have with regard to pain: that it not invade your mind or remain there.

The ways to deal with pain are directly related to the Buddha’s instructions on how to use the breath as a topic for understanding feelings. There are four steps altogether.

The first step is to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture—and here the word “rapture,” pīti, can also mean fullness or refreshment.

The second step is to breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure or ease.

The third is to breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions.

The fourth step is to breathe in and out calming these mental fabrications.

Now, of the various forest ajaans, Ajaan Lee gives the most detailed instructions on the first two steps, and Ajaan Maha Bua gives the most detailed instructions on the last two. Let’s look at what they have to say.

With regard to breathing in and out sensitive to rapture, Ajaan Lee recommends, when there are pains in the body, not to focus on the pains immediately. Focus instead on the parts of the body that you can make comfortable and refreshing with the breath.

This requires some mental fabrication: perceptions. First, you have to perceive that there is breath energy already permeating your body. Sometimes as you breathe in and breathe out, there will be a sense of movement in the breath energy in different parts of the body. Other times, it’ll be still, but either way, it’s an energy. Hold that perception in mind. That’s the perception, the mental fabrication, you’ll use in order to spread the breath energy, together with the fullness and pleasure, throughout the body.

There are different perceptions you can hold in mind to help you feel the sense of the breath energy moving. For instance, you can think of the body as being like a sponge: As you breathe in and out, the breath comes in and out through all the pores of the sponge, and there’s nothing getting in the way. Another perception is that there’s a column of energy going down the middle of the body, and as you breathe in, energy comes in from the outside and goes into the column of energy, and as you breathe out, it goes out of the body in all directions from that column of energy. As you hold in mind the possibility that breath energy can do this, you will begin to sense that, yes, there is a movement.

Even though you use images to induce this sensitivity, that doesn’t mean that the energy is imaginary. It’s like telling a child that the world is round. As far as the child is concerned, the world doesn’t look round, so he has to imagine it as round. But as the child grows up, he begins to realize that, yes, the world is round. If you’re going to fly the quickest route from, say, Los Angeles to Bangkok, you have to fly over Alaska. If the world were flat, that wouldn’t work. But because the world is round, that’s the way you have to fly to save time. In the same way, you use your imagination to allow yourself to think that the breath energy does flow, and then as you get more and more sensitive to the body, you begin to realize that it actually does.

When you feel secure in that good breath energy—accompanied by a sense of pleasure and fullness—the next step is to think of the energy radiating from the comfortable spot and going through the pain.

For instance, suppose you have a pain in your knee. Ajaan Lee recommends imagining the breath energy going down the leg and not stopping at the knee, but going through the knee and out the foot. If you think of the energy stopping right at the pain, that’ll reinforce the sense of tension around the pain, which is part of the problem.

In some cases, you’ll find that the pain will actually go away. That’s a sign that the pain was caused by something you’re doing right now. In other cases, though, the pain will still be there, which is a sign that the pain is caused by something that you did before you sat here or simply by the fact that your body is not yet used to this posture.

If you’re new to the meditation posture, there will inevitably be a period in which there’s pain in the legs as the blood is being blocked or being squeezed out of the part where the legs are folded. This forces the blood out of the main arteries into the capillaries. It’s as if there were a traffic jam on a main road, and the traffic has to go down through the small streets, where it gets even more jammed.

The difference with your body, though, is that if you keep forcing the blood through those capillaries by sitting in this posture again and again, the capillaries will eventually begin to expand. In other words, you’re turning them into new arteries. Streets can’t do this, but blood vessels can. If you have some patience with these kinds of pain, eventually they will go away over time as your body gets more adapted to the meditation posture.

You’ll notice that a large factor in making use of feelings of rapture and pleasure lies in the perceptions you bring to them. The same principle applies to feelings of pain. Your perceptions of pain play a huge role in the impact it has on the mind.

This brings us to the third and fourth steps in the tetrad, getting sensitive to mental fabrication and calming it. To sensitize yourself to how perceptions of pain may be affecting your mind, Ajaan Maha Bua recommends that you ask questions about how you perceive the pain. This would be an example of applying appropriate attention to the pain.

For example, he says, suppose there’s a pain in your hip: Is the pain the same thing as the hip? Or are there two different kinds of sensations in the same place? In other words, the sensation of the body is one thing and the sensation of the pain is something else. Now, your rational mind knows that these are two separate things, but all too often in our direct experience of the pain, something in the mind says that the pain and the body have become one and the same thing. The pain has invaded the body, and you’re trying to push it out.

So here, to calm the perception, you have to change it. The body and the pain are two separate things even though they’re in the same spot. The sensations of the body are the four elementary physical properties of earth (solidity), water (liquidity), fire (warmth), and wind (energy), but the sensation of pain is none of these things. It’s as if it’s on a different frequency—like radio waves going through the air. You put a radio in one spot, you adjust the dial to one frequency, and you get one station. If you adjust it to another frequency, there’s another station.

You don’t have to move the radio to a different spot to get a different station, because the waves are all in the same place, and yet you can separate them out because their frequencies are different, and you’ve got something that can detect the difference. See if you can do the same thing with the sensations of the pain and sensations of the body in that one spot.

Another perception that might be playing a role in your experience of pain comes from the notion that we have to be responsible for our pains. In other words, right now you think you’ve got to warn the next moment in the future that there’s a pain right here. To correct that tendency, tell yourself, “I don’t have to tell the future. The future will find out on its own.” Otherwise, you use perceptions to keep sending a message from one moment to the next to the next, which stitches the pains together, adding to the pain and suffering.

A similar problem is with verbal fabrication: You’re sitting with some pain and you keep telling yourself, “I’ve been sitting with this pain for the past 15 minutes and the session’s going to last for another 45 minutes.” That’s 60 minutes of pain placed on top of one moment, and then, of course, the present moment will break down.

Ajaan Lee has a good image for problems of this sort: You’re plowing a field, and next to the plow you’ve attached a big bag. As the dirt falls off the plow, you put it in the bag. Of course, you’re going to get weighed down. So, simply get rid of the bag and let the pain fall off at the first moment. You don’t have to feel responsible for it; you don’t have to keep a record of it. Just stay with the sensation in the present moment.

Ajaan Maha Bua notes that you can also ask yourself if the pain has a bad intention toward you. If you have a perception that it means to hurt you, remind yourself that the pain has no intentions at all. Or you can ask: “Is the pain one solid thing? Does it have a shape in your imagination or is it simply different moments of pain arising and passing way?” If you look very carefully, you see that it is made up of individual moments. So, try to drop the perception that the pain is solid or has a shape.

Then you look at those moments of pain and ask yourself: “As they appear, are they coming at me or are they going away?”

If you have the perception they’re coming at you, that will make you suffer more from the pain. You feel like a target. But if you can hold in mind the perception that as soon as they appear they’re going away from you, you’ll suffer a lot less. It’s like sitting on a truck facing backwards. As you go down the road, as soon as anything appears in your range of vision, it’s already going away from you. This perception can help make you suffer a lot less from the pain.

Another question Ajaan Maha Bua recommends asking is, “Where is the sharpest point of the pain?” Then try to track it down.

Or ask yourself, as you breathe in, “Which direction is the breath coming from as it goes through the pain? Can I switch the direction?” See what that does.

The important thing, though, is that you show that you’re not afraid of the pain. You’ll find that even if you don’t change the direction of the breath, the spot of the most intense part of the pain keeps shifting around. This teaches you two lessons. One is that the pain is not as solid as you thought it was. The second is that as long as you keep pursuing questions about how you perceive the pain, the mind becomes a moving target. When you’re a moving target, it’s harder for the pain to hit you. If you just sit there and suffer from the pain, complaining to yourself about it, then you’re an easy target to hit. But if you make it your purpose to understand the pain, then you’re going to suffer a lot less from it.

This is precisely what the Buddha has you do. He says your duty with regard to pain is not just to endure it, and it’s not to make it go away. The duty is to comprehend it. That should be your ideal intention when dealing with the pain. You comprehend it by asking questions and being curious about it. That would be an example of applying appropriate attention.

The ideal intention and way of paying attention require that you be fearless of the pain, which requires in turn that you have a good foundation inside. This is why we first work to make the breath comfortable so that when the pain gets too intense for us, we know we have a comfortable place to retreat to. But as the Buddha said, if you really comprehend the suffering that you create around the pain, then you’ll find that you can locate the cause of suffering and abandon the cause. And the cause will be in the mind: right around the perceptions you have around the pain. When you find the mental act that causes the mind to suffer around the pain, you can drop it.

That way, even though the pain may still be there, you don’t have to suffer from it. That’s the duty with regard to right view.

One of the insights you gain by trying to comprehend pain in this way is seeing the extent to which you’re making choices in the present moment that you normally are not aware of. As we’ve said, the present moment is not simply given to you from the past. You’re also shaping it in the present moment as well. You come to see that if you shape it with ignorance, it’s going to cause suffering. If you shape it with knowledge, it becomes part of the path to the end of suffering. We suffer not because of our past karma but because of our present karma: what we’re doing right now. If you can see your present karma clearly, you can get rid of the suffering with which you’re weighing your own mind down. And that’s the only suffering that places a weight on the mind.

One day, when a group of us were sitting at the monastery in California, Ajaan Suwat pointed to the mountain across the valley and asked, “That mountain: Is it heavy?” Now, when an ajaan asks a question like this, it’s a trick question. So nobody answered. He finally said, “Only if you try to pick it up is it going to be heavy. If you don’t try to pick it up, it may be heavy in and of itself, but it’s not heavy on you, and that’s all that matters.” In the same way, the suffering that we cause in the present moment is like picking up the mountain. If you stop creating that suffering, the other pains and disappointments in the world will not impinge on the mind. They may be heavy in and of themselves, but they’re not heavy on you. And that’s all you’re responsible for.

So, it’s important that you not be afraid of pain. But if you’re just getting started in meditation, don’t try to force your endurance too much. If the pain is so intense that you can’t focus on the breath, then very mindfully change your position. But if you find that you can stay with the breath in spite of the pain, then use the breath to create that foundation you need in order to understand the pain. And maybe you’ll gain some important insights of your own.