The Loosening of a Belief
El Aflojamiento de una Creencia
A question about heightened bodily sensitivity, the fear of feeling pain, and a puzzling movement toward the very pain one used to avoid.
The Loosening of a Belief
A question about heightened bodily sensitivity, the fear of feeling pain, and a puzzling movement toward the very pain one used to avoid.
What has been coming up is so much sensitivity in the body. I can see how a fear arises, the fear of the pain of what comes up, and there is a protection that arrives right away, contracting inward. I can see this. It has been happening since childhood, like when parents were screaming at each other and there was so much pain that I withdrew into the sense of thought, of "I," into a kind of internal world protected from the outside. Now, with this deeper work, the body is getting so much more sensitive to everything, and I can really feel that fear of contracting for safety, for preservation, so as not to feel the pain. At the same time, there is a feeling of a movement toward it. That is a strange movement. I don't know if you have anything to say about that.
Yes, definitely. This is the human experience. In childhood, everything is set up to seem so clearly that what we are is this body. So the destiny of the body becomes the most important thing. Destiny in the sense of how I'm going to feel tomorrow, what's going to happen to me in the next few moments. This becomes a kind of obsession of thinking and thinking, because we recognize that there is a big impact between the circumstances and events of life and how the body feels.
In a sense, we begin this life in a school of learning that impact, learning to manage it. There is a usefulness in learning how to survive, for the body to be safe and well.
Where the belief overreaches
But what happens is that there is a movement too far into the confusion, into the idea or belief that all of what we are is this body, that we are nothing more. That fundamentally the essence of what we are, meaning all of what we are, is bound by the body, so that whatever happens to the body happens to the totality of what we are. That is not true. That is a belief.
This is not something we can debate and resolve into an intellectual clarity or agreement. It can only be known through experience. It can only be recognized by you. It cannot be taught in a book, in the sense that you learn it, understand it, and now it is true to you, because it has to do with the ending of a belief, not the acquiring of another belief.
This is what we mean when we talk about awakening or realization. Different levels or depths of realizing that what we are is not only the body, not bound by the body. The same goes for the mind. The mind is where the belief inhabits, where the belief happens.
Why pain intensifies
The experience of pain is a very important trigger for this belief, because it is at the center of what we are trying to avoid, especially when the belief is ingrained that what we are is the body and only the body. Awakening is often a process of deeper and deeper layers of this one belief falling away.
What you are describing, this greater sensitivity, is the numbing of the sensations falling away. Part of how we manage pain is through beliefs that help numb the experience of the body. As we awaken, those filters that create the numbing start to fall away, and so the intensity of sensation, of pain, even of feeling at the heart level, becomes louder, because the filtering thins out. It begins to challenge us at a deeper, more subtle level of belief.
We would imagine that once we have some level of realization or awakening, then pain is going to matter less, that we will feel it less. In fact, it is often the opposite. We become far more sensitive, and things become more intense. Then the deeper, more subtle beliefs start to come to the surface to be met and seen for what they are, which is mind and thought and belief. But until they are seen as what they are, they are reality. They are the experience of reality.
The movement toward pain
So you are describing a movement in you toward that pain.
Not that I am trying to do it. I don't know who is trying to do it. It is just happening.
The movement toward it is happening. That is part of the instinct of freeing, the instinct to know directly what things are, to undo the avoidance and resistance. It is an instinct, but the instinct of awakening. It is a curiosity: what is this, really? The wanting, the curiosity of intimacy with what is, because what is, is in this moment. If there is physical pain, then there is going to be the narrower instinct, narrow meaning more limited, more of a lower level, which is to avoid, to control, to numb, to fix.
As you have seen through that enough, you have found that its utility goes down. It is no longer that useful, because you are becoming familiar with the pain and realizing it is not that big of a deal. So there is less need to avoid and fix, and through that, the intimacy with it grows. The pain is more present when it comes. It comes and it goes, but it is more present.
When pain stops being pain
What can happen then is a lighting up of the instinct to know more directly and intimately what that is. It could become the absolute, total, unfiltered sensing of pain. It comes and it goes, and at that level pain stops being pain, because "pain" is a name, a label. The actual experience is an energy. I call it an energy, but that too is a label. My point is that it is just a flavor of experience.
Yes, I understand.