Feeling of and Attitude toward Pain

As for the pain, that also becomes something you can approach with the tools you’ve learned from your technique. Try breathing through the tension around the pain. If the pain is in your knee, you can think of the breath coming in and out right at the knee. Or you can think of it going down the leg and through the pain in the knee and then out through the toes. Or if it’s already coming into the knee, you can think of it coming in from the kneecap or coming in from behind the knee. There are all kinds of ways you can play with your perceptions of the breath.

As you experiment with them, you find that they have an important impact on the actual feeling of pain and your attitude toward the pain. You feel less threatened by it. You begin to develop an inquisitive attitude, which, as the Buddha said, is how you approach the First Noble Truth. You want to comprehend it, and that requires you to be inquisitive about pain, trying to understand it.

So the breathing technique gives you several important approaches for dealing with the pain. Instead of just sitting here and spinning out over the pain — thinking, “Here I am sitting and hurting myself by letting my knee get all bent up like this” — you can focus instead on, “Okay, what are the mechanics of the pain? How do they relate to the energy flow in the body?”

Having a comfortable breath sensation as your basis in some other part of the body gives you a place you can go when the pain gets too much to handle. You’ve got a place you can turn around and run to, and when you have that sense of safety and security then you feel less threatened by the pain. You’re more inquisitive, and at the same time you actually have tools that can lessen the pain.

And because your approach is one of being inquisitive rather than trying to push the pain away or squeeze it away, your attitude is going to have a huge effect on how you experience the pain. There are cases where the change in attitude will make the pain go away. At other times the pain won’t go away but it doesn’t matter because you’re not involved in trying to feed off the pain.

You don’t find yourself forced to consume the pain. You’re not a consumer anymore. You’re an experimenter, inquiring into “What’s the nature of this pain? How much does the way you breathe affect the pain? How much does your attitude affect the pain? What are you doing that makes the pain hurt the mind?”

After all, the pain is something in the body. It doesn’t have to hurt the mind. We’re doing unskillful things; we have unskillful attitudes, unskillful ways of relating to the pain that drag it into the mind. We’ve got to turn around and look: “Okay, what are we doing that turns the pain into suffering for the mind?

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the book, Meditations 3, (pdf) pp. 49-50.