Pain and how I got beyond it

Swiss Sayalay Khema Cari (Italy) edited/explained: Dhr. Seven, Ellie Askew, Wisdom Quarterly

How can I help my parents and myself?

A few years ago, as a Western novice nun in Burma, I did a retreat in a Burmese monastery famous for being very strict, Thae Inn Gu, with Sayadaw Sandima.

It's famous because meditators have to practice very strenuously. Retreatants are not allowed to continue unless they are very serious and try very hard.

The​ first evening, with my father on the phone, I told him I would go off medications for some time. He announced that he had to undergo surgery. The side effects of the toxic chemo he was undergoing were too harsh, and he had to have an organ removed.

I felt very sad, thinking what a bad daughter I had been. He was in danger yet couldn't contact me because I was on retreat. I was struggling with thoughts that I might be acting egoistically when he needed me most as my meditation course began.

I thought full lotus would kill me, but it was fine.

We were instructed to sit in full-lotus position for meditation with the aim of staying without moving even a finger for as long as possible (eventually building up to two hours).

That length of time means pain. But they teach us HOW to detach from pain. The more I was training to detach and learning about pain itself, the less I had any doubts I was doing the right thing to help my father.

After all, if I really wanted, I could move and escape the physical pain while sitting. But what about my father?

He might end up in a bed in tremendous pain, unable to adjust to relieve it. There would be no escape. It didn't matter that I could phone him to distract him, in the end he would still be alone, dealing with his own pain.

We are all alone in this way. Sooner or later each one of us will have to face pain. Sooner or later, death. We'll have no way to escape it, no way to distract ourselves from it, no medicine to relieve it. Will we face and accept it then?

There's pain, and there's mental suffering.

On retreat at Thae Inn Gu (Theingu, Thé Inn Gu), I discovered that there are two kinds of pain, mental and physical.

Mental pain adds a lot of unnecessary suffering to the tangible physical pain. However, it can be abandoned mentally.

Physical pain is difficult to accept, but if we look at it precisely, a strange thing becomes clear: It is not long-lasting.

Westerners have lots to learn from the East.

This kind of pain is actually a succession of many sensations, one after the other. It's constantly changing. Whatever starts has to end, and it's constantly ending. There's nothing to do, nothing we can do to end it, but we resist. And this causes a lot of extra pain, resistance, aversion, exhaustion, anger...

Pain ends by its own intrinsic nature (swabhava). It constantly changes by its own nature. There's nothing to do but observe this nature with right understanding -- neither attaching to it nor rejecting it, just experiencing it.

Fear of pain is no longer needed because we really only fear what we don't know. If we know by experience that pain is short lived rather than enduring, fear subsides. And we can open up, exhale. Why? We can tolerate short, momentary bursts. They keep ending.

Great realization

Some of the Sayadaws of Burma know and see.
Don't Look Down on the Defilements (Tejaniya)

These realizations were great, but there was a greater realization. I ended all doubts that now I could really help my father.

If I could not teach him to be free from pain and resistance, I could at least be free from fear and help him by not adding my fear to his. That is definitely the best thing I could have done.

Most Westerners criticize such meditation practices, judging them as "extreme." This is because we misunderstand pain, assuming the pain is extreme. Pain is not extreme. Pain is just nature. ​Rejecting it or attaching to it or misconstruing is extreme!

• [Three Poisons of the Mind/Heart: the human habit of clinging to what we like, hating or fearing what we dislike, and reacting with delusion as to what is and isn't real.]

All our days, our whole lives, we stay busy, preoccupied with trying to avoid pain and any kind of discomfort. We think there's nothing wrong with these desperate and vain attempts at escaping.

I can't stand it. I'm afraid! I hate it!

But actually this is creating fear and therefore creating more mental pain. In Buddhist psychology, FEAR is another kind of aversion called dosa (Sanskrit dvesha) just like hatred, anger, turning away, and rejecting what is.

Instead, what if every moment that there's an unpleasant sensation we were to try to observe our reaction? All of our lives we just swing from rejecting pain -- uncomfortable feelings, sights, sounds, odors, flavors, impressions -- attaching to any kind of relief or distraction. There's nothing else we are doing in between.

What is the true nature of things/phenomena?

This is why the Buddha taught the Middle Way, which avoids the extremes of languid hedonism and severe asceticism. Experience, according to my teacher (Sayadaw Ottamassara), is to "know-only, to use-only, to experience-only, to do-only," avoiding the extremes of rejecting and attaching to experience.

We get all we need to study at every single moment if we stay present. There is time to understand the Truth -- the true nature of things -- the swabhava. It's so important that my teacher calls all of his centers the Burmese for this word, Thabarwa.

• Theingu Sayadaw and Meditation Monastery (Burma Dhamma)
• A different U Sandima? Rape charges filed against monk who won million-dollar lottery (myanmar-now.org)
• Book review of A Journey to Eternal Peace by Sayadaw U Sandima of Theinngu Monastery, Burma/Myanmar (Dhamma Wheel Buddhist Forum)