Digesting Pain

by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

Primarily, we feel, we act on are our instincts. When we truly contemplate this situation, we have to acknowledge that these are not all-natural instincts, because some of them lead us against our fundamental innate desire to be happy. Not only do they lead us against it, but also they actually bring us suffering. Obviously, there are some flaws in these instincts! If they were natural, primordially pure instincts, they would not have any flaws.

These instincts are shaped and conditioned by the ignorant confusion of believing that there is a self and that that self is extremely important. To cling, cherish, and protect the self is a state of mind that has been with us for so long it feels completely natural — you might say instinctual. But if these were genuine, natural instincts, we could never get rid of them. If that were the case, nobody would be able to get enlightened. Precisely because there are so many individuals who have already become enlightened, we can say that self-clinging is not a truly natural, primordial instinct.

It’s not always good to fight against instincts. When we have a dualistic battle with them we can become quite discouraged and despondent, because they are so ingrained in our psyche. So, instead of dualistically battling with them, transform them.

Transform them skillfully with wisdom. The way to do this is to actually change the focus from ourselves to all others. Cherish others as we cherish ourselves; protect others as we protect ourselves, and by using our tendency to cherish and protect, our loving-kindness and compassion will increase. In doing this, we reverse the entire psychology without giving up working within the context of sentient mind.

These are the specific, great methods of the Mahayana teachings. Through them, what you experienced in the beginning as a problem later becomes an asset. It is also realistic, because if you had no experience of how to love, to imagine loving is very difficult. But if you have some understanding of how to love someone, even if it is yourself, then it is easy to love others as well. Basically, you just change the focus. Maybe you do not do so immediately, but gradually. You can’t stop making yourself the focus right away; it takes a long time to completely undo the habit that we all have. But if you actually practice, then slowly, slowly it changes. When you see the wisdom of doing such a thing for oneself and others — when that wisdom dawns much more clearly in your mind — you will naturally follow its lead. The habit becomes weaker and weaker.

When wisdom has not dawned clearly in us, this habit has much more power over us. When wisdom dawns within us, however, habit loses its grip. This is a process, rather than a leap of faith or intention. In this way we can all feel encouraged that whatever we are doing, a little practice of bodhichitta will eventually lead us somewhere, as long as we don’t give it up. This is also a safe path. If we try to leap, expecting to get there right away, it is difficult. We have a saying in Tibetan: “If a fox tries to leap the distance a lion can jump, the fox will break his back.” We have to be realistic. The point is not to get there immediately. The point is to cover the distance. If we proceed in this way, disappointment with ourselves and despondency over the lack of result in the practice will not arise.

Especially endeavour to integrate practice with our confusion and our afflicting emotions that create pain and suffering for us. To do this, we have to study and understand our confusion — really sit and examine our confusion and conflicting emotions, getting to know them and recognising how they don’t serve us.

This is not always an easy thing to do. Usually, the problem we have is not being able to sit with them, because a certain amount of pain is involved and we react against the pain and try to escape. We have to change that pattern. If we want to sit with our confusion, if we want to sit with our conflicting emotions, if we want to study and understand them more intimately, we have to be able to tolerate a certain degree of pain. Pain is actually the great doorway to self-reflection. Without the pain, we may have no reason to engage in self-reflection, or we may forget to do it even if we want to. By using pain as a doorway to self-reflection, we will find out a lot about our own mind and the way it is — both how it is functions and how it is dysfunctional.

Sit with and meditate on your mind to get a greater sense of freedom from negative habits and to gain more trust and confidence in its positive aspects. You will progress, depending on your merit and diligence, and increase your loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. If you have even a tinge of noble qualities, and you give your word to somebody, saying, “OK, I will do this for you,” you will either do it, try your best to do it, or at least feel some concern for not being able to follow your word if you fail in the attempt. It is very rare that basically good people will act completely irresponsibly or shamelessly and not keep their word. Everyone has some conscience. Everyone has some sense of dignity. Everyone has some sense of individual pride and some pinch of wanting to do what they say they will do, some desire to mean what they say.

When you are actually seriously contemplating cultivating the four immeasurables of lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity and you recite the lines, the next time you act in a way that goes against that you will feel a little bit of hesitation. You will feel a little bit like you should follow your words, thoughts, and intention. That is a good start. That is the beginning of practice. As time goes on, you will see how those heartfelt feelings are extended to others, how they cleanse, secure, and bring your mind to another level of happiness. Naturally you will walk towards that.

Becoming a practitioner is based on how interested we grow to be in this process. At first, we are not a practitioner; we are completely governed by habit. The mind of a practitioner begins as we train in the opposite and grow to be more reliable. Our mind becomes steadfast in our sanity and begins to serve us the way we intend it to do so. Prior to that, we were not stable because our minds were not stable. Mind was tumultuous, torturing us. But this is no longer the case. This kind of transformation is the true significance and meaning of becoming a practitioner, a student of the Dharma.

Without Dharma, as I said, we are like a fly fruitlessly trying to escape and hitting his head against a window. We resort to our own confusion, which does not provide us with any way out. I’m sure we all feel this sometimes. When we try to figure things out, our minds spinning and spinning, we get nowhere. The fear is actually making us more distressed. We are like that fly, exhausting ourselves and dying. Humans not only jeopardise themselves in this state; they jeopardise others as well.

In the Dharma there is a view. When there is a view, there is wisdom. When there is wisdom, there must be skilful means to apprehend that wisdom, which can be applied by individuals interested in practice. We need to simply rise to the occasion. We have to tolerate pain. If we have zero tolerance to pain, we will panic and forget to look into what we can do. The way to really become a practitioner is to have the courage to tolerate relative pain. There is no absolute pain. All relative pain must be tolerated with courage and an understanding that we can end the pain. We do so by first tolerating it, then figuring out the causes and conditions of it and reversing these causes and conditions.

We all know that we can bear physical pain. People sometimes even like physical pain, which is why they work out hard at the gym or climb Mount Everest. They actually bear physical pain quite well — but not mental, emotional pain. Mental pain is confusion itself, not knowing what to do. Emotional pain is feeling hurt. If you really look at who is hurt, nobody is hurt, since there is no self to hurt! It is only the mind that has gotten into this place where it feels hurt.

We try desperately to not experience this hurt or pain. When we realise there is no one to be hurt, only the mind imagining it is hurt, then the desperation is diffused, as it is recognised to be pointless. Everything passes; this feeling of hurt will also pass. We don’t need to act prematurely to get rid of it — even if we did, it might make it worse instead of better. This feeling of hurt or emotional pain interdependently originates with the self-being there as someone to be hurt. The mind projects the self-being offended and hurt, the mind conjures up the feeling of hurt, and then the mind also says, “It’s unreasonable; I can’t bear this! I need to patch this right away! I can’t stay one minute longer in this pain!” Of course, for someone who is not a practitioner, there is a legitimate pain and hurt, because one believes totally in the self and the experience of the self-being wronged. The pain and hurt are real and unbearable. There is a real desperation to feel healed.

As practitioners, we should train in seeing how all of this happens in the relative, as an illusion. Since it is all happening relatively, we shouldn’t take it completely seriously. It’s like how actors train. They go through the motions, but in actuality they know they are actors playing a role. It’s not real. We should start to see things that way.

Do not believe in the absolute, truly existing self, in mind, or in projections of the mind. The pain, the frustrations and desperations — none of these really exist. This is not merely hypothetical. When we have a glimpse of the nature of mind, we’ll know that all this play doesn’t truly exist. The insubstantiality of mind becomes our own true experience.

As you become more mentally focused and aware, you will not act out of habit and you will no longer become desperate and vulnerable. Simply summon up your courage to sit still, to be present, and practice whatever practice you do to penetrate to the core of your confusion. By doing this you can see that one minute you are in total misery and the next minute the misery has vanished. Your mind’s situation is temporary, transitory, and empty. Nothing is intrinsic: If it were, these moods would last forever, but they clearly do not.

Through practice, you can overcome the pain. At first, you become desperate so quickly. You throw in the towel so easily, like one of those guys in the boxing ring, and say, “I can’t do it.” Walking out of the ring is one thing, but with only your own mind involved, you cannot walk out on it. Where are you going to go? What are you going to actually achieve from that?

You have to be able to sit with your experience and tolerate it, to learn to let things pass. Immediately jumping into practice to kill the pain doesn’t work either, because of your desperation to remedy the pain. The pain doesn’t even have time to blossom. By leaping into practice, you are too attached to the cessation of pain. Acting out of fear never works, and practice used dualistically, like water on fire, is not that effective. Summon up your courage to let the pain fade away by itself. To enhance that process, practice.

I would encourage you to tolerate and find value in your pain in this way. Use your pain as a doorway to deep self-reflection regarding what you know about the Dharma. Become silent, and turn your attention inside; get centred, and become clear. It’s as if you had the skill to be a great marathon runner, but your own mind overwhelmed you to such a degree that you couldn’t even race with a child. In these situations, you fall under the power of confusion, which only gets worse by the minute. It is helpful to become silent and centred. In any kind of ordinary situation, when you lose your balance you have to get it back. Mentally you have to regain your poise as a practitioner. Expecting to have poise all the time is unrealistic. You are bound to lose your composure on occasion, and then the only question is how do you get it back.

What helps this process the most is your faith in your own ability as a practitioner — your faith in yourself. Where does that faith come from? It comes from the strength of your intention. The more you have the burning intention to become a practitioner, the more you will have faith in your ability to become a genuine practitioner. Moreover, your faith in the practice of Dharma will increase. Dharma practice is what all the tathagatas of the past have done so efficiently, and it worked for them.

When our yearning is merely lukewarm and our interest in practice is haphazard, our faith is undermined by our attitude. Even if we have faith, our interest doesn’t support it completely, so faith is not able to come in strongly in our time of need. When the interest and the yearning are there, strong faith intensifies. Belief and devotion strengthen. When devotion, faith, and the belief in the experience of being able to transform our mind by the skilful means of the tathagatas become a reality, it is not even a matter of faith any more. It is our experience, our life, and our own truth at that point. Confusion simply falls away.

I myself have trouble tolerating emotional pain, but I increasingly see how we must welcome our pain in order to become strong, stable, and capable of establishing ourselves as practitioners. We need to summon our courage to tolerate more pain in many different ways. Often, people think that tolerance means something like, “Grin and bear it.” Perhaps for just a little bit in the beginning there is an element of this, but from that point on tolerance is actually about becoming clear inside.

Use your view, your understanding, to allow the negative experience to actually dissolve by itself without putting more fuel on it. Apply your clear mind and intention. Work with your own understanding of the interdependent origination of how this pain has come to exist and how in reality it doesn’t exist, how it is just the play of illusion. In this way, even tolerance is not the right word. The phrase is more like “eat your pain.” When you eat it and digest it, metabolise it, it becomes nourishing. It’s no longer much of a problem. It’s like the metaphor of a peacock eating poison, transforming that which can harm into that which heals.

Get to know the pain more intimately. Getting to know your own pain intimately can make you revolt against the root cause that created the pain in the first place. Of course, you always feel the pain, but knowing the pain intimately is different from feeling the pain. Knowing the pain intimately means using discriminating awareness, discriminating intelligence. Feel the pain — even animals feel the pain. In working with knowing, you have to sit with your pain. You have to very objectively get into your pain to understand your pain more and then inspire yourself to be patient in order to work with it further.

Studying the problem first and then making a bridge to the practices that remedy it is a great Mahayana method for increasing paramita practice in your life. The only drawback is that often when you do this, a sense of discouragement or judgement of your own mind may show up. When this kind of aversion or nausea towards yourself arises, know that something positive is happening. Something is penetrating to the core. If you give in to it and quit, nothing will happen. The habit will stay intact. But if you don’t give in to it, if you simply continue your practice without giving in to these reactions, slowly the reactions will be overcome and you will not be so judgemental of yourself. You will find yourself thinking more intelligently, being more spacious with your own mind, tendencies, and habits. You will think about your habits from a different perspective, and this will be very good. When you know how to think about your own habits from a very objective viewpoint — when you are spacious with your own tendencies and don’t have unrealistic expectations for yourself — you will find a greater sense of peace and contentment within yourself right there and then, even though you may still have a lot of bad habits. So it’s very good to sit with your mind and study it in light of the four immeasurables, in light of altruistic mind, in light of the six paramitas.

Lastly, I want to say that people need the taste of peace, of joy, of freedom, of power, of a clear mind, of a contented mind, of being deeply in harmony with one’s mind, in order to sustain themselves on the path. If there is no integration of these qualities, if there is only self-hate and self-reproach, it doesn’t happen. There has to be an appreciation of one’s positive side as well as one’s negative side. The positive side has to get stronger, edging out the negative side, rather than completely rejecting the negative side or not even knowing what it is.

This whole dualistic tendency is the biggest problem of a practitioner’s life. It’s not because the teachings are taught in that way or that the path is that way, but rather because it’s how we relate to everything in the world. We relate in a dualistic way, so that when we come to the path, when we come to the Dharma, we relate to our obscurations in a negative way and get aggressive with ourselves.

In actuality, the potential is very beautiful. It’s very beautiful in that you can have room for it all. You can actually have a dance with the habits, and you can actually slowly and firmly get ahead of your habits, outsmart your habits. In order to outsmart your habits, you need to know your habits. When you are in a blind state, the tricks played on you by your habits and weaknesses can get you. But if you are not blind, they have no way to hook you. If you don’t study those blind spots and do research on them, it’s very difficult to outsmart your habits. Sometimes a big blessing can come, and then all of a sudden you get some kind of breakthrough. Usually, though, it’s very hard to get some kind of leverage with your habits. That’s why it’s good to treat our most negative and bothersome habits as a subject of study and research.