It means you no longer experience it as an explicitly negative experience. While physiologically the pain signals are still present, your brain's reaction to them changes. Most notably (in my experience) the change occurs when one learns to stop resisting in any fashion the experience of the pain and just accepting it is there, neutrally observing it. From an uninitiated person's standpoint, I can't say this means things will no longer "hurt," they still do, you just change what it even means to be hurting. At the very least from something that is unequivocally negative and must subside, to something neutral that is occurring in the midst of everything else that is occurring.
We've conditioned ourselves to pay close attention to pain for obvious reasons (e.g. something presents an acute threat to our survival), and we respond by escaping the sensation as quickly as we can.
With practice, we can learn to accept pain as any another sensation. If you're not afraid of death, it won't bother you at all. If (like most of us) you do, next time you stub your toe, recognize your conditioned response of trying to soothe the pain, just try leaning into it a bit. Know it won't kill you. Just take the opportunity to explore the experience and try to understand it more deeply. Remind yourself that you're not in danger, accept you can't unstub your toe (or whatever it may be), realize that the fight or flight response isn't necessary or appropriate, you can take more of your attention back from it than you gave it in the first place. It will still hurt, but you can make it much quieter, as it were.
> We've conditioned ourselves to pay close attention to pain for obvious reasons ...
Have we conditioned ourselves to acknowledge pain? It seems to me that we evolved the ability to have pain, which is, by definition, a sensation that grabs your attention right away.
> If you're not afraid of death, it won't bother you at all.
Am I understanding your phrasing correctly? That, if you're not afraid of death, then physical pain won't bother you at all? I don't think that's right.
Another q: What kind of benefit/enlightenment do you achieve by leaning into the pain of a stubbed toe? Why lean in to it and pretend that you're "above the pain", instead of shouting out a swear word, complaining about it for a minute or two, and then moving on with your life?
>Have we conditioned ourselves to acknowledge pain? It seems to me that we evolved the ability to have pain, which is, by definition, a sensation that grabs your attention right away.
I don't know if I understand what you mean. I agree that we evolved to have pain for a very important reason and that it's extremely useful to react to it differently than other sensations. But does a relatively light, non-life-threatening pain need to take so much of your attention once you realize you're not in danger?
>Am I understanding your phrasing correctly? That, if you're not afraid of death, then physical pain won't bother you at all? I don't think that's right.
I'm not saying submit to it willingly, or not to escape if it's possible, but otherwise yes. To me it's the struggling against the pain that causes suffering.
>Another q: What kind of benefit/enlightenment do you achieve by leaning into the pain of a stubbed toe? Why lean in to it and pretend that you
Thanks for the reply. So, if you're injured, it still hurts. But what changes is your response, mentally. You gain the ability to peacefully endure, even study, the pain because you're smarter than it? And this ability comes as a result of meditation? Can the same thing be achieved by telling someone to "suck it up" if they stub their toe?
>You gain the ability to peacefully endure, even study, the pain because you're smarter than it?
Kind of, yeah. It's something I've experimented with. The longer I focus on something painful the less it bothers me. It just sort of feels hot. But once I start to do something else with my body that agitates it, it provokes the strong response that takes my attention away immediately. I'm not that quick to take it back, or turn it down, yet. It's the revoking of ALL my attention while I'm trying to do something else makes me feel angry, like anyone being nagged with useless information at relentless volume and frequency. Nothing you can do except give it less of your attention and remember that getting angry is the exact opposite thing. It does take a lot of practice, I think.
>And this ability comes as a result of meditation?
Definitely. Meditation is the practice of training your attention, among other things.
>Can the same thing be achieved by telling someone to "suck it up" if they stub their toe?
It depends. If you said that to a stranger, they'd tell you to go to hell (more or less). If you said it to someone to whom you were the whole world, you'd create a louder pain that would drown it out. But they'd still be suffering.
Re "suck it up". I think you brought up two extremes: a stranger, and a loved one. But if my friend tells me to suck it up, I don't get offended, I'll just take it as an informed suggestion. And he'd usually be right. The cons of outwardly expressing the pain of stubbing a toe far outweigh the pros (are there any?).
Thanks again for your responses. A lot of the meditation talk still sounds a lot like "it was great but hard to explain, but you had to be there". I want to try it soon.
Oh definitely, I did that intentionally just to show that it was relative. I'm only speaking for myself, but I don't think an informed suggestion, even a kinder one, would have helped without having practiced giving and revoking attention to something I hadn't really looked at much before.
My pleasure - that's kind of the thing. All subjective experiences are impossible to define until we create words for them and know that we've shared the same experience with others. But we know that subjective experience is completely real. And it's everything.
after long periods of sitting, you end up having to confront pain very closely. When you inspect it with your meditating mind, you can actually see that it isn't directly "hurting you". Instead the pain is just recognized for what it is, a physical sensation; energy moving through your body that is ever slightly changing and won't last.
It went far beyond what some of the other commenters are suggesting. It wasn't merely a conscious realisation that the sensation of pain could be reframed as mere sensation; it was a deep reconceptualization of the pain as 'vibrations'. (I realise how kooky this sounds, which is why I didn't go into details in the above comment.)
The pain of sitting for 10 hours a day was actually just a feeling of... energy? I struggle to find a fitting word. A fly landing on my face was no longer annoying; it was a blissful reminder to stay in the present moment.