Pain is Pleasure. Pleasure is pain.

On transforming sensation through awareness

Over the past month, I’ve had some health stuff come up.

Maybe in a later post, I’ll share more specifically. But, for now, as I’ve been experiencing more of what we can label as pain (physically, mentally, emotionally), a question kept arising: what would it mean to actually be with this? Not push through it. Not resist it. Not wait for it to pass. But to meet it fully and allow it to transform me.

That question opened something. And, here’s what I’ve learned thus far:

One.

In the meditative tradition I primarily practice, which is a form of Tibetan Buddhism, often what happens when we experience increased pain, so much so that we feel collapsed by it, it means that our orientation, our level or depth of awareness, is orienting from the self.

If that’s confusing, most simply: in Tibetan Buddhism, there are a variety of stages of awareness. Most people experience reality from the inside looking out. They have a very dual experience of their reality. That’s orienting from the self.

Then someone might have a more spacious awareness. They might be orienting from what some call like an aura, or their energetic body, slightly beyond their self. Some might have a non-dual orientation, meaning they don’t feel any inside or outside, and they rest into the oneness that is the awareness permeating all reality.

And higher stages of awareness, which I won’t go deep into, is what Tibetan Buddhism refers to as awakened awareness. This is where there’s the ground of experience, the awareness that permeates all reality, and then the phenomena that arise from that ground. Awakened awareness is when all phenomena reinforces the view and tracelessness, where you reorient back to the ground and simply witness the unfolding of all reality experiencing itself in front of you.

So going back to how this relates to pleasure and pain.

Oftentimes, when we are collapsed by experiencing pain, if we have a deeper stage of awareness available to us, we slip back into reorienting from the self. And when we orient from the self, it can really only handle so much. It can really only handle so much sensation, whether we label it as pain or pleasure or delight.

I’ve struggled with really intense bouts of anxiety and depression, and I notice when I’ve experienced these very coarse mental-emotional states, my stage of awareness drops to a lower level where I’m experiencing reality from inside and outside. Very dualistic. And that’s a very clear flag.

Because when you’re experiencing immense pain, to really see the wisdom available from that emotion and that experience, what can be very helpful is to be fully with it in your direct experience. Resting in the non-dual unbounded wholeness that’s available in your reality. And then from that space: what is the wisdom arising from this?

So that’s number one. What stage of awareness are you orienting from?

via Midjourney

Two.

What I’ve found upon resting in deeper stages of awareness while experiencing very dense sensation, often what people would label as pain, is that there are levels to how we experience sensation.

There is sensation that we experience in the body, the physical body. From that, there’s an emotion that may sprout from that sensation, or a thought. And these three take an interwoven loop of direct experience, interplaying with each other.

Upon expanding your aperture of awareness enough, you can see the space between the sensations and how you’re starting to label those sensations. Am I labeling it as good or bad?

In Vipassana or insight-type meditative traditions, which have become increasingly popular, the language often used is craving and aversion. Do you want a lot more of it, maybe become addicted to it? Or are you trying to push it away?

It’s in that space that you can really start to see. That’s where suffering lies, in this space of increased craving. Do I need more more more more more? Or am I pushing away, pushing away, pushing away?

So: how am I relating to this sensation? Am I labeling it as positive or negative, good or bad?

From there: is there a story or narrative, or even an identity, that’s wrapped up in this?

For me, for quite a long time, I’ve worked with this narrative of being a perfectionist. Holding on, gripping onto my experience of life so tightly. Hoping, wishing, wanting, desiring for it to be a certain way. Yet, the unfolding nature proves time and time again another route. Upon shifting this narrative, it completely transforms how I experience the unfolding on my reality.

There can be different narratives, whether conscious or subconscious, that are driving how we relate to it.

Three.

If you’re experiencing so much direct pain, so much coarse sensation, a very direct way to reprogram it is through different practices.

Think about something that brings you delight or joy or pleasure. This can be in a sensual or sexual context. This can be from a laughing, hilarious kind of context. This could simply be something that puts a smile on your face and brings you joy.

Or it can work in the other direction. Think of something like an ice bath. You’re deliberately entering what we would call a negative experience, a coarse and intense sensation, and allowing that exposure to transform your relationship to it. You’re training the body and the nervous system to stay open, to not collapse, to find stillness and even pleasure inside what the mind wants to label as pain.

But the depth of this positive experience needs to equal the depth of what we’re calling the negative or painful experience.

What this does, and I’ve found it cuts through, is it rewrites that pain into what we can call pleasure. It cuts through our labeling. It cuts through the emotions, the thoughts. Not to say the sensations will go away. This is not medical advice. Though, I’ve found through direct experience, it can eventually lead to a release of these sensations, it might result in immediate release of them too.

But the essence here is how to use action to rewrite how we experience reality.

It can lead to such immense ecstasy. Such divine yumminess. A complete rewriting of what the body knows to be true.

And maybe that’s the main takeaway here. That pain and pleasure aren’t opposites at all. They’re the same energy, the same sensations, filtered through different lenses—stages of awareness, different stories, different labels.

When you drop all of that, what remains is just sensation. Just life moving through you.

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Emergence with Rachel Weissman is a weekly exploration of the interconnections between consciousness, technology, and planetary flourishing.

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