Being present with chronic pain and acute discomfort—like throbbing, aching, or itching—can be extremly difficult. Some experiences of pain reveal themselves as shifting and vibrating energy when the light of attention shines on them, but others seem intractable. I've tried breathing into such pain, pouring attention into it, but have noticed that this doesn't seem to help—I feel myself hardening up and turning the pain into an enemy. The next thing I know, I feel defeated and utterly exhausted, and the sense of self feels massive. The I screams for relief, respite, oblivion.
In this excerpt from a presentation on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, Ken explains what happens energetically when we focus attention on a painful locus. I've found his instruction to be aware of the whole body—including the pain—to be particularly relevant as I grow older, although remembering to open and loosen the focus can be a challenge!
From Eightfold Path 2
Now I'm not quite sure how this happened—I think there are a number of possible ways—but people tend to associate mindfulness and attention with the narrowing of attention. It may be the word "concentrate" was influential here. And so people often approach their practice, and approach any form of practice of attention, with the focus of narrowing and excluding things. And this has been really problematic in a lot of people's practices. Because when they're excluding things stuff gets suppressed and that comes back to bite them in all kinds of ways. Creates sometimes quite severe imbalances.
One of the principles which at some point I was forced to start relating to—because I was getting into such a bad place in my practice—is the notion of inclusive attention. That is you include everything in your experience. So you may be attending to something, but you don't ignore everything else. And so at the beginning of the meditation period when I said to you, "Rest in the experience of breathing," it's different from focusing on the breath. When you rest in the experience of breathing you are in the experience of breathing, but as you rest more and more completely you include absolutely everything that you experience. Don't be distracted by any of it, but include everything you experience because it's all part of the experience of breathing. And you'll still be right there with the breath, but experiencing everything. This notion of inclusive attention really helps you form a relationship with your experience that is free from struggle, which is really the point of the whole exercise. So that's something I think you may find helpful.
One of the ways that I've found to work with pain and discomfort in the body is an application of this. I had a lot of difficulty with pain in the three-year retreat and I took the instruction to put my attention on the pain. It was not a good thing to do. I learned much later that when you put your attention on something, energy collects there. And so if you put your attention on a pain in your body then you are often drawing energy into a place that is already stagnant. The energy stagnates and makes things worse.
What I found works much better is to be aware of your whole body and include the sensation of pain in the awareness of the whole body. And that way you aren't focusing on the pain, but you are opening to the experience of it. Because you aren't focusing on the pain you aren't sending energy into that. Because you're aware of the whole body you're creating the conditions in which energy can circulate freely in the body in the way that is natural for the body. And that is going to move energy through that area of pain, allow energy to move through that, and that's going to help break up the stagnation of energy there.
So a very practical point of working with pain in the body: this inclusive attention and working with an expanded field of attention rather than a narrow focus of attention I found to be very, very important. So that's a principle that I hope will be helpful to you.
Related posts:
Getting Black and Blue: Learning to Rest in Awareness
Seeing From the Inside: Evolution and Cycles