Decoding Pain One Kick at a Time?
Imagine a martial arts sparring session in progress.
Avni, a senior brown belt (name changed), lands a hard low kick on Sumit’s leg. Sumit limps for a moment, gathers himself and resumes the sparring.
After a while, the instructor says — “Yame” or stop, Avni and Sumit wish each other. Sumit acknowledges the hard kicks Avni landed. They touch gloves and move on to the next assignment.
Now, imagine Sumit in a cinema hall.
There’s a sudden jerk on the chair. Sumit gets up with the pain and gets into an altercation with the person sitting behind him. Sumit has had enough.
The pain from the leg kick that made Sumit limp was much more than the pain from the chair jerk. However, Sumit smiled and even congratulated the person who delivered the kick. In comparison, the pain from chair push was nothing. Still, Sumit could not bear that pain, which spoiled his family’s movie experience. He fought, he shouted, he suffered.
Is sparring painful? Yes.
Do we suffer? No.
Why? Because we do it willingly and have accepted that pain is a part of it. As a result, we do not suffer.
Can we live in a pain-free world? No, pain is as much part of life as life itself. There will be something or the other that is not how as we want.
Is suffering inevitable? No, we need to isolate pain and suffering.
How? Sumit did not suffer the painful leg kick because he accepted the kick as a kick, nothing else. He was not ashamed that he got beat up. He was not worried about how it looked to the onlookers. Had he had any such thoughts, he would have suffered along with the pain.
Similarly, practising the following will remove suffering:
- A push is a push. It is not demeaning.
- A glance from someone is just a glance. It does not convey anything else.
- An email is just an email. It does not hurt unless you get hurt.
The list can go on.
Remember the two sides to everything that happens. First is what happens- The Kick, in our example. The second is what we perceive. In the first example, Sumit took the kick as a kick. Whereas in the second example, he took the push as an intrusion.
The moment we start living in the first block, take things as they are, without creating stories around it, the suffering is gone. Its just pain, which is inevitable.
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is Optional.”
- Teachings from Buddha, Quote attributed to Dalai Lama, Haruki Murakami, and M. Kathleen Casey.
