The Illusion of Pain

Suffering only shows you where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.

- Ram Dass

Pain. The ache we feel deep inside — the misery which tugs and gnaws at us by the likes of sickness, injury, disease, heartache. It is but a story. An illusion. An imagined occurrence that we long ago decided to believe in. 

A story of loss, of unworthiness, of self-loathing. A story of distrust, of chaos, of a difficult existence. A story of fear, of victimhood, of uncertainty. It matters not what the story is, but it is stories which lie at the root of all our physical and emotional suffering.

Humans are great at stories…it’s kind of our thing. It’s stories which comprise the foundation of the reality that we tell ourselves is the truth of what is. But everything about us is a story — our personality, our beliefs, our thoughts, our wants, our desires, our past, our future…and even our pain. 

Our pain. Our pain is a story we latched onto very early on. Like a suckling leech. We cling to it, desperately keeping it in our grips, unknowingly too afraid to let it go. The most painful and chronic of our ails are the oldest and deepest of our stories. The ones we’re not yet willing to face and to release from our white-knuckled clutches.

We excel at hiding these stories from ourselves. We create new stories that we may bury those stories which lie at the root of our pain. So that we don’t have to face them. So that we don’t have to look at them. So that we don’t have to feel them fully. We hide from our pain, and in the wake of our hiding, we create greater, deeper pain.

Let me define exactly what I mean by the word pain.

What I mean here is not physical discomfort of the body…the kind which occurs with a broken bone or a physical ail. Pain is something entirely different. Pain is the story which we tell ourselves about that physical discomfort. It is the merry-go-round of suffering we build up around an experience. 

When an animal, for instance, experiences physical discomfort, there is no suffering, no pain — because there is no story that something should be different than it is. There is simply the experience of the physical discomfort. No beliefs or stories or thoughts or opinions about it…just pure experience.

Humans, on the other hand, are another matter. We’ve forgotten that we have the power to experience without adding the burden and the suffering and the pain of a story. To release our hearts’ clinging to these stories. And, in doing so, release their imagined power over our imagined lives.

But first, we continue to hide our oldest stories beneath newer, thinner stories — ones that are less heavy, that are easier for us to face than the monsters that lurk beneath them in their shadows. We spend our lives hiding our stories from ourselves. Hiding our clinging from ourselves. Creating pain.

But a time comes when we can’t hide anymore. When the pain which our stories create is so sharp, so nagging, so ever-present, that they can no longer remain hidden beneath the veil of the others. 

They call to us, beckoning to our soul to be brought into the light of truth, where we may finally see them for what they are…a thing of our own imagination. 

An illusion. Nothing.

Only then will we be free.