{"id":1281,"date":"2017-07-28T08:25:41","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T15:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/?p=1281"},"modified":"2017-07-26T16:32:24","modified_gmt":"2017-07-26T23:32:24","slug":"no-pain-no-gain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/2017\/07\/28\/no-pain-no-gain\/","title":{"rendered":"No Pain, No Gain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the record, I haven&#8217;t found any form of meditation\u00a0that espouses &#8220;No Pain, No Gain&#8221; as a tenet. Sitting still and silent may feel awkward. Sitting\u00a0may even elicit some of the uncomfortable emotions and thoughts we commonly associate with pain, as in &#8220;I can&#8217;t take this anymore,&#8221; but the point of meditation is neither\u00a0to produce pain, nor to use pain as a yardstick. On the other hand, pain is an unavoidable fact of life (I&#8217;m sure my birth caused my mother plenty of it), and aches and pains can serve a useful\u00a0purpose (don&#8217;t put wait on that sprained ankle yet). So how should one relate to pain?<\/p>\n<p>Long-time meditation teacher Ezra Bayda writes(<a href=\"https:\/\/tricycle.org\/trikedaily\/more-body\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><strong>&#8220;More than This Body,&#8221;<\/strong><\/a> Trike Daily, 26 July 2017)<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Pain, by definition, kind of sucks<\/em>. &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><em>We usually try to simply get rid of it. Being cured of pain is the outcome our culture teaches us to expect \u2014 we carry a sense of entitlement that life should be free from pain. But one of the worst parts of the pain syndrome\u2014whether the discomfort is short-term, as in meditation, or long-term, with chronic pain \u2014 is that our physical pain and our urge to nullify it feed off one another in a most unfortunate loop, and our life comes to revolve around our discomfort. &#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>It is essential to understand that both our pain and the suffering that arises from it are truly our path, our teacher, in that we can learn from them and experience our life more deeply as a result. &#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>When pain arises, instead of immediately thinking, \u201cHow can I get rid of this?\u201d we can say \u201cHello\u201d to it, and ask, \u201cWhat can I learn from this?\u201d It\u2019s not always easy to do this, but when possible, it turns the whole experience upside down.&#8221;<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Bayda&#8217;s article goes on with exploration of the different\u00a0dimensions of pain, our responses to it, and a menu of tools for experiencing life-with-pain free of the\u00a0mental hangups that normally present themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the record, I haven&#8217;t found any form of meditation\u00a0that espouses &#8220;No Pain, No Gain&#8221; as a tenet. Sitting still and silent may feel awkward. Sitting\u00a0may even elicit some of the uncomfortable emotions and thoughts we commonly associate with pain, as in &#8220;I can&#8217;t take this anymore,&#8221; but the point of meditation is neither\u00a0to produce [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33,18,50,5],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fear","tag-instructions","tag-pain","tag-stress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1285,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions\/1285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}