Each year, as applications for continued participation in this community were being reviewed, the question would arise as to why one particular individual would be invited to return. This man was notoriously challenging, difficult to get along with, and generally undermining to the values and teachings of the centre. Each year Thich Nhat Hanh would patiently listen to the near universal entreaties to bar this individual from membership; and each year he would approve his continued association. When pressed to explain his reasons, his answer was simple. This man provides a focus for the centre. His actions are so outrageous that he cannot help but be noticed by all. And none of you has yet learned to be in his presence without having him distract you from your own reflections and study. Only when you have learned his lesson<\/em>, will we consider your request to bar him (and then we won’t need to). He is your \u2018best teacher\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The community members were merely acting out the very human response to a situation or individual that made them uncomfortable, angry, frustrated: avoidance<\/strong> \u2013 or at least a request that the community\u2019s leader would \u2018remove\u2019 the challenge and restore order and peace. The belief, of course is that by excising the problem, the issue is resolved. Thich Nhat Hanh was underscoring the reality \u2013 \u2018until the next time\u2019. Better, even necessary, to cultivate a capacity to deal with these emotions within ourselves than to spend our days trying to remove the external source of them.<\/p>\n With Karmic predictability and relentlessness, these \u2018opportunities\u2019 enter and re-enter our personal theatre \u2013 until we get it right. (Maybe it\u2019s time to watch Groundhog Day \u2013 yet again!) The range of response is also predictable (although somewhat specific to the individual). For me, the sequence usually starts with a rant, typically rationalized and washed through the lens of feeling betrayed or disappointed. (I\u2019m entitled to rant because<\/em> I\u2019ve been . . . or so the opening act generally goes). Truth be told, it\u2019s usually more about the order of things, my order of things, being disturbed (often unexpectedly). Then the parent appears \u2013 usually daddy \u2013 and his need (delusion?) that order can and must be restored \u2013 whether through civilized negotiation, gentle correction, or arbitrary mandate. This stage of course is heavily reliant on my having sufficient control of outcomes to be conciliatory, didactic, or<\/em> arbitrary. Either way, the operative term is \u2018control\u2019; and its flip side, \u2018helplessness\u2019. And then we move to angst \u2013 what if. . ? If the tantrum doesn\u2019t do it, dickering and\/or pronouncement doesn\u2019t do it. . . then what? Concern, anxiety about the future. Quite a lot to learn from one \u2018teacher\u2019!<\/p>\n So what\u2019s to be done? In an earlier blog (May 9, 2011) on projection and how to address it mindfully, I\u2019d recounted Zindel Segal\u2019s suggested protocol: developing an awareness of the present experience \u2013 taking our attention away from the \u2018trigger\u2019 event or individual and shifting it to our own experience (what am I feeling?); identifying the way in which we\u2019re relating to the event (attaching, avoiding, etc.); letting go of our need to make things different than they are (accepting, allowing); and finally, inviting the experience to remain, understanding that it will change, evolve \u2013 all things do and<\/em> in their own fashion.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>At lunch with a friend this week, we began to discuss the relationship between physical pain and levels of discomfort or, in many cases, literal suffering that result. As Shinzen Young, a widely respected meditation teacher, frames it, pain exists along one dimension of our experience; and our resistance to it (in simplistic terms, our effort to avoid it, deny it, medicate it, operate on it, etc. \u2013 in essence, the degree to which we push against it) along a second dimension. He describes the subjective experience of pain, our suffering<\/em>, as the product of our \u2018objective pain\u2019 and our resistance \u2013 or the amount of the first multiplied<\/em> by the amount of the second. So, as we experience greater levels of pain, our subjective experience of that pain is magnified exponentially by the level of resistance we bring into the equation as well. In the diagram, a six-fold increase in pain, accompanied by a similar increase in resistance, produces a subjective pain level, not of six, but of 36! His contention is that, a regular mindfulness practice, by bringing increased levels of clarity and acceptance to our physical experience, is able to address the dimension of resistance \u2013 in essence containing that part of the equation over which we have some control. While we can\u2019t, in many cases, limit, reduce, and certainly not remove the pain, we can definitely impact our level of subjective suffering by lowering our resistance (increasing our acceptance).<\/p>\n