Choose the Pain

A Note Before We Begin

These essays were spoken before they were written. They emerged in meditation, in sessions, while driving, while sitting in a park, while building a company, and in the middle of ordinary days. I've kept the uncertainty because the uncertainty is part of the truth. I do not know whether every metaphysical interpretation is real. I do know that certain ways of seeing work. They reduce suffering. They create freedom. They let life move.

I'm not offering a belief system. I'm speaking from experience and personal realization. That's the only place from which I know how to speak safely. Take what lands. Test it in your own life. See for yourself.

Part 1—Choose the Pain

1. Stop Avoiding Pain. Start Reducing Suffering.

The question isn't whether I can avoid pain in order to have a good life. The question is how much pain I'm willing to endure to reduce my suffering, and how quickly.

That question changes everything for me.

I can drag the process out for many, many years, and there's nothing wrong with that. I can decide that I prefer a very low level of pain. I can live with the level of suffering I have. I can say, honestly, that I'd like to reduce it, but it doesn't feel like an emergency. That's a choice. It may even be the right choice for a time.

But I should at least know what I'm choosing.

Pain and suffering aren't the same thing. Pain is the difficult conversation. Suffering is the life built around avoiding it. Pain is the boundary. Suffering is the resentment that grows because I won't set it. Pain is admitting I do not know. Suffering is spending years pretending that I do. Pain is learning what I need to learn.

Suffering is remaining frozen because I'm afraid to see how much I do not know.

Pain can be sharp and immediate. Suffering can become the atmosphere.

The blessing of extreme circumstances is that pain suddenly seems like nothing compared with suffering. When the status quo becomes unbearable, I become willing to feel the pain necessary to move through whatever is causing the suffering. I stop negotiating. I stop asking whether the doorway will hurt. I walk through because staying where I am hurts more.

That's one blessing of desperation. It clarifies the exchange.

Most of us don't need to wait for desperation. But many of us do. I believe there's an easier and softer way, but most of us are often incapable of heading that way. We have an impulse to learn our lessons the hard way. We wait until the suffering becomes an emergency. Then we become willing.

There's no shame in that. There's only the question of whether I want to continue.

Yoga asana is a long, slow process. It's a beautiful process, and I use it. Meditation is a long, slow process. Breath work is a long, slow process. Each practice has moments when it feels as though I've broken through. Sometimes I get a glimpse of a spot farther down the path, and then I return to my current state. Psychedelics can do the same thing. A crisis can do the same thing. A relationship can do the same thing. Business can do the same thing.

A glimpse isn't failure. Returning isn't failure. It's part of the process.

I used to think that spiritual progress would eventually remove discomfort. Now I see something different. To move beyond discomfort, I become comfortable with discomfort. The very qualities needed to shift are often the qualities I don't want in the moment.

I don't want to feel heavy. I want to feel lightness. But I have to ask: Do I want artificial lightness, or do I want to find the lightness that's always there - the bliss underlying all existence?

Sometimes it's good to get a break. Rest isn't avoidance. Relief isn't failure. But there's a difference between resting and building a life around not feeling.

I see people settle for just enough relief from suffering to go through another day. That seems to be a dominant energy in much of the world: not freedom, not joy, not even deep peace, but just enough relief to tolerate another repetition of the same life.

I think we can have much more than that.

This doesn't mean I should attack myself with pain. It doesn't mean intensity is always wisdom. It means I can stop pretending that avoiding pain is neutral. Avoidance has a cost. Delay has a cost. Every day I postpone the necessary pain, I may continue paying in suffering.

The first part of transformation is to decide how much pain I'm willing to experience to reduce my overall suffering. The second part is to decide how quickly.

Those aren't moral questions. There's no superior answer. A person may choose the long, gentle road.

Another may choose a more concentrated passage. The honest answer matters more than the impressive answer.

Ask directly:

- What suffering have I learned to live with?

- What pain would begin to release it?

- How much of that pain am I willing to feel now?

- What am I protecting by waiting?

Then listen. Don't turn the answer into another story. Don't demand that the answer feel spiritual. It may be ordinary. Make the call. Tell the truth. Learn the skill. Leave the room. Enter the room. Stop rescuing. Ask for help. Rest. Begin.

Pain isn't proof that I'm headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes it's growing pain. The discomfort, fear, and nervousness aren't necessarily the problem. The reflex to escape them can be the problem.

There may be no problem at all. There may only be a painful moment that I keep converting into a life of resistance.

The question remains simple: How much pain am I willing to feel to reduce my suffering, and how quickly?

2. Notice What the Mind Is Escaping.

I once sat in Bomberger Park in Dayton with an earbud in my ear. The air felt fucking amazing. There were beautiful trees. It was a city park, but it was nature. I started listening to something on my phone, and a question came through with unusual force:

- What am I doing?

- Why am I listening to this?

I'd asked that question many times. Why do I constantly listen to books, videos, television, anything? I told myself that I was taking up excess brain capacity. That explanation was partly true. I feel at home working on five things at once and using as much of my brain as possible. I enjoy it.

But why did I need help falling asleep? Why did I need sound while walking through beautiful air? Why did silence, which always felt pleasant once I entered it, remain so difficult to choose?

I took out the earbud.

Something deeper appeared. I hadn't been avoiding boredom. I'd been avoiding an experience.

When I examine ordinary reality, even with logic, it falls apart quickly. The naive experience of a stable world doesn't survive sustained attention. What's consciousness? What holds this particular experience in place?

What's this apparent collection of body, mind, emotion, sensation, and memory? What happens when it ends?

What's outside time and space if time and space are products of consciousness?

I do not know.

The experience can't be replaced by a description of the experience. The experience is the experience. It's a mystery.

For a long time, I thought all fear was fear of death. Maybe death is part of it. But I found something more fundamental: fear of what we really are - the groundlessness of that.

This apparent self is fragile, not only because the body can die, but because I can't find what holds the entire structure in place. Even if consciousness continues after death, that isn't automatically comforting. What's consciousness outside this body? What's God contemplating itself? What's an eternity of awareness?

Forgetting may not merely be a limitation. Forgetting may be medicine.

My nervous system reacts before my philosophy can explain anything. I feel lines of energy down my shoulders and arms. It doesn't hurt. It feels like too much energy. The mind looks for a release valve. A video works. A book works. Mindless material works especially well because it fills the space without demanding contact with the thing beneath it.

Then the realization came: The mind is always looking for relief. What's it looking for relief from?

Itself.

I'd made decisions from anxiety almost all my life. I'd never made a decision without consulting my anxiety. I now saw that as mind making decisions by reference to itself. Anxiety raises the question, anxiety supplies the evidence, anxiety evaluates the options, and anxiety grants or denies permission. It's a closed system pretending to be wisdom.

Distraction participates in the same loop.

After an intense spiritual or creative experience, I often feel a strong pull away from it. I once assumed that the snapback was caused by the intensity of the realization. Now I think the snapback often comes from my response. I pull away. I permit the distractions. I rush to reestablish the familiar mind.

The realization doesn't create the regression. The flight from the realization does.

So I began asking a different question: What happens if I don't pull back?

The answer that came wasn't complicated: more of the fullest self and path manifest immediately.

That doesn't mean I must preserve a peak state. Trying to hold a spiritual experience in place is another form of control. It means I can stop abandoning what the experience revealed. I can let the next brushstroke follow. I can write while the language is present. I can sit for another minute. I can take the next action before the mind rebuilds the wall.

The deeper experiences are easy to forget. That's one reason I record so much. Sometimes the meatiest realization disappears two minutes later. If it were easy, I'd already have figured it out. Forgetting isn't evidence that nothing happened. But forgetting does create a practical need: capture what can be captured, then integrate it through action.

I don't need to make silence into another performance. I don't need to sit for three hours to prove that I'm serious. If fifteen minutes is too much, do ten. If ten is too much, do five. Even one minute counts. The point isn't superiority. Someone living a fully material life isn't in an inferior state of consciousness. My dog isn't inferior because she's living her dog life rather than meditating.

Practice isn't a throne. It's a way to stop running.

Turn off the sound for one minute.

Feel what happens in the body before you explain it.

Notice the urge to reach for relief.

Don't condemn the urge. It has been serving a purpose. Ask what experience it's protecting you from.

Maybe it's grief. Maybe it's emptiness. Maybe it's the next honest decision. Maybe it isn't fear of death but fear of groundlessness. Maybe it's simply unused energy.

Let the answer be uncertain.

I do not know exactly what consciousness is. I do know that continuous escape narrows life. I do know that when I stop hiding, something begins to move. I do know that the mind can become quieter when it no longer has to protect me from itself.

The invitation isn't to destroy distraction. It's to see it clearly enough that it becomes a choice.

Take out the earbud.

Let the air feel fucking amazing.

Stay long enough to discover what was waiting beneath the noise.