Looking for Shoulds in Pains

  Reflecting on when pain becomes suffering, is there a specific point where we become over-attached to pain and it therefore becomes suffering? In this day and age of health fixes and naturopathy, we would do anything to buy a magic elixir that dashes away all the pains from our body, including uncomfortable headaches and the like. But I would like to suggest that, rather than focusing on pain itself, we need to focus on the line between pain and suffering. I believe that for the most part, pain becomes suffering when some aspect of pain becomes a kind of "should" where we assume a subject that ought to feel better and "be better" compared to others. Pain thus becomes a construct where we perceive ourselves as potentially having less restriction than we actually do.

   The mind naturally compares past to present. I imagine a "better" time somewhere in the past when I had a more youthful body or fewer frustrations. But is that person "real" or only a construct of my mind? In fact everything is really only mental constructs that come up in the present, which often make us believe that something is better than something else. Then we long for some "golden age" that presumably existed in the past, where we were completely pure, innocent and untouched by the scrapes and scarring of a life.

   Not only that, but we are then promised magical elixirs that are supposed to make us feel stronger and better. But the underlying problem is that we can never compare one moment to the next, and these moments, too, are fleeting. We can never go back to a "ground zero" point because there never was one. Again, things change all the time.

   The solution is not to try to eliminate pain altogether but rather, to stop trying to attribute pain to an agent. We don't blame ourselves for bodily discomfort (we have them all the time) and don't attribute these discomforts to a fixed self. After all, pain is only a phenomena and it's one of many sensations that travel through the body. If we are able to separate the pain from our sense of self and not associate one with a self, then the true nature of pain is seen as empty.