The “Will Power " of Water

During our Thursday evening sitting tonight, a question had been raised by one of the U of T students regarding how pain is treated in meditation practice. The Venerable mentioned three approaches, all of which resonated well with me. The first is to appreciate the pain, almost as though one were to embrace the pain rather than rejecting it. This is a tricky practice, since it involves letting go of the fear of pain that often overwhelms the meditation practitioner in the beginning of practice. Sometimes people refer to this practice as being ‘open’ or ‘curious’. In other words, it’s not just a neutral practice of holding something at bay or trying to emotionally disconnect from it (which would be a form of rejection in a way). I think it’s more like slowly opening up to the rawness or the tenderness of that pain, wanting to genuinely face it and understand its signals rather than trying to neutralize the experience or detach from  it.

The second approach mentioned by the Venerable is not to treat the pain as ‘my’ pain. For example, I might describe the sensation as something that is part of me: “I have this pain”, “there is a pain in my leg”, etc. This approach can be valuable in the way that I am no longer adding more pain to it by identifying with my own body. But this ‘dissociating’ is not the same as the dissociating I do with my intellect, when I find a pain uncomfortable.

The third approach was described by the Venerable as a kind of will power. By acknowledging that sitting with pain can create a greater sense of tolerance for that pain, the practitioner can learn to sit still in that pain with a sense of purpose and motivation. If I can learn to bear the discomfort of leg pain, I may later be able to have the strength to handle the greater discomforts of a major illness.

In principle, I think all these approaches work, but I find it useful to go back to the water analogy to understand what is happening. When I first started to meditate in longer group situations, my reaction to pain was often quite intense. I noticed how I regarded the pain as something that somehow should not be, and therefore needs to be rejected in order to embrace a truly ‘liberating’ experience. What I didn’t realize was that this desire for a liberating experience was where most of my suffering was.  It reflected a lack of intimate understanding of the pain itself, and a wish to push away from the body in order to achieve a realization of some kind. But what I couldn’t realize is that this pressure to desire something more created a tremendous fear of not realizing it. This took the form of anxiously trying to push away the pain or transform it into something else, much as an alchemist might transform lead into gold. Of course, it doesn’t quite work this way.

What I find most useful with the water analogy is that we don’t even need to reject our ‘rejections’. Everything is beheld as it is equally in mind. When I can understand that no experience is ever away from the mind, it is like realizing that the water pervades everything without obstacles. The true nature of mind is able to accommodate any experience, so it fluidly moves between viewpoints. The more I can understand this, the less I feel a need to change one ‘unfavorable’ experience into a very good experience. Each experience is complete into itself because it depends on something greater than everything.

This sounds abstract, but one way to practice it is to understand that the thoughts are just parts of a fluid and dynamic experience. They are never to be confused with the true mind, which cannot be grasped as an object. It can only be somehow pointed to. The more I can grapple with that question of how true mind is approached, the less I take these solid-looking appearances to be real. So the will power of water is that it simply has no separate individual will controlling its experience.