The Painful Friend

   I read a post on Facebook today which read something like, "pain is the great educator". I think this remark is interesting. What makes pain so educative in the first place? Is it just an age old idea that one grows one's character through painful experiences? If so, what's the dynamic behind it? And why does pain shut people down in some cases, while opening people's hearts in others?  I think the key to it is being able to maintain a spacious attitude toward pain without feeling that the pain is the main aspect of one's experience.
    During meditation tonight, the thought arose: even the label of 'pain' is just a sort of mental filter or concept. Without that concept, it doesn't really exist, since the bare sensations behind it could be read and understood in completely different ways. While Western medical models tend to see pain as something neurologically based, Chinese approaches tend to look at pain as the passage of energies through blocked or obstructed areas. I find this latter approach to be more conducive to a relaxed attitude toward pain, because there is some hope in it that pain passes from one state to another, just as energy passes through a blocked passage or channel. The drawback of Western approaches or models of pain is that they tend to operate under this idea of a malfunctioning electric signal or feedback. Here there is not too much hope of 'fixing' a problem unless there is some adjustment (whether through surgery or otherwise). The point is that both models suggest how 'empty' the concept of pain is, and how it can lend itself to endless experiences and interpretations. Pain is never a 'thing' one is saddled with, because there are always layers of interpretative possibilities to understand it.
      Can pain be a friend? I think that what pain can do is offer an invitation to approach things non-dualistically. The more I react to and label something as 'painful', the more there is a distance from it: a subject emerges from all this and says, "this is no good-my body should not be acting this way in meditation." But over time, it's no so productive to think this way, and the meditator starts to find alternate ways to make an open, inviting space to see that pain in new ways. It is hard to look into this, but the more one does not make pain into an object or obstacle the harder it is to be with it or to inhabit that pain. From a perhaps Huayen perspective, it is taking a part and exaggerating it into a whole, without considering it as an equal among many parts.