Post Retreat Reflection

  The one day intermediate retreats often teach me one thing, and that is the importance of acknowledging facticity of experience. I think 'facticity' is more a word coming from Heidegger, but it might map onto the idea of cause and condition in Buddhist philosophy. And during the one day retreat today, I had this experience where the leg pain seemed to great that I simply found it impossible to exert any effort to 'soothe' it or transform it in any way into something else. And the interesting thing is that during the sharing afterward, the facilitator talked about how meditation often appears to be a physical 'embodied' experience at the beginning, but then later it starts to appear that al the bodily conditions can be rooted in specific states of mind. That is, the key to being able to deal with states of pain is to contextualize pain in terms of wider states of mind.
   However, I found that toward the end of the day, the only thing I could really do was to completely and utterly accept what was happening to me in that moment, without trying to adjust anything. How did I accomplish that? Well, I found that simply asking 'who experiences this pain?' lead me to experience the absence of a single fixed person who feels pain. This was very powerful for me, not in the sense that it eliminated the pain but more in the sense that there was no self that was pushing it away anymore. The pain was at times experienced as a kind of pure sensation, and there was simply no self to say "I" feel this pain. But at times this experience was quite difficult to sustain, and there were times when I had to accept that I was not 'okay' with the pain at all. Now again, is there an "I" in this particular experience?  Not a permanent one, but in those moments, I had to realize how hard it is to let go of the belief and attachment to self-experience.