Resistance
I will see you on the other side of these quotes.
The pain that you create now is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of resistance to what is. One the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgement. On the emotional level, it is some sort of negativity.
The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly, you are identified with your mind.
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If you just are willing to pay attention to it, a couple things happen, one is your resistance to feeling it goes away by definition because now your goal is to just pay attention to it. And you recognize that so much of the suffering associated with the pain was born of the resistance to feeling it. You're kind of bracing against it and all of your thinking about it.
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And so much of our suffering in the presence of pain is the result of resisting it, worrying about it, everything we're doing with our minds but just feeling it. So when you just feel it, again, it breaks apart into this ever shifting collection of different sensations and it's not one thing and it never stays the same and so two things happen there. One is there can be a tremendous amount of relief that happens there where you can achieve a level of equanimity even in the presence of really unpleasant physical sensation. And this is true of mental sensations as well as true of emotions, the classically negative emotions like anger or depression or fear. The moment you become willing to just feel them in all of their punctate and changeable qualities, they cease to be what they were a moment ago.
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It ceases to be a problem in that moment because it no more maps onto the kind of person you are than a feeling of indigestion or a pain in your knee maps onto the kind of person you are. It's just sensation.
Does this make sense? Any guesses on who I'm quoting? Do you think this person is more likely to be a neuroscientist or a spiritual teacher? Would finding that out influence your willingness to consider this explanation and act on it?
The identity of the author and knowledge of their profession is a good signal about the quality of an idea, and whether you should spend some time on it. But sometimes, it might not be the important and might even be worth ignoring for a while. I think that might be true with the kind of idea expressed by these quotes. With that in mind, I'm going to wait until the next issue to reveal the author. Of course you can google the quote if you're impatient but I want to encourage you to wait.