Pain & Prevalence

A few months ago at a cafe in Maine, Victoria had me try on a bucket hat. And when I put it on she seemed to really like it on me...so now I have a bucket hat.

In the days that followed we saw many bucket hats. All over. Anywhere we went. There are different names for this phenomenon in which someone discovers an object or idea—and then "suddenly" encounters it everywhere they go.

Essentially, once something enters our consciousness, it becomes easier to notice. It appears more common, more prevalent, more salient. This same thing happened to me after I began to study the body in order to better understand the pain I was experiencing. 

Pain and discomfort began to appear everywhere I looked. In people's facial expressions, posture, behavior, language and movement. Each one tied or rooted to something deeper - something that I couldn’t see. 

In somatics the general idea is that sensation and feeling give rise to thought and movement. And as most anyone can attest, it is not easy to think clearly, be patient, or move gracefully when pain is present in the body. 

It becomes much harder to be yourself. 

And if the statistics are true about the amount of people suffering from a persistent physical ailment, or any of the myriad mental health disorders then we are living amongst many people who are struggling to be themselves.

So, it seems, the whole purpose of a meditative practice should not be the pursuit of mental enlightenment or physical sublimity, but rather to help ourselves connect to our own experience, to our own aches, pains, and tensions in order to see them more clearly in others. 

That is why Buddhists pray once for the people they love and once for the people who cause the world suffering. 

Because pain begets pain. Those who create suffering, are suffering.