The TAO Of Daniel: PAIN

It was once said that: “Pain is inevitable, where as suffering is a choice”.

We’ve all experienced what we know to be pain and what we know to be suffering. But what do those words really mean? And how might we learn to successfully navigate our way through them?

The Tao understands pain to be a specific kind of ‘sensation’, and nothing more. The experience of pain itself is neutral and can be observed, recognised and appreciated as simply ‘what it is’.

Then there is the story of that pain, and that story can quickly become a kind of suffering!

The story of one’s trauma, one’s past difficulties, one’s old identity. This ‘living in the past’ and holding onto one’s older self is the epitomy of suffering, of stagnancy, of depression and of a deep emptiness eventually if one is not redeemed from this tragic cycle.

Pain will come. It needs to come.

It is a momentary-ness, a ‘now-ness’, a being and bearing of what you thought you were not but actually are. And then it’s over, and the next sensations begin: pain, pleasure, excitement, anger, jealousy, etc.

To be Tao means to not be consumed by such things; to feel them deeply and, at the same time, watch them from a distance with the mind and eye of the neutral observer.

Then, and only then, can suffering cease to exist, and can pain become the transformative thing that it truly is…

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