Riding the Waves of Pleasure and Pain
We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.
— JACK GILBERT
This world provides a never-ending range of experiences. Life moves through a succession of peaks and troughs, highs and lows, miracles and disasters. In one place, babies are born to the delight of gleeful parents, while in others infants are starving. Young fawns prance through bluebell woods, while a cougar kills a sleeping deer. Spring flowers blaze across mountain hillsides, while industrial mining lays waste to tropical rain forests in Brazil. Activists devote their lives to protecting the environment, while smugglers traffic young girls for sex. Humpback whales are saved from extinction, while beluga whales are hunted in the Arctic.
Every day we are bombarded with an endless flurry of beauty and horror, of things that both open and shut tight our hearts. This raises important questions about what to pay attention to and how to respond to this roller coaster of experience. Neuroscience tells us our brains have a hardwired negativity bias, so we tend to look at what is wrong, to focus on the negative. This is clearly reflected in the media, which grabs our attention by highlighting the worst news of the day. Do we let that negativity bias dictate what we see and how we view it? Or do we take a different perspective, as offered by Jack Gilbert in his poem “A Brief for the Defense”: “We must have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of this world. To make injustice the only / measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”
Mindfulness is the capacity to see things as they are. That includes opening to the “full catastrophe,” the entire range of beauty and horror that exists. But doing this requires us to stretch to take in such a wide expanse, to appreciate all that is beautiful and wondrous as well as what is tragic.
Every year in the 1990s, I used to travel annually to India to study meditation. As soon as I got off the plane, I questioned why I had come. The polluted air in New Delhi was acrid, and exhaust fumes in Lucknow, the city where I studied, often turned the air into a blue haze. The stench from sewage could be nauseating, and the poverty at times was heart-wrenching. Nothing was hidden away. Funeral processions of families carrying their dead passed openly in the streets. Homeless beggars in Benares sometimes had no arms or legs or displayed crippling leprosy.
Yet on the same street as the lepers, I might see a woman cleaning a public latrine and radiating the most beatific smile, one that melted every brittleness in my heart. Like a momentary scent of heaven, I might catch the fragrance of freshly picked jasmine placed elegantly in a schoolgirl’s hair. Little boys would be laughing and giggling with glee in side streets, playing cricket with little more than a stick of wood and a ball of newspaper. Bells ringing from roadside temples and wafting incense suggested that the gods were not so far away. The intensity of India invited a broad lens of attention, one that encompassed the beauty and tragedy of life.
What goes on “out there” in the world is no different from the ups and downs of our inner landscape. A discerning awareness reveals that when we pay close attention to our mind and body, we see that it, too, is a changing cacophony, oscillating between the poles of pleasure and pain and including everything in between.
For example, take a moment while reading to pay attention to what is happening. Notice the variety of sensations unfolding in your body and mind right now. For myself, as I write this, I notice that my back is unpleasantly tight and achy from sitting too long at my desk, but I can also hear piano music in the background, which is uplifting, soothing, and pleasant. But not everything in my environment elicits a strong reaction, such as the beige color of the walls, which feels very neutral in tone to me. Can you observe a similar variety of experience in this moment?
With awareness, not only do we notice the waves of pleasure and pain, but we can also observe our reactivity to these changing stimuli. Left to our own devices, we tend to react unconsciously, running toward or grasping after what is pleasant and resisting or rejecting what is unpleasant. This creates a constant push/pull, a contentiousness with life that leaves us frequently in a struggle with experience.
To a degree this tug of war with experience is evolutionarily hardwired. All beings and organisms move toward what is safe and pleasurable and away from what is painful and potentially threatening. At times, this is simply self-preservation, like gravitating toward warmth and food and away from pain. Yet we can’t avoid all discomfort; we can’t experience only pleasure. Trying to achieve this all the time only leads to frustration, since so much of life is out of our control. Even if we do attain some peak satisfaction, it never lasts and is soon replaced by yet another experience.
The question we face, then, is the same one I faced in India: How do we ride the waves of pleasure and pain without being tossed around by our preferences and our reactive nature? Over time, through cultivating mindfulness practice, we can learn to access a more steady presence in the midst of such turbulence. When we observe, over and over, how the knee-jerk habit of chasing fleeting pleasures and running from pain doesn’t actually bring peace of mind, that clarity allows us to unhook from that agitation. In this way, we slowly build the muscle of equanimity, the capacity of steadiness and balance no matter what the circumstances.
As an example of this dynamic, I remember teaching a silent meditation retreat in northern India. One day, one of the students, Robert, shared with me the difficulty he was experiencing during the course. He was on a bit of a roller coaster. The first few days were bumpy as he settled into the stillness of the retreat, then one day, as can happen, he became unusually serene. His mind was clear, and his meditations were blissful and spacious. He became so happy that he began to fantasize about how he could maximize this meditation high. Robert mapped out what he would do after the retreat: he would move to Burma, join a monastery, become a monk, and then go meditate in a cave, where he imagined spending the rest of his life meditating in endless rapture.
Of course, all this excited planning destroyed his peaceful meditations. Rather than abiding in meditative stillness, he became restless. His mind became overwhelmed with a torrent of thoughts and plans about his future, and he found it harder to sit and maintain any focus. He lost the desire to meditate and started resisting the tranquility of the retreat. He became uncomfortable, tossed around by the unpleasantness of his busy mind and agitated body. He began to fantasize about getting out of the now-not-so-pleasant retreat and instead chill out some place where he could go surfing. He began judging the other participants and condemning the teachers for misleading him about meditation.
Then one evening during a lecture, one of the teachers described how the mind grasps after pleasure and how this obsession can actually destroy what we find joyful. Robert realized this had been happening to him: he had stopped simply appreciating his serenity and joy. Instead, he’d become consumed with capturing and prolonging the bliss of meditation by fantasizing about becoming a monk. These thoughts — his restless, agitated planning — had eroded the very pleasure he was trying to grasp and caused meditation to feel more and more unpleasant.
This is the hamster wheel of chasing pleasure and fleeing from pain, in which we all get caught at times. Certainly, we can enjoy serenity or bliss when it comes, but we can do so without holding on, since we understand its fleeting nature. Nor do we need to escape or eradicate an unpleasant experience, since we know it too will pass. Yet by simply witnessing the waves of joy and sorrow, the ups and downs, with a clear awareness, we learn to step off the wheel of reactivity. By doing that, we discover freedom and ease right in the midst of wherever we are.
• PRACTICE •
Exploring the Waves of Joy and Pain
Practice this meditation in a public place with a lot of activity, such as a city park. Sit with your eyes open, either with your gaze down or looking directly at everything that’s happening. Open all of your senses and become aware of the various sights, sounds, smells, and sensations in the environment.
Likewise, be aware of the flow of experience within you. Notice the changing physical sensations, the movement of breath, the ebb and flow of emotions, the flicker of thoughts and images. In general, be aware of the totality of your inner and outer experience with a curious attention.
In addition, notice when an experience is felt as pleasurable, as unpleasant, or as somewhat neutral. All phenomena will have one of these three attributes. As you identify the quality of an experience, become aware of your reaction to it. Do you resist or avoid unwanted smells or noises? Do you reject anxious thoughts? Do you demand to hear only melodic birdsong or grasp after what’s beautiful in your surroundings? Do you try to hold on to pleasant feelings? With neutral experiences, does your mind space out or get distracted?
Remember, it is quite natural to react to stimuli. The practice is to simply notice these impulses as fully as possible. If you hear a jarring noise, how do you react? Does your stomach contract or your jaw clench? Do you judge the source of the noise? Does the unpleasant sound overwhelm your enjoyment of other things that are pleasant, or perhaps create so much dissatisfaction that all you experience is negativity?
This meditation trains the mind to recognize reactivity with an open awareness, without becoming consumed by it. With that clearer perspective, we are able to respond more skillfully, whatever the stimulus is. By developing this quality in meditation, we increase our ability to access it when we need it most — in the midst of any strong experience, at work, with others, or elsewhere. To learn to be present with the full range of experience without being tossed about by our impulsive reactions, no matter how pleasurable or painful, is a tremendous support for finding wisdom and well-being in any situation.
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