Clean Pain, Dirty Pain

If ever there’s a time to learn that most of the emotional pain we experience is self-inflicted, it’s Christmas. This is the time of year when we bump up against the ancient pain of dysfunctional family dynamics in technicolour, so it helps to have a reminder that we’re at choice about exactly how much suffering we experience in these encounters. We all know that it’s not what happens, but the story that you tell yourself about what happens, that determines how you feel about it.

That’s why one person can say something insulting to you and you’ll laugh it off, but when someone else does it, it activates an old dynamic and releases that charge of ancient pain that sends you spinning off into an abyss of self-attack. It pops the lid off the Pandora’s Box of stories we tell ourselves about why things happen to us. Let’s take the classic of any form of rejection as an example – maybe you didn’t get a job or you just got dumped. You are at choice. You can decide to observe that the job or the person wasn’t right for you and motor on regardless, or you can dust off an old story about how unworthy or unloveable you are and use it to sink yourself into a downward spiral of depression and self-recrimination. The choice is yours.

Psychologist Dr Steven Harvey has - through Acceptance & Commitment Therapy – defined ‘clean pain’ as the emotion we feel when something happens to us. It’s the direct experience of pain in the moment. ‘Dirty pain’, however is the result of the thoughts we have about that pain and what it means about us. It’s the story we tell ourselves about what that pain means – and this is where we endure our greatest suffering.

Coach Martha Beck notes that “The two kinds of suffering occupy different sections of the brain: one part simply registers events, while another creates a continuous stream of thoughts about those events. The vast majority of our unhappiness comes from this secondary response—not from painful reality but from painful thoughts about reality. Western psychology is just accepting something saints and mystics have taught for centuries: that this suffering ends only when we learn to detach from the thinking mind.”

She adds, “Learning to detach starts with simply noticing our own judgmental thoughts. When we find ourselves using words like should or ought, we're courting dirty pain. Obsessing about what should be rather than accepting what is, we may try to control other people in useless, dysfunctional ways. We may impotently rage against nature itself, even—perhaps especially—when that nature is our own. This amounts to mental suicide. Resisting what we can't control removes us from reality, rendering our emotions, circumstances and loved ones inaccessible. The result is a terrible emptiness, which we usually blame on our failure to get what we want. Actually, it comes from refusing to accept what we have.”

This is not a new concept for the Eastern mind, as Lama Surya Das, of the Dzogchen Tibetan tradition makes clear. He writes, “One old Buddhist saying tells us that pain is inevitable in life – but suffering, on the other hand, is optional. How much we suffer depends on us, our internal development and our spiritual understanding and realization. Our pain and suffering point out to us where we are most attached, and what we're holding onto the most; likewise, they point out how free we are. By recognizing this, we can learn to use loss and suffering in ways that help us to grow wiser and become more at peace with ourselves and the universe. Through meditation practice, we come to see that the necessary losses in life - aging, separation, sorrow and death -are inevitable. And when we learn to accept the inevitable changes, through a more graceful letting go called the wisdom of allowing, we will tremendously lessen our suffering and leave room for happiness to arise.”

This Christmas, give yourself the gift of awareness and allow yourself to only experience ‘clean’ pain, if it occurs. Give ‘dirty’ pain the week off. Pay attention to your thoughts and notice if you’re getting into ‘dirty pain’ territory. Watch the thoughts that come up when you’re dealing with old family patterns and indulge only the ones that deal realistically with the present moment. Notice where you’re reacting from old pain and projecting it into your current experience (and the future). When you see that happening, observe it and let it go. Acceptance is the key. If you can laugh at your own mental patterning, you’re heading away from suffering into the direction of acceptance, where you notice the old story but don’t give it airtime. Keep your mind as tidy as you would your house – no room for old clutter.

As an illustration of a clean mindset, here’s an extract from an interview with the musician and designer, Lenny Kravitz, from Elle Decoration. The dude has a pretty good take on life, if the answers to these questions are any indication …

What is your greatest fear?
Not fulfilling the purpose that God put me here for.

What is your greatest regret?
I don’t have any regrets. It’s all part of the journey.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I honestly don’t think I would. Not because I think I’m great, it’s just that it wouldn’t be me.

What is the quality you most admire in a person?
Soul. It sounds a bit vague, but I mean inner strength and integrity.

What’s your guilty pleasure?
If it pleases me, I don’t feel guilty about it.

How do you define style?
It comes from within. It’s someone being themselves.

And here’s a final treat to get you through the Christmas period – a slideshow of Simple Serenity tips from Oprah.com. They’re basic, but they do work - the oldies are the goodies ...

http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/spirit/emotionalhealth/slideshow2_ss_personal

Happy Christmas, Joyeux Noel and Feliz Navidad!

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