ON PERCEPTION AND PAIN
"Physical pain itself has a lot of mental factors, and the most important one is the factor of perception--the way we label things. Sometimes the word "sañña" is also translated as "memory," which is not really accurate. Memory plays a role in perception--we apply our old perceptions of pain to our new experience of pain--but memory deals with the past. Here we're trying to focus on the present, and yet we use our memories from the past to cover up the present, to shape our experience of the present.
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Say, when there's a pain in your leg, a pain in your waist, a pain in the back, what perceptions does the mind apply to it? If you can't see the process in action, you can try consciously applying different perceptions.
As you work in concentration, you should be getting some practice in this--because, after all, each of the stages of concentration, all the way up to the dimension of nothingness, is called a perception attainment.
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For example, when you're working with the breath, the label of "breath" should be your primary perception. The label you apply to your experience of the body is "breath." Not only the in-and-out breath: Try to experience all the different parts of your body as types of breath energy. If your arm really were breath energy, would it be good breath energy or blocked breath energy? Just try applying that label very consistently to the sensation of the arm, and after a while your experience of the arm is going to change.
Try applying it to all the different parts of your body.
See how that changes the way you experience those parts.
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You'll see that the actual physical experience of the body is going to change because of the mental label.
And the advantage of this is that you can start doing different things with the sensations. If you perceive a particular sensation as something solid, there's not much you can do with it. If you perceive it as blocked energy, there are ways to unblock energy. You can figure out how to redirect it, how to loosen up the blockage.
In other words, the perception is useful because you can do things with it...
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...you're ready to start taking pain apart. One of the first things you notice when you look at a pain is the sense that it seems to be a solid mass in the body. Is it really? Or is it the result of your perception?
Try changing your perception to see what happens. Again, think of the pain as just tiny dots of sensation that can move around, that have space between them. The breath can flow through the pain. The blood can flow easily through the pain. Try to distinguish which of those sensations are just body sensations and which are the pain sensations, and you begin to realize that all the things you used to glom together are actually lots of different kinds of sensation.
Only the way you perceived them was what made them so threatening.
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You may have picked up that old way of perceiving because you thought that putting a boundary around the pain was a good way of dealing with it.
Putting a boundary around the pain, you thought, might keep it from spreading. But when you really look at the process of putting up and maintaining that boundary, you begin to see that often it's an unskillful way of dealing with the pain.
So you can replace that perception with more skillful ones.
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Then you can look at the other perceptions and thought-fabrications that gather around the pain--the stories the mind tells itself about how long you've had this pain, or how much you've suffered in life, and "poor you": all this suffering, all this pain. You begin to ask yourself, "Do you really have to believe those stories? Can you stop making the stories for a little while?"
See what happens.
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Pain is an excellent place to start seeing all the different processes in the mind, because you begin to see that it's not only a physical pain. There's a lot of mental activity around the pain that can cause the really important pain, the really important suffering: in other words, the mental burden you build up around the pain. If you look carefully, you can see these different stories, these different perceptions, simply as events in the mind, and you can just drop the habit of listening to them and believing them. See what happens..."
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Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Excerpt from "Perception"
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