Do you know how to handle pain and pleasure?
Here’s a small story.
One day, a man came to a master with a question, ‘Master, how can we avoid heat and cold?’
The master replied, ‘Be hot, be cold.’
Heat and cold are metaphorical representation of pleasure and pain.
How to avoid pleasure and pain? Just go through both in a witnessing state, that’s all.
From Upanishad as expounded by a living Avatar, Bhagawan Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam, it says that all our sensory pleasures are just agitation-gratification. It is the agitation we feel in the tongue that makes us satisfy it with food and then destroys our health but gives a temporary agitational-gratification. For example, a highly spicy food or junk food will not allow our whole mouth to work as we will feel tired after a few minutes. Whether it is through any of the 5 senses, the agitational gratification items will always be short term goal with a short-term vision. So, if you cognize your existence to be short lived, you will fall for agitational gratification practices which gratify and excite you now – a low level pleasure. If you think you are going to live till 100 years, non-vegetarian food can never be part of your diet. If you think you are going to have many births and deaths, you will have a clear vision about you and your actions will be aligned to that. Fundamentally, the moment what you consider as you change, your pain and pleasure will also be different. Anything that makes you get into agitational gratification is based on perishable. If you live with the perishable understanding, you will surely perish.
Pain on the other hand, whether it is emotionally and mentally, pain arises out of our resistance to the present. Such pain is additive and creates negative energy field around us that we can refer to as the pain body. Emotional imbalance disturbs the physically body, sexual repression leads to the back pain: a sense of bearing high responsibilities, causes shoulder pain, when you are in unfriendly company, your body seems to shrink. Pain calls for our attention, because attention is energy. We invite pain upon ourselves through a lack of moderation in whatever we do, and often enjoy the pain as it brings us attention.
A very important sacred secret – These illusory pain and pleasure, even if you handle it with the awareness that it is happening in you, it will lead to evolution. All changes whether getting more and more caught in illusion or delusion or evolving from illusion or delusion and reaching into higher states, both happen by illusion and delusion. The cyclone of pain and pleasure is constantly happening, life is testing you, if you behave with delusion, you will create more complications and illusions in your life. If you sit with more restful awareness, the same cyclone will make you evolve.
Life constantly tests our stability, understanding and strength, but in a very foolish way, we respond and react and create a bigger mess. However, when our taste matures, we will function on the basis of delayed gratification i.e. based on the imperishable. Your cognition about you should be based on consciousness, soul which does not perish. With this cognition, strategize your life – the long-term vision about you and your pleasure and pain in life, you will not allow the hormonal hijack to happen in you.
The famous sage, Patanjali goes a step further, he explains how after conquering the pain and pleasures of the body you are no longer bound by it. He gave the technique – science of making the body balanced. If you keep the body balanced you can go beyond pain and pleasure, and the intense, innate, inside pleasure gets awakened. Your muscle by its very nature creates pleasure just because it’s alive. If the life force is infused into the muscle, if the muscle is aware that it is alive, it will create pleasure. When you are alive in your muscles, the pleasure created is so strong, so intense that you will go beyond all outer pleasures. Namaste 😀