Khanti - Wat Pah Nanachat

around unpleasant situations, and a fear of pain. It’s sobering to
realize how often the reasons that we give ourselves for turning
away from things are rationalizations after the act. Often our
decisions that are made are basically on the pain-pleasure
polarity, we’re simply moving away from pain and towards
pleasure. This fear and anxiety about pain is in itself an
important area of study, because fear of pain is bound up with
fear of losing control. When you are in pain you are in a
situation that you can’t get away from, so more than anything
else it exposes just how severely limited your resources in
dealing with dukkha 28 are. The natural tendency of the
unenlightened mind is to try to avoid that kind of situation
altogether. The meditator is interested in going against the
grain and looking into the way our mind works in every
situation.
So to summarize, I would say, that there are occasions
where it’s not a good idea to bear with physical pain, if it’s
going to have long term physical consequences for example,
or, if you are just getting really depressed with having to sit
through pain every time you meditate. You want to be able to
maintain a sense of buoyancy and interest and enjoyment of
meditation. But having said that, bearing with a certain amount
of physical pain in meditation – just a certain amount, not just
changing posture immediately when you feel discomfort,
bearing with it for a while before you change, even on this
level, you are developing, vaccinating yourself, gradually
developing an ability to be with the uncomfortable and the
unpleasant, in an unruffled and natural kind of way which
expands naturally into an ability to deal with the unpleasant in
daily life.
28 dukkha: suffering, unsatisfactoriness, stress
27