It's Only The Pain That Hurts . . . Or Is It? On Impulse, Meditation and Discipline

"Es ist nur der Schmerz, der wehtut," (it's only the pain that hurts) my mother often said to us. Part joke, part consolation, part teasing this was her strategy to distract us from the real pain we felt after hurting ourselves.

It is not just the pain that hurts. What often hurts right along with the pain are questions such as why did that happen to me, how could I be so stupid, will I get hurt again, etc? Shame, searching for reasons, fear and many other feelings are brought up by pain. They exacerbate it, they make it stronger, longer lasting, perhaps, and, in many situations, they cause a certain kind of impulse re-action to the source or perceived source of the pain. Often that re-action is a variation of anger. It's  impulsively defensive. Our vulnerability scares us and we feel a strong need to protect us from any additional unwanted attacks.

Impulsive defensiveness can be a problem. It can have us act destructively towards others, objects, and, sometimes, even towards ourselves. To the extent that meditation teaches us to notice our feelings, but not act on them, to sit with the itch, but not scratch, it is also teaching us to be mindful of our impulses, especially the destructive ones.  Meditation teaches us a kind of suspicion (lit., looking under) of those impulses. It is saying or recommending that we not follow the impulse.

But can we really afford living without our impulses? Is it wise to use meditation to reduce our impulsiveness? And if I use meditation to reduce my impulse towards anger, how will it affect my impulse towards love? Is the impulse to wolf down food really a lesser experience than it is to eat mindfully? What would love-making look like without impulses? And I wonder how such an attitude of impulse-suspicion might affect my relationship with another person--a friend, my partner, my children. Can I really dispense with the immediacy of my impulses without jeopardizing the growth of intimacy in my relationships with others? In a recent conversation my somewhat impulsive response to that question was that, pushed to the extreme, meditation would contradict the very idea and materiality  of the relationship itself.

If I need reassurance that the world is real, that the person in front of me really exists I will follow my impulses. My anger, my pain, my love, my laughter--all impulses, i.e., reactions to something--tell me with an amazing mix of speed and depth that the world is truly and materially there. And with the same amazing mix of speed and depth the world also forces its material reality on me. I cannot help feeling it, knowing it.

If meditation helps me see and gauge my own reactions and feelings towards another person, if, in fact, meditation changes my thought and feeling processes from re-acting to noticing, then it will--to the extend that it succeeds in this--distance me from the world.

Perhaps meditation helps me see that my feelings and impulses, especially the strong ones, are merely my response to the other person and not what really is. In that view my feelings and impulses could even be seen as mere projections of my own shadow on to the other person…then how do I decide, better even, how do I know that not everything I feel about another isn't simply what I believe and feel about them? How do I know the other really exists? Where does this business about meditation that simultaneously wants to distance me from my impulses toward others and that, perhaps, explains my reactions to others as mere projections…where does meditation leave room for the actual other?  Isn't this an almost unethical withdrawal from the other person into the self--unethical because it ultimately denies the reality of the other. It ignores the very existence of the other as other. It is self-absorbed!

A few examples might help shed light on this: When I was a young boy and teenager getting hurt, being confronted with unexpected pain, could drive me into a rage. I remember the lightning-flash-like rage that coursed through me upon hitting my head on the corner of a cupboard or stooping my toe somewhere. I felt like tearing down, destroying the object that had caused this pain in me. Clearly, that kind of reaction would not be helpful! A more meditative attitude could help me (and did help me, long before I knew anything about meditation) to see that this is not the cupboards fault. As an object it just exists and the problem of pain is just my response to it. I could see that the suddenness of the pain combined with a sense of not having paid attention enough to avoid this pain had caused me to feel ashamed. An attribution error followed.  I "concluded" that the object had in fact shamed me! And I was going to destroy it for its impudence! --It's not difficult to see that this is not a helpful way to look at the world. The shame came from inside of me and I needed to learn how to deal with it more constructively. And I did grow out of this impulsive projection of shame onto something/someone else.

Strangely though, in spite of all that learning, the pain itself that I felt when I hit my head was still there.  When I hit my head, there is pain. This pain tells me two things: I exist and so does the cupboard. On top of that the pain functions as a judgment: Something is wrong. Two realities--the reality of my head and the reality of the cupboard--just collided. And I am vulnerable, always vulnerable, to such a collision! And, even though the shame response is not helpful, some kind of response, some kind of impulse is necessary. Perhaps such a response would look like my mom's actual response to her own pain: she would hold her head, dance around from one foot to the other, perhaps jump up a few times and go "arrrghh."

So, to attribute these reactions to shame only seems to be reductive at the same time that it can be helpful. Reductive because if I pushed it too far it would deny the reality of the other  as well as my vulnerability and replace it with a kind of solipsistic experience in which, by way of shame, I cause my own pain, in which I am vulnerable simply because of my own judgments.

If I replace the cupboard with a person who said something upsetting and painful to me the situation might be different. Of course, there too, shame and feeling shamed could be the cause of my upset, not the other person. If I get upset at what the other is saying it might very well be simply a result of the shame I feel. But does this take into consideration that the other person is real and that he/she might very well have said something, inadvertently or not, that upset me? In that case my very vulnerability becomes a sign for me, a sign that the other is truly there in his or her full existence. In a relationship this vulnerability needs to be expressed frequently. If that doesn't happen the relationship will wither and die. But it doesn't make sense to think that we can express it simply by saying "you know, I am always vulnerable." Even the oft-used phrase "that really hurt my feelings" remains too aloof. While that might be true it is also way too abstract a statement. It is, in a strange way, no longer vulnerable. We express vulnerability in spontaneous and often reactive ways to the other person.  The impulse is to say "ouch." Taking such an expression of vulnerability on a course of self-examination first, before we express it to the other person, would make my relationship with the other person artificial and stale. The impulse to say "fuck you" is no less important than is the impulse to say "I love you."

Perhaps the answer to these questions and reflections can be found in the nature of human beings themselves. As much as might strive to life a non-impulsive life we will never quite get there. Our body and nervous system are set up reactively/impulsively. No discipline in the world will completely circumvent that. Similarly, however, we may strive to life a truly impulsive life and completely follow the flow of our feelings and reactions to the world. Yet, here too, we will soon realize the impossibility of such a "discipline." Our mind is set up in such a way that we will observe the impulse, notice it and, therefore, have already lost the meaning of what it is to be truly impulsive.

Working on both disciplines--non-impulsive discipline and impulsive discipline--may be worth our while still.