Pain, Injury, and Suffering
by Sam Glannon
Let's take a moment to talk about pain, injury, and suffering. Each of these three are experiences which can be meaningfully related to our yoga practice. It can be easy to conflate these concepts, but they are not entirely interchangeable on deeper reflection.
Pain in this instance means the physical experience of pain in the body in its most narrow sense. I am talking here about somatic experience - our felt sense of our own body, of which pain is one aspect.
This is distinct from injury in that we might have an injury without experiencing pain, and distinct from suffering in that it might not cause us any further psychological discomfort. Injury and suffering may or may not involve pain and vice versa.
Pain
Pain is interesting in the context of our practice because it allows us to see one particular reality of our perception of our physical bodies, namely that our felt sense of the body is a perception created in the nervous system and not a pure flow of information appearing to us with no filter or distortion. We are in the habit conventionally of regarding our perceptual experience as a clear depiction of reality.
But certain aspects of our experience show us otherwise, and pain is one of them. We can experience pain whether or not there is some underlying problem in the body, or else can experience little or no pain when there is a problem, even a major one. People who experience serious injury sometimes feel no pain as a result of going into shock. Some injuries lead to chronic pain even after the underlying damage to the body has been repaired.
All of this is to say that pain is a certain reality in the nervous system and not an objective fact. In pointing this out I do not mean to dismiss it but instead to call your attention to this reality of your perception. Perception is not objective reality. If you don't believe me, you can read what Merleau-Ponty has written about his research on people who sustained serious injuries in the second world war.
Injury
Injury here means damage to the body such that the underlying integrity or utility of the body is impaired. You might have injury without pain and without suffering. I point this out to you especially to call your attention to the fact that you may have some latent, unfelt area of the body which causes you no pain, but which has been damaged in such a way that you need to interact with it differently.
You might for instance have a knee or an ankle which you know you have hurt in such a way that there is a lingering vulnerability in that joint such that it would be more prone to being damaged again in future. This might be true without that area of your body being at all painful to you. This again is a sense in which the somatic experience of your body, while not unhelpful to you in negotiating such a situation, might not be sufficient as an approach for relating to your physical body.
Suffering
Suffering is even more notably distinct. Suffering here means not just physical discomfort but also the psychological experience of suffering more generally.
When we encounter this concept, it is important to recall the philosophical background from which yoga emerges. Suffering in Hinduism and Buddhism is a basic aspect of human life. For Hinduism, our experience of suffering results out of a basic illusion of separation from ultimate reality. In Buddhism, suffering is one of the four noble truths and similarly results from the deluded nature of our ego-based perception.
In both traditions the project of moving into a different ontological state wherein suffering no longer exists is a serious and literal intention. That is to say, if we are sufficiently good meditators and yogis, we may eventually reach a state of being in which we no longer suffer. This is the project of ascetic practice in both traditions. It is important in framing our conception of our practice and our expectations for its result to know that the people who created this system had this in mind as a project.
Suffering relates our individual psychological experience of reality. This is also easier to understand by witnessing the difference between pain and suffering. Having pain can be just an experience of physical discomfort in the body which may or may not have any emotional color to it at all. One could have all kinds of different psychological relationships to pain. What is additional about suffering is that we detest a certain experience, that we adopt a certain relationship to our experience. There is also a certain relationship here to the concept of resistance.
Yoga can relate to and address all three of these experiences. We hope that by doing yoga, you can reduce any experience of pain you have in your body or prevent it from occurring if it otherwise would have. We certainly hope that we won't cause you any pain through the practice itself.
If it does, please talk to one of us teachers, don't suffer in silence if you will forgive my play on words here.
Likewise we hope that we can improve your body's functionality if you have any injuries. We encourage you to practice in such a way that you do not cause yourself any injuries in the process of doing asana. And finally we hope that through yoga, your experience of suffering can be alleviated in part or in whole.
Reflecting on these aspects of your practice is meaningful in that it should guide your approach. It can be easy to become too materialistic or goal-oriented. You want to have good abs. You want to do Kapotasana, or deep backbending, or complete intermediate series. You want your Instagram account to blow up. Fine, fine.
But if you contextualize the activity in a different way and try instead to reduce your pain and suffering and heal your injuries, whatever they might be, this would likely lead you to a more mature practice in and of itself.
The intention with which you approach this practice is meaningfully related to the result you will achieve and your experience in the process. This is all just to say that a wise approach leads to a good result, and through this kind of self reflection we can attain that.
Yoga can be either a mundane practice or a spiritual practice.
Just to say that one does asana does not necessarily mean that one does yoga. Just because one is practicing yoga does not mean that one is doing spiritual practice. To make your practice something profound, it has to change you and it has to change your relationship to the basic realities of life, such as suffering.
Our Ashtanga yoga practice is difficult. In a sense, one has to suffer to do it. But that does not mean one has to injure oneself or have unnecessary pain. It does mean that one must change the way one relates to pain and suffering. That does not mean that one seeks suffering as some form of self injury because that would certainly not be spiritual practice either.
It does mean that one must let go of the dualistic way of thinking about pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness as good and bad. That is transcendence. To go beyond the mundane way of seeing life and the human situation transforms the activity from something mundane into something spiritual. By practicing in this way, one achieves a result beyond the commonplace.