How to Ease Pain by Expanding and Contracting Our Awareness

In a previous post, I wrote about the oldest solution to stress, loss, anxiety, and pain of all sorts—access to the two fields of life. One is the “relative world,” which we all live in, but there is also the transcendent, which we can all experience—some of us easily, some with practice. The alleviation of suffering through access to these two fields is, in a way, the basis of all spirituality. Buddha spoke of nirvana as beyond all suffering. Krisha in the Bhagavad Gita said, “Established in Being, perform action.” Jesus said the Kingdom of God is within (a kingdom totally unaffected by the relative suffering caused by Roman domination). Muhammad said to handle difficulties by staying close to Allah, the transcendent field of God, through prayer and supplication.

However, I realize that the transcendent—Pure Being, God-as-the-Absolute–may seem a bit inaccessible. I am going to look at these two fields in another, more practical way, as something we can always access. Let’s start by seeing all of the relative world in terms of contraction. Matter is just a contraction or concentration or condensation of stuff—atoms, etc. Air is not as contracted as water, water is less contracted than hard stuff like stone. We see relative degrees of contraction or denseness all around us.

Inside, we can also feel degrees of contraction. We can be highly focused (thinking hard, or emotionally focused, as when we feel fear or anger); we can be alert but not especially focused; or very relaxed, open, and uncontracted. As an analogy, our thoughts are like a stream, flowing along freely, but sometimes there is something like a pile of rocks that causes rapids, and on the other side of the rapids, the water forms eddies. That is, we start thinking about something, and we HSPs (highly sensitive persons) especially may process it deeply. Our thoughts churn around this rock pile like the water in rapids, sometimes getting stuck in an eddy that seems to circle endlessly before we can move on. At other times, we can just “float along.”

You Can Always Eddy Out

I like the eddy analogy because when I went with a group down the Colorado River for 15 days, after going through a rapid, a place requiring intense concentration for boat travelers because of the big rocks in the water, our oar person would “eddy out”—allow the boat to be caught in an eddy—in order to stop and see that those coming through after us were all right. An eddy was a safe place in a sense. The rushing river did not control you, carrying you down to the next rapid. You just floated in circles. But you had to row pretty hard to get out of an eddy to continue to flow down the river.

Of course, contracted states, whether diamonds in the material world or intense thoughts in the subjective world, can be very nice. When we are experiencing some great pleasure, we are fully contracted, “really into it.” We can truly enjoy being completely focused while engaged in a concert performance, learning something fascinating, or working to express ourselves creatively. We have “eddied out.”

There is nothing wrong with contraction. Our very self or ego is a contraction, or an eddy we swirl around in, separate in a sense from the big river of life. The universe is thought to have been contracted to the tiniest, infinitely dense point, a “singularity,” before the Big Bang expansion.

Some Contracted States Are Fun—But Some Are Not

Most people on that Grand Canyon trip lived for the white-water rapids. Not me. I went despite my fear of the rapids. My point is, contracted states can also be painful. Pain itself can reduce us to nothing but PAIN. Emotional states can do that, too. Think of terror. Or sinking deep into feelings of loss, suffering, worry, grief. They all cause us to contract, to focus down, until we are that one huge thing, that huge eddy in the rapids that has us cut off from the flow.

I have said that as HSPs, we focus especially well due to our extra observing and processing of our surroundings. We also feel physical and emotional pain more than others. So we contract very easily. And, again, contracting is normal, even good. But as HSPs, we need to be as skilled at expanding as contracting, for those times when we want to escape a painfully contracted state and row ourselves out of the eddy we are stuck in.

Using Expansion Skillfully

Think about all the ways you naturally expand out of a contracted state. Sometimes we use distraction to deal with the contraction that comes with pain—physical pain, or maybe grief, or maybe waiting for a test result to tell us if we are seriously sick. Maybe we plunge into some work, or watch an absorbing movie. Here, true, we are exchanging one eddy, a painful one, for another. But in a sense, when we use a distraction, our world has expanded beyond the pain.

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But there are other natural ways to expand. Suppose you have been concentrating very hard. Then you “take a break.” You may literally step outside of your contracted state. Go for a walk. Look at trees. Go down to the shore and stare across the ocean, a lake, or up and down the length of a river.

People can expand us, too—talking to a friend can give us a new perspective; realizing others have gone through the same thing or worse; and, more expanded yet, seeing our situation in the light of human history.

We can expand out of a contracted state by doing something that is easy for us and that we love—dancing, singing, running, petting our dog or cat. And of course, there is the ultimate expansion—meditating, praying, performing meaningful rituals. These can expand us right out to the edges of the Absolute. Think about the many ways you expand when you need or want to.

P.S. I want to give credit to author and spiritual teacher Andrew Holechek for introducing me to this contraction/expansion perspective. It is an important concept in one of his books, Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom. The reason for the title is that Holechek begins his book by arguing that meditation is sold as a way to feel better, but what happens when we feel bad? If equanimity is the ultimate sign of enlightenment, why not tackle it at the start by facing the hard stuff first? Reverse the goal by learning to fully, fully expand at the moment of intense contraction. But that is a topic for another time.