“Meditations on Eckhart Tolle” quote for talk: “Pay attention to your pain: keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is. Stay alert and stay present with your whole Being, with every cell of your body. As you do so, you are bringing a light into this darkness. This is the flame of your consciousness.” 

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This teaching goes against the grain of every thought in our mind. Avoid pain, remove pain, fix pain, get rid of the cause of pain…but don’t just keep feeling it. Don’t just sit with in! Do something!

When we live totally in the flatland’s surface of cause and effect, pain has an external cause, someone, something, or myself. But something is causing it, and we know that if you remove the cause, you remove the pain. When this cause and effect logic, that works in the external world of objects, does not work when we try to fix the pain in our life. Life is both objective and subjective, and the inside is the cause of the outside. Fixing the inside pain by using a wrench on the outside just increases the pain, tightens the pain instead of releasing it.

When you go to a massage therapist, they release the pain. They don’t fix the person or the world you blame for the tension in your body. They release the pain by finding it and pressing on the tension, applying pain to pain. Through pain we are released from pain. This is also the teaching of the Cross. Through the pyre we are liberated from the pyre.

The Dharma (teaching) of Buddhism is all about liberation or the cessation of pain (suffering). And it really works, but you have to do the experiment in your everyday mind in order for it to work. You have to take the medicine instead of just reading the label. Buddha Dharma is what you do, not what you think about or conceptualize.