As I sat there, somewhere around 45 minutes in, my leg began to hurt. As I sometimes do, I turned my attention to the pain, which steadily increased. As time passed, the pain became intense, but so long as I paid attention to it, it was manageable.
This time, however, I looked very closely at the sensation of the pain, and noticed there were two parts. One was the pain itself, which had a dull, aching, almost sour quality to it, and was located directly inside my leg. However, there was nothing inherently objectionable about that feeling. The other part was some piece of my mind that was constantly triggering thoughts about getting away from the pain. It wasn't the thoughts themselves; whatever it was lay deep beneath anything conscious. Still, I could see its effects directly. It was spewing a stream of different thoughts aimed at getting me to take action to remove the pain.
Some of the more common ones included "how much longer do I have left before this session is up?", "if i just lean forward a bit, circulation will come back and the pain will lessen", "remember how good it feels when you're done meditating and the pain stops?", "check the clock to see if it's almost time to stop meditating", and "I think it's time to go -- Julia's waiting for you. Let's end this pain". It was amazing how clever this "pain avoidance" part of my brain was. It dressed itself up in all kinds of different thoughts, both direct and indirect, in an attempt to get me to take action. Still, I sat there and watched the pain. And that's when the second realization came.
As the pain intensified, I noticed that my sense of time became much sharper. I was very aware of how long each minute was, and felt worried that it would be a long time before I finished meditating. I began to feel a sense of urgency about a lot of things: urgency to finish meditation, urgency to get up and go do something, urgency to go eat lunch, urgency to go hang out with Julia. For a while, I felt the urgency without noticing it consciously. At some point though, I suddenly became aware of it, and realized that it was completely arbitrary. I saw that it too was arising from my mind's attempt to get me to stop the pain. Once I understood that, I took a good look at the feeling of urgency itself, and it quickly dissipated (very similar to the way that a patch of fog dissolves in the warm sun).
Once I had realized the arbitrary and desperate nature of my mind's attempts to escape pain, I just started laughing (which has never happened to me before during meditation). Despite the intensity of the pain, a deep happiness washed over me, and I couldn't stop smiling if I tried (which has happened before :) ).
Behind that joy and laughter was a profound sense of contentment stemming from the understanding that pain, no matter how intense, can always be overcome. And that follows for all the negative emotions like sadness, anger, greed, hate, depression, jealousy, uncontrollable desire, and so on. All it takes is time, effort, and focus.
I will definitely keep at it.
