•

This chapter goes
together with
the chapter

Meditative
Pixelation

and

Trauma and
Transcendence

 
INTEGRAL SUFFERING AND HAPPINESS
             The Inner Warrior's Sacred Wound

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer

"What gives light must endure burning."
Victor Frankl
  
The cure for pain... is pain.
Rumi

This chapter is about suffering. However, my impulse to write is driven by my happiness. It is arriving like a circadian rhythm of joyful ease every morning triggered by my first and only cup of coffee. When I was younger, I wasn't particularly happy. The inner happiness gradually crept in through meditation and the self-knowledge that emerged from my life long dedicated pursuit of 'innerstanding.' So I am here to testify that happiness—though as elusive as a butterfly in nature—can indeed land in the body.
  
Already, I find myself in another contradiction. On one hand, I here state that I 'own' what I write about in the sense that I only write from personal experience. I only talk what I live and I live much more than I can express. In crafting this discourse and everything elso on Meditation.dk, I adhere to a principle of personal authenticity: As far as possible I only share insights and experiences that are intrinsic to my own life. This commitment ensures that my words on happiness stem from genuine personal fulfillment, distinguishing this text from purely academic endeavors or the narratives of individuals like Alan Watts for example. Watts, while articulate in discussing meditation and spirituality, led a life marked by personal decisions that contrasted sharply with the wisdom he espoused—evidenced by his departure from his wife and kid's and his premature demise due to alcoholism.
 
At the same time, it is obvious that this happiness is not 'mine'. I was for some years a tour guide in India. That does not mean that I own Taj Mahal. By nature, happiness cannot belong to anyone other than everyone. It grows by being shared, but actually, we do not even have to entertain the notion of sharing. Being in happiness is enough because happiness like all other mental states is infectious by nature. However, some ego's seems to have develloped a strong immune defence against it and hence they feel unease and even occasionally display agression when disturbed by too much happiness.
     
The Cosmic Fool and the Suffering Scribe
Happiness, I believe, is our natural state. This view may seem contradictory to the conclusions drawn by many intellectuals and philosophers throughout history. In some sense they are right: striving to be happy can often lead to the opposite. However, I 'think' there's an inherent systemic burden for thinkers: the price of insight often comes with a sense of alienation. It could also be the other way around, in the sense that alienation creates a space for insight. I interpret the quote below from Meister Eckhart in this spirit. As I always do, I allow myself to understand the Meister's notion of God as equivalent to the most mysterious 'no-thing' in us: consciousness.

"Had I a God whom I could understand,
I would no longer consider him God."
  
"The more we can impute to Him (God) not-likeness,
 the nearer do we get to understanding Him."

Here comes then the third contradiction: Why do I write as I do - with so many words and concepts? I think this urge to verbalize was a gift given to me by the suffering I went through as a younger man. The intellect was trying to find a way out of the maze of unease and confusion, and it indeed contributed to that crusade. In this sense I 'own' both suffering and happiness.

The lover's warmth, the penetrating depth of his voice,
the appeal of his words - all stem from the pain in his heart.
Hazrat Inayat Khan

Use the Intellect to Remove Barriers
I must clarify here, just as intellect can never fully comprehend the 'soul,' that I don't have the ability to 'create' happiness. The intellectual ego's search for happiness is like chasing the famous pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Happiness isn't an achievement akin to building muscle through weight lifting. Rather, it's a byproduct of 'something' that exist beyond our direct understanding and control. That mysterious something is embedded wthin the realm of consciousness.

Therefore what I can share are my observations of psychological and societal barriers that prevent happiness from taking the center stage in our lives. These barriers are within our cognitive understanding and our power to overcome by de-constructing them. Listen here to what Rumi has to say:

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.
Rumi

Happiness - even in Suffering
I previosly stated that I 'own' both suffering and happiness. Of all the wonderful things I realized on this life long journey of 'innerstanding', the maybe most important take away is that that happiness and suffering are not mutually exclusive.
    
Indeed, it is feasible to find happiness amidst suffering. In fact, this form of happiness might be the only kind that can be sustained as a continuous state of being. Let me here add some wise words from the Meister.

A life of rest and peace in God is good;
a life of pain in patience is still better;
but to have peace in a life of pain is best of all.
Meister Eckhart

From personal experience, I can affirm that every step we take on this never-ending journey of an accepted, troublesome life simultaneously creates a plateau where deeper and higher states of peace and happiness can be found. In this dynamic, the depth of our happiness is shaped by our suffering. That is why I coined this little koan:

The deeper you fly
The higher you fall

However, as this text unfolds, it will become clear that not all suffering is beneficial. The kind of suffering that cannot coexist with, or contribute to, the depth of happiness is the suffering we refuse to accept as a gift.

AUTHENTIC FEELINGS AND INTEGRAL SUFFERING IN HAPPINESS
Before delving deeper into the phenomenon of suffering, we must first address an essential question: Is there truly such a thing as genuine, authentic feelings? This inquiry is closely tied to the question of individuality. If our sense of individuality is an illusion—a mere trick of the mind—then it logically follows that our suffering must also be illusory.
  
Is there something authentic within us?
Do we possess a deeper, truer individual essence or 'soul'? Despite the sophisticated arguments many academics—and even some spiritualists—might present, claiming that individuality is an illusion, I am inclined to take a stand. While achieving 100% authenticity may indeed be a pipe dream, I believe we can move closer to a version of inner truth. In this sense, it gives meaning to talk about indivduality.

Here, I am inspired by Kantian terminology. It is a bit like chasing the horizon—fully aware that we can never completely reach it (the "Thing-in-itself"), yet striving to approach it as closely as possible from our subjective vantage point (the "thing for us"). Our individuality, in this sense, is the "thing for us". For us, it is real.
 
And what, then, is real in this subjective sense? Here, we must part ways with Kant's more neutral perspective. Inner reality is where the heart resides. Whatever love gazes upon becomes real - for us.

But why, then, is it so difficult to experience this inner individual essence? It is because, first and foremost, love must gaze upon suffering. Suffering is the portal.
  
Legitimate Suffering
Late in his life, C.G. Jung made this profound statement:

"The basis for all mental illness
is created in the avoidance of legitimate suffering."
C.G. Jung

What does Jung mean by legitimate suffering? As I understand it, it refers to the suffering that arises naturally from life's inevitable adversities—a bittersweet blend of joy and sorrow. Jung further observed:

"Nobody, as long as he moves about
the chaotic currents of life,
is without trouble."

Jung’s insights illuminate a fundamental truth about the human condition: the essence of our being, or our soul, is not revealed without enduring pain. This leads to an important distinction—what Jung terms legitimate suffering, which can be understood as existential pain, the primordial discomfort that arises directly from engaging with the raw, chaotic realities of life.
 
As an integral part of our survival instincts, we are naturally inclined to avoid pain at all costs. However, this avoidance carries a price. When we engage in a one-dimensional pursuit of positive emotions, I propose that the flourishing of the inner human soul is stifled by excessive indulgence. Such fixation risks leaving no space for the existential discomfort essential for authentic personal growth.

C.G. Jung’s concept of individuation closely mirrors this journey. In a state of constant emotional one-sidedness, where the pendulum of well-being is forced to swing exclusively toward artificial brightness—or its neglected opposite—the necessary duality of darkness and light is lost. Yet, it is precisely this blend of opposites that lends depth, substance, and richness to our lives.

Meditation is Legitimate Suffering
The Danish poet Otto Gelsted speaks in the poem below, The Common, about what he calls clean pain. Allowing it to hurt, in Gelsted's wonderful poem, is a prerequisite for health and further: the possibility of finding the common great find.

The Common
All alone, just myself
I'm happy anyway

Let it just hurt!
Clean pain, it's healthy!

Lie still like a stone,
become hard and become one -
....

Just go down into loneliness,
maybe you will come - who knows -

through the loneliness portal
out to something free and great,

and the common great find!
lay on the loneliness bottom
Otto Gelsted - 1920

Meditation is the attentive, passive, and as far as possible, storyless act of resting in the suffering that naturally arises along life’s journey. It is in this existential state that the soul attains a holographic depth—something it cannot achieve solely through positive experiences.

I am fairly certain that Otto Gelsted never read Rumi or other mystical texts from the East. As a committed socialist of his time, he likely disapproved of religious matters. Yet, paradoxically, this detachment lends his insight in "The Common" a rare purity.

Nevertheless, Gelsted's words tap into a universal human experience—one echoed timelessly and spacelessly by the mystical brotherhood of humanity, a kinship unbound by knowledge of one another yet profoundly interconnected:

"Accept the pain allotted to you and you will discover in pain a joy which pleasure cannot yield, for the simple reason that acceptance of pain takes you much deeper than pleasure does.... Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage, and endurance open deep and perennial sources of real happiness."
Nisargadatta Maharaj

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. Rumi

I said what about my heart
God said: Tell me what you hold inside it
I said pain and sorrow
He said: Stay with it.
Rumi

Story-told Pain is not Legitimate Pain
Let me here assert that I am not talking about the pain we artificially inflict on ourselves through thought-spin, where we weave ourselves into endless stories of self-pity, but only the sensed pain that naturally arises in front of our noses on life's not always nicely paved roads.
 
What is, IS!

The suffering created by our worried and constantly planning ego-mind is thus not 'legitimate'. Legitimate emotions are in this sense the emotions and survival thoughts that arise in the first split second in the present, when we openly meet the world. Meditation is to rest and spontaneously and powerfully act in and upon these fresh emotions rather than being thrown back and forth like a ball in the ping pong machine of thoughts reenforced by thoughts in a disembodied state of victimhood. Note here that if you fully embrace the first fresh emotion, there will subsequently not be so many thoughts to create an extended drama out of the situation.
 
In this exploration, I delve into the nature of what I term 'fresh emotions.' Fundamentally, our cognitive processes were honed as a survival mechanism, a response crafted by the amygdala to navigate through perceived threats and discomforts. Thoughts, in this context, act as emergency responders rushing to the scene of an accident. Their objective is clear and necessary: to manage and rectify the crisis at hand, a function they have proficiently performed since the inception of our amygdala. The issue arises not from their initial response, but when these cognitive processes begin to conjure hypothetical disasters, trapping us in a loop of imagined crises that our primordial emotional body struggles to distinguish from actual threats. This blurring of lines between real and imagined dangers triggers a cyclical escalation of thoughts and emotions, a vortex that invariably spirals downward, retraumatizing the psyche.

The intricate and often downward spiralled dance between thought and emotion, while evolutionarily advantageous for our mammalian ancestors, beckons us now to transcend the biological constructs that have been our survival scaffolds for millennia. The longer we dwell within these thought spirals, the further we stray from resolution, and the more we entrench ourselves in destructive patterns. The freshness of our emotional response becomes diluted, contaminated by the "ifs, buts, and whens" that clutter our mental space.
 
The challenge lies not in the act of thinking itself but in the clutter of incessant, often unproductive chatter that we superimpose upon our foundational cognitive layer. This acknowledgment is not a call for the abandonment of thought but an invitation to sift through the mental noise, to return to the immediacy and purity of our initial emotional responses. In doing so, we pave the way for a more harmonious integration of thought and feeling, where each serves its purpose without encumbering the other.

It's crucial to acknowledge the value of a reflective mind. There can be a tremendeous benefit in translating our inner emotional state into fresh words. However, there is a hair fine balance to be obtained in this process. If these first thoughts entertain into a spiral where thoughts begin to paint feeling patterns on the body-canvas and then new thought try to solve these new scenarios, then we have entered the vicious circle of retraumatization. That is why Meister Eckhart emphazises peace in the pain. As long as there is peace in the pain, natural healing occours spontaneously.
 
To be able to feel oneself uncompromisingly and almost storylessly acceptant in all life situations creates spontaneous meditation... One becomes meditated in and by one's acceptance of oneself and others, an acceptance that connects the inner and outer person in emotional dialogue. In this sense, one could call Meditation sensed self-honesty, an inner emotional honesty, where the one who is oneself effortlessly becomes meditated by and in oneself. Does this sound hairy? What I mean to say is that spontaneous meditation can only happen in self-honesty.
 

THE WOUND OF PRESENCE
The incredible miracle here is that the divine mystery touches and penetrates me precisely where I am most vulnerable, traumatized, and complicated.

The wound is the place where the Light enters you
Rumi

To contain oneself is tantamount to exposing the inner person in the outer. This makes it possible for the soul, our felt essence, to breathe through the cracks in the armor of the outer person. To be emotionally honest, first with oneself, then with others, is tantamount to vulnerability.

The inner person thus exposes itself in the outer in what one might call a wound of presence.

When inward tenderness finds the secret hurt,
pain itself will crack the rock and Ah!
Let the soul emerge.
-Rumi-

To expose this wound of presence in the fresh air is the highest form of courage. This form of passive sensing requires courage and patience because our biological nature has programmed us to think and then act ourselves out of uncomfortable situations.

The great Whole or God or whatever you want to call the unfathomable mystery touches me precisely where I am most hurt. I have spent an inordinate amount of my life on such scenes to reap the precious experiences that only mistakes and suffering could give.

To keep that wound open requires a lot of courage and above all honesty. We have first of all to be as honest to ourselves. This honesty cannot be learned on universities obtaining all kinds of degrees. It is all about our character. Most important is the nobility of our character.

The Inner Warrior's Sacred Wound
A shamanic archetype is the wounded healer. On the contemporary scene of healers, therapist and psychologist most are helpless helpers. A few of these helpless helpers evolve into being true wounded healers.
 
The one who passively can contain his inner interoceptive body is for me a spiritual warrior. For this inner wounded warrior, performing outer strength is the highest degree of cowardice. The spiritual warrior passively contains his own inner war with a smile, while in his inner exploration he treads new behavioral paths in the network of neurons.
 
In meeting the wound, it is important not to depersonalize oneself. This is the Eastern meditation survival strategy: that in case of a painful and catastrophic situation one lets go of one's humanity and becomes pure spirit.

We are so often told not to take ourselves too seriously, that it is narcissistic to circle around our own little sore navel.

I will say the opposite: take everything in the world personally to the highest degree! Especially take your inner wound seriously. The more secret your wound is, the more important it is to expose it - for the wound itself is the opening into the inner side of life. However, at the same time: ignore your wound in the sense of endless story-telling.
 
Just like sleep and meditative wakefulness, the fool and the wise man are only separated by a hair's breadth, so taking oneself emotionally seriously is close to self-importance. The difference lies in the very sensing. The narcissist looks at himself from a distance, alienated, while story-telling himself. Meditative self-celebration, on the other hand, is created in almost thought-free meditative wakefulness.

Here's my proposal for the most important of all meditations:
Every second, from now and for the rest of your life, whenever you remember, return to the innocent close sensing of the body's inner space. Remember yourself in the form of your sensed body. The mystic Gurdjieff called this act "constant self remembrance." I would term this with the word 'awarance.
 
The Good Mother's Attention
To allow meditation into the wound of presence requires taking full responsibility for even the smallest and perhaps most ridiculous or unreasonable vulnerabilities. Nothing is too insignificant or small, for the devil is always in the detail.

Let me repeat the lesson: Let's not meditate ourselves away here.
Instead, allow everything, even the smallest sensed things, to enter the warming center of attention. Give it the greatest gift you can give to both yourself and the world: simple, undifferentiated, and non-cognitive attention.

It's like being the good mother. When her child cries, she picks it up and gives it attention by cudlling it. She doesn't first ask why the child is crying. Nor does she judge it. She just picks it up and nurses it with her attention.

By doing the same with your often unreasonable inner children, you allow even the most sensitive aspects of your nervous system to become a serving part of you. Cuddle your inner child. It is still there - believe me!

To stop and feel yourself as a raw, sensed body is not easy. For our biological software is outdated and actually programmed for a life in the Stone Age, where all sensations are divided into survival-friendly and survival-hostile. Therefore, my dear friend Rumi must remind us again and again how important it is not to run away:

"Don't run away from grief, oh soul
Look for the remedy inside the pain.
Because the rose came from the thorn
and the ruby came from a stone."
Rumi

THE HEALING DISCOMFORT

"If you can face it - God can fix it.
If you can feel it - God can heal it."

"Think of suffering as being washed."
Hafez

Beyond the existential necessity of resting in the body's sensed duality, there is another, more practical reason to take the bull of life's pain by the horns.
I will now reveal a secret hidden in the self-evident: that both the body and mind can actually heal themselves through pain and discomfort.

For the one who seeks out the pain is not pursued by it.

How do I know this? I know it from my own experience. The best way to validate my claim is through your own personal experiences in your own inner body laboratory.
 
When I call it a secret, it's because this innate ability for self-healing is so simple and so close to us that we often overlook or underestimate its wonderful possibilities.

Many years ago, I read in a scientific magazine that some French researchers had observed the amount of white blood cells in a finger with an infection. According to them the number of white blood cells fighting the infection increased when the test person was keeping his attention on the finger through looking at it and feeling it from inside at the same time.

Where the Attention Goes, the Life-Energy Flows
Self-healing, both psychological and physical depends on the quality and intensity of our attention. The more our supreme awareness is intensified in meditation, the greater the ability for self-healing, when this attention is brought into the body's sensory universe. A tired attention is not of much use.
  
Attention is anchored in the sense of sensing and feeling. We notice our feelings. The sense of feeling is the most important of our close senses. This wonderful sense has a double job. It functions as the 'body community's border guard' in the form of the skin's outward sensations and also has an inward task, patrolling the almost hidden universe of the inner body.

One of the most important sections on Meditation.dk is devoted to an investigation of the hidden world of attention. Meditative healing requires that attention make direct contact with the wound of presence, to allow full and innocently wordless attention to feel bodily discomfort without fleeing.
 
Attention understood as the process of ignorant awarance must be cleansed of understanding and then in its pure a-ha innocence get close contact with the sensations in the body. The wound of presence must not be understood but felt. Any attempt at understanding creates a kind of filter where words, concepts, and narratives lay like a film between attention and the attended. When understanding has clamped the pure sensation, we will, for example, in our constant inner monologue tell ourselves that we feel sorrow and are sad. The next thing will be a bigger story where the inner self tells itself that it is a pity for me. Crying is therefore often, but not always, an expression of being stuck in a narrative and not having met the sensations of the body unadulterated by words. As long as one self-narrates one's feelings, one will be stuck in the mire.
 
Meditation is to go deeper than words and tears.
 
To accept discomfort and psychological pain in the body is a prerequisite for our simple non-analytical attention to make direct contact with feelings as pure sensations, that is, before they are interpreted by the mind as discomfort or pain. To feel your inner body without words allows nature to take care of the rest: If you can feel it - God can heal it.
To notice suffering without doing anything about it

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer

To feel suffering, as the wonderful new age shaman in the above quote says, without doing anything about it, without removing it, moving it, or hiding it, goes against everything we have learned and instinctively feel. In the same way as animals, we try to avoid pain.
 
Let us abandon the older survival systems we created to survive
Ideas of wellness and that it is spiritual to practice positive thinking are rooted in the ancient biological struggle for survival, where we divide the world into what promotes our survival and what does not. First we divide the world into evil and good, and then we do something about the evil and try to achieve the good. In this context, thoughts are nothing more than survival strategies. This polarization of the world is like the axis mundi in our old ego-operating system, an obstacle to a radical upgrade of consciousness into the state I call the super-awake state.

For the new fluid operating system of awarance to be installed, it is above all important to do nothing. By doing nothing, by not acting out of life's numerous traps, by not following self-development courses, yes, by not understanding, by not clinging to the comfort of religions, there is a good chance that the old self-system will collapse, and only in this collapse can the new consciousness' dancing star be born.

"Stop everything...
Then you will realize you are the freedom
you have always been searching for."

Or maybe even better: Realize your inner freedom that was always hiding in the wast darkness of the inner dark cathedral of your body, and then everything will stop.
 
The Art of Non-Doing in 'Awarance'
My warm advocacy for non-doing arises from our ego-reality's overemphasis on recognizing and acting our way out of uncomfortable situations.

However, turning non-doing into a new truth would be equally erroneous. As soon as we accept something as true, in this context, it becomes untrue.

This era's pursuit of an ostensibly perfect and perpetually happy existence leads, paradoxically, to a profound superficiality. By narrating away our primordial pain, we not only distance ourselves from the immediate experience of that pain but also from the very essence of our soul. The act of fleeing from the discomfort inherent in life's challenges through stories and narratives serves to distance us further from the authentic self, creating a barrier to true understanding and acceptance of the human experience. It is easy to see how one can flee from pain by being artificially social media happy. However, on can also flee from legitimate pain by identifying as a victim.
 
What is the soul? For me, the soul is the living hologram of simple beauty that appears when human consciousness coherently observes and senses the world's incomprehensible interference patterns with a light akin to laser light. The more synced our consciousness becomes, the more synced the world around us will be.
  
For our consciousness to achieve sufficient coherence to find or rather be the multi-dimensional answer to the contradictions that have no solution on the four-dimensional space-time plane they were created and formulated in, suffering and darkness must be the equal partner of light and joy. Meditation therefore starts and ends in the simple thing that we day in and day out make ourselves as good friends with negative emotions as we are with positive emotions.
 
Meditation is amor fati of pain
How can I now be sure that life is perfect and not unfair to me? In my case, I must say that I was not able to intellectually see through whether the world's total sum of dynamic infinite interaction in its flow through me was evil or good.
Therefore, I chose to see it as perfect - or rather perfectly imperfect.

Yes.. everything is chosen so well and every time I lose, I win a bodily life experience and thus a precious depth in my soul, which people who have not suffered are not so lucky to get. With this choice, most of my suffering disappeared; namely the suffering all my thoughts about what should have been different had caused. Resting in natural life pain is for me the very foundation of a healthy life in meditation. Meditation is in this sense the amor fati of pain.

Without darkness in life, spiritual development is not possible. In this sense, pain and discomfort are our best friends - for unlike joy, which puts us to sleep, suffering keeps us awake if we are able to be with it.

As the yin yang symbol, happiness always have a dot of sorrow in it and suffering always a smile.

IGNORE YOURSELF IN FULL AWARENESS
The first step on the ladder of inner happiness is navigating a path that meanders between the poles of emotion and reason, between surrender and control. Take, for example the combination of winter bathing, sauna sessions, and breathing exercises. This down to earth practice, popularized by the Dutch 'Iceman' Wim Hof, has blossomed into a broad spectrum of self-disciplinary techniques encompassing yoga and meditation.
  
I've carved out my own approach to these self-disciplinary routines and so can you if you like to do so. The important thing here is to fully experience one's emotions while simultaneously detaching from them, ensuring they don't dictate one's actions. How does one remain in command when engulfed by intense emotions under keen awareness?
  
What can we learn from such a simple act as a cold shower? Here we definitely feel and sense our body while a the same time not listening to and obeying old instinctual habits. Not listening to old unconscious impulses is the first step towards not listening to the story telling mind.
    
Take no Notize - But in Full Awareness!
The key lies in abstaining from weaving narratives around our feelings. This has to be repeated as a mantra: Instead ignore them in full awareness of their precense. One could call it a state of ignorance in awareness.
  
The Zen-buddhist have a saying: Take no notize. We humans, fundamentally bound to storytelling, often narrate our lives, especially our emotional experiences. Yet, in the practice I've cultivated, I advocate for a departure from narrating our feelings. Instead, I propose a process where emotions are observed in their raw form, devoid of attached stories. In this practice, feelings are broken down into manageable 'pixels' of sensation, inviting us to experience and contain them in full-blown awareness. In the pixel- state, feelings and sensations are so decomposed that the thinking mind cannot brew stories out of them, but awarenes on the other hand is fully capable of awaring them.
This approach encourages ignoring emotions not through dismissal but through full, undivided attention, allowing us to politely resist and control them while being fully present with the sensations metaphorically perceived as 'energy.'
 
For further understanding, the chapter, "meditative pixellation" delves deeper into actual techniques, offering personal insights into the transformative potential of cultivating interoceptive awareness with patience and kindness but also a bit of self-discipline.

 

With warm regards,
Gunnar Mühlmann
gunnars@mail.com