Below the cut are images of big needles going into my skin.
If you’re going to undergo suffering for any extended period of time, choosing a word or phrase to repeat can help you endure it. Here is my personal mantra: What is pain?1 I don’t repeat my mantra aloud. I repeat it in silence, in my head. The mantra is not a distraction, or it’s not meant to be one, anyway. Though mine manifests as a question, I ask it without expecting an answer, because it doesn’t exist, and I wouldn’t want it if it did.
By asking What is pain? while going through pain—sometimes at an intensity that feels unsustainable—I invite myself to deeper focus and to stronger identification with sensation. Counterintuitively, this has the effect of making the pain more manageable without diminishing it, I think because it allows me to experience it rather than merely react to it. Pain has a purpose, a very important one, but in a controlled environment with another person managing my safety for me, I have the opportunity to feel around it in a way I probably wouldn’t if I had encountered the pain by mistake or misfortune2. (The pain/pleasure binary isn’t real! It’s literally so not real!)
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