Healing & Pain
By Sylvia Gretchen

Sylvia Gretchen, dean of Nyingma Studies, teaches workshops there on Healing & Pain.

We may not be able to eliminate physical and emotional pain from our lives, but we can forge a new relationship with our pain. We can learn to listen to the subtle voices within our pain that communicate the need for a greater, more comprehensive knowledge. We can use pain itself to guide us past endless rounds of suffering and toward healing.

At the Nyingma Institute, we bring both ancient and innovative methods to bear on the practical question of how to relieve pain and bring about healing. For the past fifteen years "Healing and Pain" workshops have been offered that highlight teachings from Tibetan Lama Tarthang Tulku's Time, Space, and Knowledge writings. The focus of the workshops is practical: participants learn four visualization exercises that they can apply to relieve pain and to awaken insight into their own healing process.

The first exercise utilizes a creative imagination of light and color to begin to integrate our inner experience of pain with our knowledge of healing. The exercise also helps calm body and mind, illuminating the habitual ways we relate to both healing and pain. We are able to more clearly see the stories, imaginations, and other factors that are associated with suffering.

The next exercise allows us to be with pain as it arises in a way that bypasses entangling stories. This exercise deeply relaxes emotions and eases inner sensations. The third exercise teaches how to use the momentum of pain itself to "overcome" pain. Instead of activating suffering, pain awakens our senses in ways that activate knowledge and healing. As Tarthang Tulku writes in Dynamics of Time and Space, "[Pain] invites the operation of the senses in ways that are not bounded by conditioning, but express instead the fully embodied continuity at the heart of the real." Putting the power of pain in the service of a greater knowledge, we find a sword of wisdom that can cut through the structures of suffering.

A fourth exercise works on transmuting the energy of darkness, negativity, and pain into light. We become alchemists, turning our ordinary experiences of pain into an extraordinary light of awareness that illuminates the dark chaos of confusion and pain. Renewed and reinvigorated, reminded of the unity of all living beings, we discover that pain is a messenger, leading us on an unending healing journey.