Managing pain without drugs?

What I suggest is a very life-affirmative, life-loving way. My suggestion is: when there is pain, go deeply into it, don’t avoid it. Let it be so, be open to it, become as sensitive as possible. Let the pain and its arrow penetrate you to your very core. Suffer it. And when the pleasure comes, let that too move you to your innermost core. Dance it. When there is pain be with pain, and when there is pleasure be with pleasure. Become so totally sensitive that each moment of pain and pleasure is a great adventure.

And I would like to tell you one thing: that if you can do this, you will understand that pain too is beautiful. It is as beautiful as pleasure. It also brings a sharpness to your being; it also brings awareness to your being – sometimes even more than pleasure. Pleasure dulls. That’s why people who live just in indulgence will be found to be shallow. You will not see any depth in them. They have not known pain at all; they have lived only on the surface, moving from one pleasure to another. The playboys…they don’t know whatpain is.

Pain makes you very alert, and pain makes you very compassionate, and pain makes you sensitive to others’ pains too. Pain makes you immense, huge, big. The heart grows because of pain. And it is beautiful, it has its own beauty. I am not saying seek pain; I am only saying whenever it is there, enjoy that too. It is a gift of existence and there must be a hidden treasure in it. Enjoy that too; don’t reject. Accept it, welcome it, be with it. In the beginning it will be difficult, arduous. But by and by you will learn the taste of it. The taste has to be learned; it is just like other tastes. If you start drinking alcohol, in the beginning the taste is just bad and bitter.

Mulla Nasruddin is a drunkard. One day his wife went to the pub, and he was drinking there with his friends. And the wife was in a really bad mood; she had tried every way and he wouldn’t listen. Today she wanted to shock him. And of course he was a little puzzled; she had never come to the pub: “Is she going to create a scene here? Home, it is okay. Home is the place where scenes are created and enacted, but in the pub?”

And she came and just sat by his side and said, “Mulla, I have also decided to drink, from today. He was a little more puzzled. But then he poured a glass for her. She tasted and it was so bitter, and she just could not believe it. She said, “It is so bitter, Mulla.”

Mulla said, “Look! And you have always been thinking that I am enjoying. It is a great sadhana; it is not easy.”

When you start anything new you have to learn the taste. And of course the taste of pain is bitter. But once you have learned it, it gives such sharpness and brilliance to you. It shakes all dust, all stupor and sleepiness away from you. It makes you so fully mindful that nothing else can make you so mindful. In pain you can be more meditative than in pleasure. Pleasure is more distracting. Pleasure engulfs you. In pleasure you abandon consciousness. Pleasure tends to make you unconscious; pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is a remembrance: you cannot forget pain.

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