Stress does not cause pain, but it can exacerbate it and make it worse. Much of chronic pain is 'remembered' pain. It's the constant firing of brain cells leading to a memory of pain that lasts, even though the bodily symptoms causing the pain are no longer there. The pain is residing because of the neurological connections in the brain itself.
When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.
You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn’t that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that’s why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can’t measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question really is, Why doesn’t that pain make you say, I won’t do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don’t.
I've never had a surprise birthday party. I've had every other type of surprise. I've had surprise beatings, surprise drug tests, surprise daughter I think.
They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
It’s [old age] not a surprise, we knew it was coming – make the most of it. So you may not be as fast on your feet, and the image in your mirror may be a little disappointing, but if you are still functioning and not in pain, gratitude should be the name of the game.
Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection - in memory - that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us.
What makes me unusually intense is that I personalize the pain of war, the pain of children being killed, the pain of a 16-year-old who has been permanently cheated by his school and cannot read.
She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.
Humor is based on surprise, and surprise is a milder way of saying shock. It's surprise that makes the joke.
We all know that as we form thoughts, they form deep channels in our minds and in our brains. Chronic pain is an example. If you burn yourself, you pull your hand away. But if you're still in pain in six months' or six years' time, it's because these circuits are producing pain that's no longer helping you.
Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.
Pain is no longer pain when it is past.
Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?
The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you.
PAIN was no longer a cause of suffering, but a source of pleasure, Because they were redeeming humanity from its sins. Pain becomes joy, the meaning of life, pleasure.