Curiosity’s Path to Unbelieving Your Pains
The cure for pain is in the pain.
— Rumi
The Undercurrents of Searching
Have you ever considered what mainly drives your spiritual quest? What do you see as the endgame here for you? What do you want out of it? Is it your search for the truth of being? Or is it the search for relief from the deep intensity of being as you are, and from what you experience as pain and suffering? Or both?
Looking for truth is always and necessarily confrontational. This means being willing to see, with curiosity, honesty and kindness, what this whole existence truly is about. It means to honestly meet reality as you see it, without shying away from what you really think about it. And then to ask if what you think about it, the story you tell yourself about it, is true. It is to be curious and to ask ‘but is this so?’ for every story or assumption, no matter how foundational, in relation to what you are, what your world is, and everything within it.
If the honest search for truth is what you’re after, with everything else being secondary, then you might as well stop reading now (unless, of course, you’re curious) because you don’t need anything more. The truth itself will lead you to relief. In your quest for truth, you’ll naturally question whether the pain from your past still holds any truth in your present.
By ‘pain,’ I refer to what is essentially an existential disturbance, often experienced emotionally. It’s a disturbance of your usual sense of self, leading to a profound experience of unsafety, however that might manifest for you cognitively or behaviourally — whether as fear, shame, hopelessness, anger or confusion, withdrawal or pleasing, or anything else. Note, I am not referring to physical pain here.
If, instead, relief from this pain is what you seek most, there are two possibilities here. The first is the same path of truth and curiosity that requires you to look at your pain kindly and honestly (honestly being the key word here) to see if the story at its core holds truth in the present. As I mentioned, this path leads to genuine relief. Yet, facing pain head-on, even with support when available, often isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when the instinct is to escape from pain.
The second possibility is what is done the most — to instinctively defend yourself against this pain with all your might. This avoidance strategy requires turning away from the pain, leaving it unexamined out of unconscious fear that it might hold more truth than the truth itself. Instead, the pain is numbed and obscured. The act of numbing and obscuring then becomes greatly important to you because disturbance to its ‘truthfulness’ throws you back into your original pain. You then scramble to confirm the ‘truthfulness’ of the protective veil. It is this constant existential tension and swing between one story and the other, between pain and temporary relief, that is suffering.
Most people are well-practised in avoidance, which might have been the only available approach once but may no longer serve you all that well. Let’s take a closer look at why it fails to work effectively and how curiosity and truth offer a better alternative. While self-deceit and avoidance can provide temporary pockets of relief, they never lead to true relief — the kind that allows you to drop the endless search (which may be yet another form of running away) and relax into the safety of your own okayness with yourself.
The Anatomy of a Suffering ‘I’
To organise thoughts on this subject, let’s consider two layers of stories that contribute to your sense of self: one is the pain (painful self-impression), and the other is its counterpart that obscures and sugarcoats the first (preferred self-impression). Both layers are created and deeply influenced by the environment that shaped and continues to maintain them, such as family, friends, specific individuals, society, and the rest of your world.
Speaking in relative terms of passage through time, during childhood your environment signalled to you — through circumstances, actions, words, or lack of any of that — that there is a certain way of being that is necessary for belonging and feeling safe within that environment. This signalling, coupled with the natural desire to belong and be safe, suppressed your freedom to be whole (often inadvertently) by dictating what it is not ok to be, to think, to feel. Your environment may have made a deep impression on you, to varying degrees, that you are something specific and this something is somehow deficient or not enough, especially when deviating from these norms.
This artificial not-okayness becomes the first layer of the story of ‘I’ from which you then hide. This painful story is narrated through deeply disturbing feelings, intense sensations, and often words as well. You flee from this disturbance for dear life. The content of this story, when ignored, is still deeply experienced and becomes a secret you keep from yourself. You do this by numbing it through favouring a counteracting story. The story is then upheld at all costs. And the costs are indeed high. It results in a spasmodic conflict of desiring to relax into yourself and be embraced as you are by yourself, while at the same time avoiding meeting yourself deeply, your deeply felt self-perception.
You sense that there is something you’re hiding from yourself, and from others too, because you’re secretly convinced it’s true. In seeking acceptance and love, you’re seeking your own acceptance and love, but under the condition that this secret remains hidden from yourself. Yet, you sense something is ‘wrong.’ This makes you profoundly reliant on reassurances to affirm your official version of ‘I.’ When you encounter doubt or rejection — through actions, words or any situation that casts doubt on your preferred self-impression — you’re thrust back into the original painful disturbance.
Deep down, you believe this painful core story to be true, which makes it feel true. So true, in fact, that when this painful self-impression first arises from the unconscious and confronts you undefended, presenting itself as ‘this is what I truly am,’ the despair feels inescapable, igniting an urge to flee once more. The pain may be too daunting to be with. The problem is, it’s impossible to notice something isn’t true when all efforts are directed at not even seeing it.
Honest Curiosity as a Way Forward
Here’s where curiosity comes in and shows you that none of your stories about you are true and have never been. If you’re honest in your curiosity, you will allow yourself to have an honest look at what you really believe about yourself and about the reality you live in. Only then true inquiry into what is, into truth, can take place. Before that honest moment, you keep playing a game of hiding from yourself.
When you look for the truth, invite yourself to be mindful of your stance — notice if you’re genuinely curious and open to see what’s really present, including any attachment to the pain story that integrates the pain into your sense of ‘I.’ The truth harbours no agenda; it doesn’t aim for a preferred outcome beyond revealing what is. Thus, a certain type of ‘.. so that ..’ can be an indication you are not looking for the truth. ‘I am going to be with my pain, so that I get rid of it’ is not the same as ‘I am going to be with my pain, so that I could truly listen and see what’s true.’ It’s a subtle but crucial difference. The latter is ok with all possible findings, ready to see and embrace everything IF it proves true. The former, however, is just another way to flee.
As a simple example, when I believe ‘I am a shame,’ the inquiry, in very basic terms, can go like this:
Is it true that I believe I am a shame? — It’s true that I believe so.
Is it true that I feel shame? — It’s true that I feel so.
Is it true that I am a shame? — …
What survives such open and honest curiosity, what cannot be doubted further, is your truth. This truth will bring the deepest relief of all. If you allow yourself to inquire into the truth with honesty and curiosity, you will find that the only ground for your pain, for your habitual sense of self and the reality of your world, is paradoxically no ground at all. For more on the subject of truth, refer to my post here.
Where There is Curiosity, There is Love
The openness with which you hold your stories — curiosity without an agenda — is, in essence, love. But how do you usually experience love? I’m not referring to the abstract notion or even the romantic kind, replete with stomach butterflies. Instead, consider love as it’s felt in its most direct and fundamental experience.
What do you crave the most when, let’s say, you’re in distress? Often, it’s the genuinely accepting and non-judgmental presence of another that provides the most comfort in that moment. Simply being fully present is enough; no words are necessary. It’s about the embrace of presence, allowing for you to be as you are, seeing and listening to you deeply, with gentle and open curiosity. You gradually ease into your being and eventually rediscover your smile and the joy of okayness.
This is precisely what you deny yourself when you are ready to be with anything but your pain if it’s there. All your pain wants is to be heard so it can go. Listen to it, and let it go. Letting go (not making go), in fact, is as crucial as listening.
This honest receiving yourself through deep listening to all your stories, and without having to believe in them, is love. Love is revealed as truth, and truth is revealed as love. When you are the listening itself, grounded in the now, you can witness your confusion without attaching to the old stories of ‘I,’ letting them go. Listening deeply, you can discern between what is (the truth) from what you tell yourself about what is. This is love, and its nature is intimate unconditional embrace.
Love doesn’t shy away from seeing what is. Love wants to see all of it. It wants to listen deeply, to be unconditionally present to what is. And when it does so, it knows what’s true and what’s not, loving both in sobriety and clarity. Self-love is to be present with yourself, to all of yourself. Love does not advise. It allows for self-deconfusion.
Pursuing Awakening to Outrun Pain
Seeking awakening can also be a way of avoiding your pain, as if awakening could nullify pain, thereby erasing a part of you that holds the key to your wholeness. The ‘I’ hopes to secure safety, believing that an ‘awakened I’ — which, by the way, is an impossibility — will be separate from your experience of pain, and may even attract appreciation and rewards that the ‘I’ relies on to remain. Ironically, this very act keeps the seeking ‘I’ away from the truth of wholeness. Wholeness must include pain when it’s present, and for as long as it’s present; otherwise it’s not wholeness.
You can’t be the truth of wholeness when what you desire is to be ‘this’ to avoid being ‘that,’ to be awake but not unawake. If you’re not willing to embrace truth at the cost of uncompromising self-honesty, then awakening isn’t what you’re seeking. Compare ‘I hear all there is is consciousness, and I want that, so that …’ with ‘I hear all there is is consciousness, and I wonder if it’s so.’ However, this is not an invitation to suppress your yearning for awakening, if it’s present. Instead, invite a sense of curiosity about this desire as well.
As long as your focus is on ‘knowing the truth’ — a fantasy of truth as an alternative to what is — rather than on exploring what is already wordlessly true and what is not about your immediate here and now, without any attachment to a result, you are not only avoiding the truth, you're also resisting it.
Awakening is the unintended result of commitment to dismantling what is not true. It’s about eroding everything that appears as an immutable foundation for the existence of a separate ‘I,’ until no untruth remains. This is why pursuing relief to avoid your pain only serves to keep that pain well hidden and preserved. It prevents you from seizing the opportunity to dissolve the most potent of all identifications: secret pain and attachment to it.
The end of suffering is not the end of everything you don’t want. It’s the end of you as you believe you are. Beyond the gateless gate there is nobody to mind being as ‘you’ are, and nobody to suffer. Only the truth remains, and your curiosity has become pure openness.