WHAT IS THIS "AWARENESS" AND PAIN?

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Shifting the Paradigm:  A NON-DUAL EMBODIED EXPLANATION OF PAIN

Why "AWARENESS" Needs Careful Explanation:

Awareness is a word and concept that can feel confusing or even invalidating when first encountered:

“Notice the part of you that is aware of the sensation. That awareness is not sore.”

For someone living with chronic or intense pain, this statement can provoke understandable resistance. If my body hurts, how could anything about me not hurt? It may sound as though pain is being minimized, dismissed, or reframed away. Without careful explanation, such language risks implying that pain is “just in the mind” or that suffering persists only because of a failure to perceive correctly. That is not what this statement means.

The purpose of this essay is to explain what awareness refers to in this context, how awareness can be present with physical pain without denying it, and why learning to differentiate awareness from sensation can reduce suffering even when pain remains. This is not a denial of pain. It is a clarification of how pain is known.

1. Pain Is Real . And Awareness Does Not Erase It

Pain is a sensory and neurological experience involving tissues, nerves, and brain processes. Pain can be severe, persistent, disabling, and life-altering. Nothing in the language of awareness negates this reality.

When pain-guided meditation invites someone to notice awareness, it is not asking them to imagine that pain is gone, to “rise above” the body, or to deny injury or illness. Nor is it suggesting that awareness is a magical cure.

Instead, it is pointing to a structural distinction that already exists in experience whether or not we notice it.

That distinction is between:

• The sensation of pain
• The knowing of that sensation

Pain is an experience. Awareness is what knows the experience. They occur together, but they are not identical.

2. What Is “Awareness,” Exactly? 

In this context, awareness does not mean positive thinking, distraction, dissociation, or transcendence. It does not mean being “spiritual,” calm, or detached.

Awareness is the simple capacity to know experience. It is the basic fact that sensations, emotions, thoughts, and perceptions appear to something.

• Pain appears in awareness
• Thoughts about pain appear in awareness
• Fear, frustration, grief, and resistance appear in awareness

Awareness itself is not a sensation. It has no temperature, texture, or location.

You cannot injure awareness. You cannot inflame it. You cannot scan it on an MRI as a sore tissue. Yet it is undeniably present, because without it, nothing could be known.

3. Why Awareness Is Not the Same as Sensation? 

To understand this distinction, consider a simple example. If you are listening to music, the sound is not the same thing as the hearing. If you are seeing a color, the color is not the same thing as the seeing.

Likewise:

• Pain is a sensory event
• Awareness is the knowing of that event

They are intimately related, but not identical. Pain has qualities:

• Intensity
• Location
• Pressure
• Burning
• Throbbing

Awareness has none of these qualities. Awareness does not ache. Awareness does not pulse. Awareness does not have edges. This does not mean pain is unreal.
It means pain is known.

4. Why This Distinction Matters for Suffering

Much of the suffering associated with chronic pain does not come from sensation alone, but from identification with sensation.

Over time, pain often becomes fused with identity:

• I am in pain
• My body is broken
• This pain is who I am now
• There is no place inside me untouched by this

When pain and awareness are unconsciously merged, it can feel as though the entire self is injured. Pain-guided meditation gently introduces a different possibility: Pain is happening. And something is aware of it.

That awareness has not been damaged in the same way the body has.

This realization does not remove pain, but it often softens fear, reduces panic, and creates internal space.

5. “Awareness Is Not Sore” Does Not Mean “You Shouldn’t Hurt”

When the meditation says: “That awareness is not sore” It is not making a prescription. It is making an observation.

It is not saying:

• “You shouldn’t feel pain”
• “Pain doesn’t matter”
• “You should feel better than you do”

It is simply pointing out that the capacity to notice pain is not itself in pain.

This matters because many pain conditions are intensified by:

• Fear of sensation
• Hypervigilance
• Catastrophic interpretation
• Nervous system threat responses

When awareness recognizes itself as larger than the sensation, the nervous system often begins to settle not because pain is denied, but because the body no longer feels as though it is trapped inside the pain.

6. Awareness Is Not Removed From Pain . It Is Distinct From It

It is important to clarify a common misunderstanding: Awareness is not removed from physical pain. Awareness is intimately present with pain.  Pain arises within awareness. Awareness does not arise within pain. This means that even when pain is intense, awareness remains open, receptive, and uninjured. This is not dissociation.
It is presence without collapse.

7. Why This Is an Embodied Practice  and Not a Mental Trick 

Awareness-based pain work is often misunderstood as abstract or philosophical. In reality, it is profoundly embodied.

When awareness rests with sensation:

• Without tightening
• Without resisting
• Without narrating catastrophe

The body often responds with:

• Reduced protective tension
• Decreased sympathetic arousal
• Increased parasympathetic regulation

The body begins to experience pain within safety, rather than as an existential threat. This does not require belief in nondual philosophy. It requires direct experience.

8. Awareness Does Not Make You Passive 

Another fear is that recognizing awareness will lead to passivity: If I’m just awareness, will I stop seeking treatment? Will I stop advocating for myself? In practice, the opposite is often true.

When pain is no longer fused with identity:

• Decision-making becomes clearer
• Agency increases
• Choices are less fear-driven
• Boundaries become easier to assert

Awareness does not replace medical care. It supports wiser engagement with it.

9. Awareness as a Stable Ground During Unstable Sensation

Pain fluctuates.
Symptoms change.
Bodies heal or sometimes don’t.

Awareness remains constant.

This constancy can become a psychological anchor, offering a sense of inner stability even when physical conditions are uncertain. Not because awareness is “better” than the body, but because it is not subject to the same vulnerabilities.

Conclusion: 

Awareness Is Not a Concept .  It Is What Is Reading. This Awareness is not something you have to create. It is what is already present. It is what notices pain, fear, hope, resistance, and relief. It is what remains when sensations shift.

When a guided meditation says:

“Notice the awareness that knows the pain. That awareness is not sore.”

It is offering neither denial nor escape. It is offering context.

Pain is real.
And awareness is real.

Learning to distinguish them does not make pain disappear, but it can make life within pain more humane, spacious, and livable. And sometimes, that distinction is the beginning of healing.