When Pain Calls: How We Answer with Awake Awareness

There’s a recurrent pattern I’ve noticed when I’m teaching Effortless Mindfulness. Often, someone raises their hand and says, “I can’t remain in spacious awareness—the pain keeps pulling me back.”

Physical pain. Emotional pain. The pain of not being in control. The hurt that surfaces when someone has been cruel. The grief of loss and disconnection.

And I often respond saying: That’s not a problem that needs to go away. That’s the place to begin.

Pain as a Telephone Call

Once you realize what physical pain actually is, it’s not your enemy. It’s like a telephone call—a signal from your nervous system saying, “Hey. Something here needs you to be aware of it.” 

The problem isn’t the call. The problem is what happens next. We use attention, and it contracts around the pain. Suddenly the small self has a job that takes over—trying to manage, analyze, fix, and eliminate. The pain goes from being a signal to being an occupation.

What Effortless Mindfulness offers is a completely different response. Instead of fighting the telephone call or letting it take over, you become curious. If it’s physical pain, then we learn how awareness unhooks from the small self and goes directly into the painful area, is aware from within it, and opens to the awake space around it. 

In effect, you say, “I hear you calling. When I look closely to see if there is a threat, awareness knows directly there’s no knife here. There’s a part of us that needs us to be with it intimately and compassionately. And now—let’s send this signal to a bigger field, not just back up to a panicking brain.”

When people do this, something changes. Not because the pain disappears—though the panic about the pain does. But the pain actually diminishes with space because it’s no longer being processed by a system that’s too small to bear it. 

Pain that was an eight out of ten can drop to a two. Not because it was suppressed, but because it’s finally being received by a mind wide and wise enough to actually hold it without being taken over by it.

Pain is part of life. The thing that can change is what or who it is arising to. When pain is arising to an awareness that is spacious and welcoming, then we’ve started a new phase of life.

The Important Difference with Emotional Pain

Emotional pain works differently, and it’s worth being precise about why.

When physical pain fires, it’s largely a nervous system event. When emotional pain fires—the terror of being alone, the waves of rage that surprise you in a breakup, the shame that surfaces when someone has been cruel—something else is also happening. A part of you is speaking.

In the Internal Family Systems framework, these are what we’d call exiles and protectors: younger parts of the psyche that have been carrying burdens, often for years. A relationship ending doesn’t just hurt in the present. It also wakes up the part that was hurt before—the one that learned early on that loss meant abandonment, that anger meant danger, that being alone meant something was fundamentally wrong with you.

That part has been waiting. And now it’s saying: Finally. Now you’ll see me.

The invitation isn’t to manage this part, reason with it, or make it calm down. The invitation is to be with it from the space of Self—that open, undefended, essentially loving awareness that is your deepest nature. 

When you can do that, even briefly, something in the part relaxes. It’s not that the storm disappears. It’s that the sky is finally big enough to hold the storm without being destroyed by it.

No ego can hold rage or terror. The ego is too small—it will collapse into them or run from them. But the open awareness of Self? The sky doesn’t get hurt by weather. And a two-year-old screaming its head off at the top of its lungs doesn’t hurt the sky either. You can just let it rage, hold it, and ask: “Tell me. Tell me what you’re angry about. Tell me where this started.”

That listening—unhurried, undefended, from a ground that isn’t afraid—is often the most healing thing a part has ever received.

It’s Not About Unburdening Everything

Here’s something I want to say clearly, because people sometimes get discouraged: I have never met anyone who has fully unburdened all their parts. Not one person, in decades of teaching and practice. So we are all—every single one of us—doing the same thing: finding Self while burdened parts are still present.

That changes the question entirely. It’s not “How do I get rid of all my difficult parts before I can be free?” It’s “How do I access this open, wise, loving awareness right now, even with all these parts present?“

And the answer—the one I come back to again and again—is that you don’t have to wait. The awareness that can hold all of this is not something you have to earn. It’s already your fundamental nature. 

Everything difficult that arises is just arising to it. A feeling that comes up is not a sign that something is wrong with your practice. It just means you’re alive.

The key shift is learning to ask: To whom is this arising? 

Not to suppress what’s coming up. Not to analyze it into oblivion. Just to make that quiet pivot from being completely identified with the content—the pain, the terror, the rage—to recognizing the one who is experiencing it. That one is not afraid. That one has always been fine.

That’s not spiritual bypassing. That’s the most honest, most courageous thing I know how to teach.