when we're not okay

Ajahn Brahm tells a story about a monk at his monastery who had bad teeth. Sometimes a tooth needed to be pulled, and dental care was not always available. One time they saw him outside the monastery workshop, holding a freshly pulled tooth smeared with his blood, in the claws of an ordinary pair of pliers. It was no problem: he cleaned the pliers of blood before he returned them to the workshop.

Ajahn Brahm asked him how he had managed to do such a thing. He said: ”When I decided to pull out my own tooth, that didn’t hurt. When I walked to the workshop, that didn’t hurt. When I picked up the pair of pliers, that didn’t hurt. When I held the tooth in the grip of the pliers, that didn’t hurt either. When I wiggled the pliers and pulled, it did hurt then, but only for a couple of seconds. Once the tooth was out, it didn’t hurt much at all. There was only five seconds of pain, that’s all.”

If we look carefully at even very unpleasant experiences, we often find that there are only a few moments of pain attached to them and that much of the suffering of the overall experience is added through our anticipation, fear, and rumination.