A Willingness to Look: Pain, Self-View, and the Preciousness of Our Humanity
(A talk given to the Bozeman Insight Sangha)
It’s been so important for me to include the vulnerability of our humanity, and to look honestly at our expectations around what we think will happen when we heal or awaken. In other words, learning to place the most human parts of us—especially the parts we’d rather not see—on maybe the highest level of the altar of spiritual practice.
Which is to say: coming into a relationship of real love and reverence toward our deepest humanity.
So much of this hinges on what’s referred to in classical Buddhist language as the first fetter, which is self-view. The first fetter is the belief that there is somebody in here. Somebody behind experience. The one choosing, acting, managing, and trying to get it right or wrong. The one we’re referring to when we say me. If someone points at us, it’s like, “Oh yeah, it’s me. I’m here.” We look at a picture of ourselves and think, “That’s me.”
I’m fascinated by the interplay of two things that often seem opposed.
On the one hand, we’re practicing to see through the illusion of a solid, separate self.
And on the other, we can’t fully see through that illusion without tending to the vulnerable, painful, unfinished parts of our humanity.
Sometimes people say we need a healthy sense of self in order to release the sense of self. I’d add that we actually have to work directly with the pain of this belief of who we think we are in order to let it soften and eventually be seen through. It can feel paradoxical.
When self-view is running the show, pain becomes personal
When the sense of self is still operational—when it’s the core place from which we relate to life—our relationship to pain becomes really fraught.
When self-view is online, pain doesn’t just hurt. It means something.
We get scared of what we might find inside because we think it confirms something about us. We’ll see fear, shame, or reactivity and immediately it turns into:
“This means I’m a bad person.”
“This means I’m not worthy.”
“This means I can’t get it right.”
That belief—that pain says something true about who I am—is what actually intensifies the pain. We gum up the works in hopes that our meaning-making will give us a better shot at getting it right—at healing or awakening beyond the pain.
So of course we don’t want to go there. Of course we avoid. Of course we try to transcend, bypass, fix, or spiritualize our experience. And then we wonder why we feel disconnected from ourselves and from each other. When we’re not in authentic relationship with ourselves, authentic relationship with others goes right out the window.
We’ve lost contact with our vulnerability. With our depth of humanity.
The pain that “drives the bus”
I was at a men’s healing weekend—an initiation-style container, very immersive and very body-based. There was a mix of men from many walks of life, including men who had been formerly incarcerated. The work was about going into the places we’d rather not go, and doing it together.
Because those places—the parts of us that hold pain, fear, and shame—are often exactly what we were taught we’re not allowed to have. Especially as men. Don’t show that. Don’t feel that. If people see that, it will confirm the deepest fear: I don’t belong. There’s something wrong with me.
During the weekend I came into contact with a three-year-old place in my system. A terror that feels young. Panicked. Overwhelmed. A place that desperately wants to cry out for help—and feels far too scared to do so.
That place has a huge impact on my day-to-day experience. That little guy drives the bus more often than I’d like to admit.
At one point, I was asked who would role-play that three-year-old version of me. My immediate instinct was to stay as the adult—the one who could show up. That felt safer. Easier. Cleaner.
But it became very clear that the real work was to be the three-year-old. To get on the floor. To feel the vulnerability directly.
I lay on the ground, being physically held down by four other men to intensify the experience of overwhelm. I let myself feel the heat in my body, the pressure, the panic, the terror—as fully as I could. I could feel the familiar mechanism inside me that wanted to shut everything down and go numb.
And instead, I took a risk. I found my voice. I screamed for help.
It was shocking to hear myself scream so fully in a room of thirty other men. Fear arose—fear of being judged, of appearing needy, of being exposed. But the overwhelm was so great that I didn’t care. I needed help, and I knew someone would come.
And someone did. I was met. I was held. I was soothed.
And in that moment, something shifted that I could never have reasoned my way into.
I saw with clarity: this scared place inside me is not a problem to be solved. It is the source of unbelievable power.
When the sense of self relates to these places as something that must be hidden, fixed, or gotten rid of, that power becomes blocked and repressed—and suffering multiplies.
That little guy learned how to navigate life in order to get his needs met without risking getting hurt. And look where it got me. I have so much to be grateful to him for. And because of this seeing, I made a vow to never again pretend he isn’t there—or worse, try to get rid of him.
When that vulnerability was held—when it was met rather than judged—it became a gateway into connection. Into intimacy. Into being real with other human beings. From inhabiting and relating to that pain, something softened. Something opened.
There was an abundance of connection around me, just waiting to be greeted. Other men who had also learned to hide their fear and pain out of self-protection. And there we were, together, learning to drop the guard and move into love.
Love cannot flow when the sense of self is working overtime to protect its imaginary being.
Expectations around healing and awakening
This is where our expectations come in.
When I first came to practice, my expectation was something like: I’ll get enlightened and I won’t be me anymore. I’ll be free, I thought. I’d heard about fearlessness and the open heart and quietly translated that into: I’ll be different and everyone will like me. I won’t have pain or negative beliefs.
I see this all the time. There’s often a deep longing to not be ourselves anymore. To transcend our humanity. To imagine that when we heal or awaken, all the pain will go away and we won’t have to deal anymore with the workings of our inner world.
We just want out. And honestly, that longing is often what brings us to spiritual practice.
But what I’ve found—especially through intentionally working with the sense of self—is that when self-view begins to soften, there’s actually more capacity to be with pain. And pain becomes something very different.
It becomes cleaner. Clearer. Less sticky.
Pain without the story
When the sense of self is still fully online, pain is immediately personalized. This is happening to me. And then the self reacts to what it sees.
But when there is a real and lived seeing-through of the sense of self—not conceptually, but experientially—pain is no longer filtered through identity.
There may still be sensations, memories, images, emotional waves, and history moving through the body.
But the story falls away.
The belief that this pain defines me, proves something about me, or confirms my unworthiness loses its grip.
So I might feel the contraction of a childhood memory being activated in the present moment. My body tightens. There’s hurt. And at the same time, there’s a clear knowing:
This pain isn’t happening to—and never did happen to—anyone “in here.”
And paradoxically, when that lid comes off, more pain can arise. Not because things are going wrong, but because the system isn’t trying as hard to manage, repress, or pretend anymore.
Here’s the crucial shift:
When pain is no longer personalized, it stops being evidence against us.
It becomes the source of our power.
The ground of our vulnerability.
The place from which real connection becomes possible.
Our humanity as a precious gem
At a certain point, belief just doesn’t get us very far. Getting it right is revealed as just another belief—another attempt of the egoic sense of self to secure itself.
When that sense of self is seen through, meaning-making collapses. And with that collapse comes a profound relief.
We are relieved of the stories we’ve been telling about ourselves.
We are relieved of the idea that we are fundamentally flawed.
We are relieved of the project of becoming perfect.
We usually relate to our humanity as something to cover over and fix behind closed doors. We don’t lead by naming where we are weakest. And yet, these very places are often the source of our greatest strengths.
Until they are fully integrated, these places create endless problems for us. But when they are held in the loving light of awareness—both on our own and with others—they reveal themselves as the precious gems of our innermost being.
They carry the truth of what we have survived. Where we come from. Who we are at our most human level.
This is not about becoming beings who never suffer, never struggle, or never feel fear.
It’s about no longer making our pain mean that something is wrong with us.
Overturning the stone
There’s an image I love from a book called Self Observation by Red Hawk. He describes the art of self-observation as being like a child who overturns a stone and sees all the insects underneath—and resists the impulse to crush them.
That’s the practice.
To look.
To see what’s actually here.
And to not squash it out.
Because when we can do that—especially in the context of enough safety, enough support, enough relationship—our tenderness becomes a doorway into awareness.
A closing inquiry
None of this is conceptual or abstract. This is real, lived, and bare-bones. The sense of self asserts itself in every interaction—in our relationships, our reactivity, the way we move through the world, and the very way we perceive reality.
We filter all of experience through this imagined being we call me. And because of that, we remain unhappy, disconnected, and quietly wondering if life will ever pan out the way we were told it would.
So I’ll leave you with two inquiries—not as things to answer in your head, but as invitations to feel into:
What are my expectations for healing and awakening?
What do I think will happen when I heal?
What do I think will happen when I awaken?Can I feel into the pain that drives the bus of my actions?
And can I include that pain in a loving embrace—without needing it to go away?
And even if the answer is no—can that be included too?
