Calling pain a pain

A man came to a Zen master and asked: "How shall we avoid heat and cold?"
He was asking, metaphorically, 'How should we avoid pleasure and pain?'

 That is the Zen way of talking about pleasure and pain: heat and cold. The question really is, 'How shall we avoid pain and pleasure?'
The master answered 'Be hot, be cold.'

Zen monks are very down to earth, they stick to the facts without fantasising about them. All their meditation practice is about dissolving the mind to such an extent that the clouds of emotions and imagination are shattered and it can encounter the sunny reality of existence.

The Zen anecdotes reflect this state. Straight, simple reflections of reality.

For example, human beings make a great issue about pain. They try to avoid it or forget about it, or rationalise it but they don't dare to look at it with naked eye. The irony is, everyone wants to be free of pain but everybody sinks deeper into it.

Osho gives some clues as to how to befriend this inevitable fact of life. 

First, accept the pain.To be free of pain the pain has to be accepted, inevitably and naturally. Pain is pain -a simple painful fact. If there is pain, there need not be suffering. Suffering is only and always the refusal of pain, the claim that life should not be painful. It is the rejection of a fact, the denial of life and of the nature of things. Pain is simply pain; there is no suffering in it.

Suffering comes from your desire that the pain should not be there, that there is something wrong in pain. We live in labels. We have labelled the experience of pain as something negative, unwanted. We don't have the courage to view it.

 Watching the pain as a scientist watches an object in his lab will be very interesting. Don't have any judgments or notions about pain. Watch objectively, witness and you will be surprised. There will be a great distance between you and the pain.

If you have a headache, the pain is there but you need not suffer on account of it. Suffering is a secondary phenomenon, pain is primary. The headache is there, the pain is there; it is simply a fact. There is no judgment about it - you don't call it good or bad, you don't give it any value; it is just a fact.

The rose is a fact, so is the thorn. The day is a fact, so is the night. The head is a fact, so is the headache. You simply take note of it.