I recently read David Goggins “Can’t Hurt Me”. On one level it does glorify superhuman pain tolerance. But a constructive perspective on such attitudes is: they illustrate courage. Do not tolerate pain, laugh at it! Do not tense under cold shower, relax into it. Do not bear problems, solve them.
I strongly believe there are many ways to respond to difficult sensory inputs, that we can learn new responses, and people like David Goggins exemplify some of this, but there are even more extreme examples, such as self-immolation by Buddhist monks.
I learned a first step on the path in myself, in a very trivial way, by watching my cats go out into the rain. They completely ignored it. So I tried that, instead of hunching up when I went out into the rain. And the suffering—in response to the same sensory input—immediately went away. This turned out to generalise to some of the inputs during workouts, although by no means all of them. DOMS, for example, appears as a sign of a hard workout the day before, rather than as pain per se. I sincerely doubt I could get even to the Goggins level, but this is clearly a learnable thing.
So maybe at least some of those who appear to experience pain and suffering are actually experiencing something else, but describing what—to you—would be pain?
I recently read David Goggins “Can’t Hurt Me”. On one level it does glorify superhuman pain tolerance. But a constructive perspective on such attitudes is: they illustrate courage. Do not tolerate pain, laugh at it! Do not tense under cold shower, relax into it. Do not bear problems, solve them.
I strongly believe there are many ways to respond to difficult sensory inputs, that we can learn new responses, and people like David Goggins exemplify some of this, but there are even more extreme examples, such as self-immolation by Buddhist monks.
I learned a first step on the path in myself, in a very trivial way, by watching my cats go out into the rain. They completely ignored it. So I tried that, instead of hunching up when I went out into the rain. And the suffering—in response to the same sensory input—immediately went away. This turned out to generalise to some of the inputs during workouts, although by no means all of them. DOMS, for example, appears as a sign of a hard workout the day before, rather than as pain per se. I sincerely doubt I could get even to the Goggins level, but this is clearly a learnable thing.
So maybe at least some of those who appear to experience pain and suffering are actually experiencing something else, but describing what—to you—would be pain?