Hi, 

Thanks for replying ... Would you mind clarifying, do you mean physical pain or psychological/emotional pain?

Can you give examples to illustrate? Hypothetical examples are okay, I'm not asking for personal information.

What are "skills for reducing pain"?

What is "pointless suffering"? How does it differ from other types of suffering?

Thanks

Huge +1!

I completely resonate with your question. 

It seems that all this awakening stuff belongs to a realm of perception that is very sophisticated, subtle or "transcendental". It is hard to talk about it: teachers either speak about it in mystical-shmystical poetic metaphors (which sounds like quackery) or they try to explain it phenomenologically/scientifcally/pragmatically, which sounds overly abstract. When a teacher says: "Awakening will free you from the pain associated with the illusion of self", 99,999% of people would not understand what are they talking about. It just sounds abstract and philosophical.
Shinzen Young once said that the curse of awakening is that nobody will understand what are you talking about. I suppose that it's like trying to talk with a fish about the water that it lives in. Someone said that the "fundamental suffering" is like a large burden that you carried all of your life so you are not aware that you carry it (because you don't know how is it to be without it).

I think that, fundamentally, there are no "real world examples" for this. Any concrete examples (such as eliminating some addiction etc.) are just anegdotes, not universal for all awakened people. And they belong to the realm of psychology, not awakening.

I like the explanation given by Kenneth Folk (you can google it): he says that awakening brings "meta-okayness" - anything can arise in your mind, as before awakening, but now there is "more space" around it, a background okayness. So, everything is the same, but, at the same time, everything is different, because things are now in this different, better context.

In several of his recent interviews, Daniel was directly asked what are the benefits of awakening, and each time he answered with a long list of things, to name a few: all negative emotions last much shorter, you can see thoughts as thoughts (you see that they are not objective reality), there is more spaciousness so suffering feels smaller in comparison, reality feels much more pleasant etc.

However, this all sounds abstract. I guess that subtle and paradoxical nature of awakening just makes it necessary to talk about it in that way.

This is so very well put! My personal experience is that the formal meditation practice interplays with other parts of my life and they nourish each other. I see my practice as integrated. It's all practice, and it's all life. I'm one of those people who need the yoga in order to be able to meditate, but I also need to meditate in order to be able to do the yoga. I'm not in therapy now, but I have been, and even outside of therapy I have done a lot of psychological work. I just had to do that, because of traumas and because I'm differently wired than what this society mainly caters to. I think that has been very helpful both for my insight practice and for dealing with it, and it's also part of the morality work that is its own practice. I can also see that insights from the insight practice are very helpful for that work. 

Suffering less and noticing it more, until one realizes that there isn't a thing called self that needs protection - yes, that's very spot on. The phases where that realization is stronger, there is a huge reduction in suffering. Words aren't enough to describe that relief. However, that realization is not stable for me yet. Sometimes outer conditions and dukkha nanas and personal conditioning interact in a way that makes the space seem restricted, and in those phases, I feel like I suffer a great deal. Still, when I look at the facts of how I'm behaving and what is possible for me, how much I'm able to laugh and enjoy life, and how fast I recover from a really shitty day, there's no denying that my baseline is very different from before I started my practice, and that there have been some significant shifts in that baseline. On a really shitty day I still just take stuff for granted that I wouldn't even dream of a couple of years ago. But do I still have really shitty days? Yes. For the record, I'm definitely not an arahant. I'm beyond stream entry. I think I'm working towards third path. 

If people find that other stuff than formal meditation is helping them, I think it goes without saying that it's good to integrate that in their practice. Whatever works! 

Okay. I think I see how therapy can be helpful. It seems obvious that we might have a hard time letting go of those aspects of self we want to protect: the body, our opinions, social status. But what is less obvious is that to let go of the sense of self, we have to be conscious of it, and often those apsects of our sense of self that we don't like, our faults, failures, and unpleasant experiences etc sometimes get pushed away out of the forefront consciousness. So some of the big things we need to let go of (surrender to) are hidden or pushed to the side unless we really go looking look for them. I suppose that hidden aspect of the sense of self is one of the things that makes awakening such a big undertaking, and facing the emotional pain of acknowledging our faults, failures and unpleasant experiences is one of the things that causes dark nights, and difficulty in maintaining a consistent and continuous meditation practice.