Unless you are fully present any experience is incomplete.

Experiencing through five senses

Experiencing something means experiencing it through the five senses. Many times while we are going through the experience we are not experiencing it as our mind is commenting, judging, comparing or evaluating the experience with similar experiences from the past.

Even if we are experiencing something for the first time, because we have a very active mind, it immediately starts decoding the experience rather than fully diving into the experience. For eg - If I am drinking a certain tea for the first time, I will start commenting on the taste, the flavor, the fragrance and use comparatives and superlatives to describe my experience. This takes me away from fully immersing in the experience. This also takes me away from the present moment and takes me into what I know and what I am projecting. With this partial presence in the present moment, we cannot fully savoir the present moment.

It's only a half-hearted experience. So it is with pain. We don't fully experience the pain in the present moment. Moreover, because it is a painful stimulus we would mostly try to avoid it rather than fully experience it and understand it. Unless we don't fully understand it as it is, we can't transform it. Hence to savour the present moment and to understand the pain we should be fully aware while going through the experience. When the mind can be free of its internal chatter and we can take the experience totally in then we would have a different quality of experiencing and understanding.