There are two types of pain, but they are interconnected and the dreaming mind may often times not distinguish between the two clearly.

The first type is the physical pain. The physical pain is nothing but a reaction of the body to something that isn’t good for the body. It’s a signal for survival, a signal for something to change. It propels your body to act. All animals and all enlightened people experience physical pain. But in the separated state physical pain isn’t just pain, it is always accompanied by a degree of emotional pain, which comes from ideas that it shouldn’t be this way, that you shouldn’t experience physical pain. In the absence of those ideas, physical pain becomes very neutral. It’s still unpleasant for the body, of course, but it’s psychologically neutral. It even becomes possible to approach physical pain, feel it thoroughly and completely, and, to a certain extent, enjoy it. Allowing yourself to feel the physical pain that is there, instead of trying to resist the experience is very good spiritual practice. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go to a doctror hehehe. These things are not mutually exclusive.

The second type of pain is emotional pain. That’s what in Buddhism and various other spiritual traditions is called suffering. All emotional pain comes from ego - from your own self-image, complete with ideas on who you are, how you should experience life, how other people should treat you, what should or shouldn’t have happened to you. We accumulate emotional pain since childhood and it bubbles up to the level of consciousness constantly in daily life. Most of our emotional pain and suffering is unconscious and it goes on without noticing. Emotional pain is the source of conditioning - the various traits we adopt to avoid experiencing it in the future and to seek emotional pleasure as a relief from the constant undercurrent of emotional pain which is always with us. The only way to release emotional pain is to allow yourself to experience it fully, without judgment, without analysis and with self-love and acceptance. That’s why meditation is uncomfortable for most people, and that’s why in long meditation sessions people often start to cry. This is also the source of what is called “bad trips” in psychedelic experiences. Both psychedelics and meditation take you into your unconscious, and the pain and suffering which is always with you is revealed to you there. That’s the reason meditative and psychedelic experiences, even though often times unpleasant, are also often viewed as profound, personally important, liberating and spiritual. You have the absolute capacity to experience and accept all the emotional pain that you carry with you - that’s basically what enlightenment is. The love in you is strong enough to accept it all. Not immediately, with time. By accepting it and allowing it we dissolve our emotional pain. The blissful aftertaste coming after spiritual experiences is, strictly speaking, the appreciation of the new level of freedom that came from accepting and releasing some of your emotional pain. That’s why it’s temporary - you get used to the new baseline, but whatever is left is still there. Enlightened beings never experience emotional pain.

Sometimes emotional pain also gets intertwined with physical pain, and during an intense emotional experience physical pain can also manifest itself as unpleasant sensation in the body, of various intensity, in rare cases even overwhelming. This is normal, and it’s not dangerous. Our neural system is vast and interconnected. The body responds to suppressed emotional pain with various ticks and tensions. Unraveling it all can sometimes feel unpleasant physically. That’s not a problem, just stay with the experience and allow yourself to have it and accept it with love.