Overcoming torture

[fork]

how would you overcome mental/physical torture?
I have heard of some tribes that trained themselves to overcome discomfort and shows no signs of suffering while being tortured for long time, how is it? what do you think was their mindset or training that allowed them to overcome it?

 

[nevim]

Reading your other posts it seems you are are asking a lot of questions regarding mental health issues. Here is not the place for you to find your answers, for various reasons- which I’m sure a moderator will explain to you soon enough.

Regarding you queries- there’s a lot of information you can find yourself on this topic through internet searches.

From a personal perspective: you can accept/overcome many pains, both physical and mental, by the practice of something like meditation. I say ‘something like’ only because you can do this without prior knowledge or teaching. It is within us all - but we must have control. No doubt, with practice (and guidance), the tolerance can be accepted for longer and longer periods. 

 

[Markus Hanke]

We habitually take pain and suffering to go hand-in-hand, but they are not the same thing at all. Pain is a physical (or mental) sensation, whereas ‘suffering’ is how we react to that sensation - we experience it as something unpleasant, so we resist the experience and try to push it away. The stronger the pain sensation, the more we resist and thus suffer.

As @nevimhas correctly pointed out, while we cannot stop ourselves from feeling pain, it is possible to train the mind out of its habitual habit patterns of resisting that unpleasant experience, and thus separate the suffering from the pain. There are specific training methods for this (i.e. meditation techniques), which lead to the ability to meet any experience - whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral - with complete equanimity (i.e. acceptance and non-resistance, not indifference). There are also other techniques that aim to block out the pain; those are deep absorption states, where, if you can get into them, the pain is no longer consciously felt. 

It has to be noted though that this type of training is not a quick process - for most people this takes a long time (often a lifetime) of consistent work to master.