He said something like "focus on the pain, let it turn into water and wash over and away from you," which, in retrospect, isn't actually that bad of an outlook once you understand it, because noticing, understanding, and accepting pain is a pretty good way of dealing with minor injuries (like I splashed my hand with boiling oil 6 months ago and can still see the scar from that, but at the time I just kept cooking and ran it under cold water when I could step away for a second, and my response was to laugh about it and use it as a lesson to be more careful in the future), but goddamn is it the dumbest and least useful shit to tell a kid with a skinned knee.
Anyways I thought of this because of that other post about hot peppers, because eating lots of hot peppers is what actually taught me how to accept and process pain, since once you've got that capsaicin soaking into your soft mouth tissue literally the only thing you can do is accept it and relax until the pain fades out.
I have a similar anecdote, my dad was into like western pseudo-Buddhist shit for a while, and he basically said “Happiness is just in your head, so just choose to be happy”
And that’s bullshit for a number of reasons but there is some core of truth there that I’ve absorbed which is “being angry at people takes a lot of energy and is unpleasant and you can kinda just choose not to”
I think very frequently about that story where a monk carries a woman across a river and a couple miles down the road the other monk says to him “I still can’t believe you did that!” and the first monk says “Bro I set her down on the other side of the river, why are you still carrying her?”
✨Just gaslight yourself into being happy✨