All of our reality is experienced only via thought in the moment. That includes all our feelings.
That's a pretty sweeping statement, maybe even a little hard to believe. When we say that, sometimes someone asks if that also applies to physical feelings, such as pain. Surely that is Real, right? The usual answer is something like, the sensation of pain is real, but the way we experience it is still created by thought in the moment. That is to say, there is pain, but is there suffering?
I had an encounter with this recently, in which I was able to see some of how it worked for myself. I managed to accidentally slam three of my fingers in the window. I slammed them pretty hard and there was a bit of swelling. I wondered if I could have broken any of them. For background, any time I hurt a finger, I get concerned because there was that one time that I broke my thumb and to be honest it hurt a lot less than I'd been lead to believe, so it wasn't until I woke up the next day with it in obviously worse condition than before that it occurred to me that there might be reason to go get an x-ray. So on this recent occasion I sat with my fingers in pain, wondering how long it would take before it would be clear whether it was worth going for an x-ray or not. And as I sat, with that worry on my mind, and as I became half-convinced that one or more of my fingers was broken, I noticed the pain increasing substantially in my mind. And suddenly I had the realization that if only I knew for certain that nothing was broken, well, it certainly would still hurt, probably even a lot, but the pain wouldn't bother me much at all. I'd just wait for the pain to go away at its own pace and know everything would be okay.
The problem was that I was counting on the pain to be the main clue as to whether something was broken or not, so the situation seemed like a tiny catch-22. I wasn't sure what to do. So when I noticed this worry, I reminded myself that even if it was broken, that was not the end of the world, I would go to the emergency clinic for an x-ray, and either someone there would set the broken finger or they would send me to the hospital and someone there would do it. And while the whole situation would be extremely inconvenient, especially since the fingers were on my right hand and I'm a righty, I would manage one way or another. Thinking this over, I started to calm down a bit, and some of the stress and worry started to dissipate. My fingers started to feel a bit better, and after a little while I felt pretty confident that nothing was broken. The next day everything was back to normal.
I was lucky that no bones were broken that day, but even more so I count myself lucky that I was able to get a glimpse of the inner workings of my experience of pain.