It’s So Familiar and Foreign, Known and Unexplored
We’ve all experienced pain, both psychological and physical. It’s one element of being alive, yet can be too complex to figure out, so difficult to live with. It can feel like it could shatter us. Maybe we just want it gone and yearn for a pill to mask it or chase it away. Certainly, it exists to signal something is wrong, but it can take on a life of its own, beyond any apparent purpose. It can also house inside itself impactful revelations.
A monk asked Tozan “How do you avoid the discomfort of hot and cold?” Tozan replied, “Go to that place where there is no hot and cold… When you are hot, be hot; and when you are cold, be cold.”
Recently, I’ve been experiencing a weird pain wrapped in chills. It can feel like an invasion of cold, and I then treat it as such and just want it gone. Other times, it seems to rise from deep within me. I’ve spoken with doctors and tried all sorts of medical, and psychological approaches. I’ve considered how lucky I am that it’s not something worse.
When I can, I try to notice how and from where it came. I notice my response to sensations, and the labels I use for them; our response to pain is as important as the original sensations. If we think we’re having a heart attack, the pain can become immensely greater than if we think we have GERD.
Sometimes, when that cold-pain overtakes me, I visualize in my mind a warm, beautiful day in a place I love. And sometimes, this works, if I don’t shake so much it shatters the image of warmth I had created.
We can get hooked on pain. Pain can narrow our focus, and we can’t let it go. So maybe we then expand the universe of experience, so the pain becomes only one stimulus amidst hundreds. We let it share a moment of our lives with everything else around us, chairs and tables, trees and birds, spatial distances from our body to the walls of the room, or between our nose and toes. Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins describe this method in Dissolving Pain; Simple Brain-Training Exercises for Overcoming Chronic Pain.
But so far, no doctor has explained, no approach has fully healed the pain. So, this anecdote speaking of hot and cold, this story⎼ or what in Zen Buddhism is called a Koan, a retold conversation of a Zen master with a student meant to lead to awakening⎼ got to me. It felt so right but its reality eluded me.
What if I became what I face? Can I do that? What if instead of thinking myself separate from the pain and experiencing it as foreign, it became just one moment of a universe experiencing itself?
I was taking a walk on a dirt road in a rural, wooded area. The songs of birds and crickets seemed to augment a sense of silence. Yet, I soon got lost in thought. Our brains do that. They’re so powerful in imagining, in traveling from place to place, memory to memory, planning, reconfiguring, trying to find understanding or release, that this activity isolates us in thought. The world around us disappears. Time and space seem to disappear.
Then I heard a crow squawk. A cricket, so small, leaped in front of me. There, on the roadside, a maple tree, its leaves the burnt red of the fall season. An oak a brownish yellow. And I was back on the road and wanted to stay there. Present.
Yet, an awful memory came to me. I felt myself, about eight years ago, sitting on the edge of the bed as my father lay clearly dying. He was in great pain despite the medication. I had studied and taught philosophy, meditated for almost 50 years, and thought I’d have something helpful, insightful to say. But when I tried to speak, nothing would come. The moment was so much bigger than any thought or word could hold, so absolutely present; I was shocked by it. And I knew at that point the situation would accept no pretense, that my life could accept nothing but total honesty. Authenticity.
And what came out, on its own, was so real it was like someone or something beyond me was speaking. What emerged was “I love you, Pop.” Just that. And thank you. For so much. For so much.
And then I was back on the road, walking with maples, crows, and crickets as companions, very alive, feeling the air that I breathed, so tasty. So tasty.
I’m not sure how much this story will help when pain comes, or when fear comes. Or when life feels too much for us and we can’t do anything about it. Maybe at such moments we can be that space that is too big for pretense, and love will speak.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock
