Pain

For some people the title of this post alone might deter them from reading it. The word “pain” itself can cause a kind of “ugh” feeling in the body as one says it. Try this, say the word “pain” and see what it feels like in your body. Then, add a word before it like incredible pain, or amazing pain, or beautiful pain. Doesn’t that change the way it feels? I think this is a great thing to know and it might teach us something about pain that could ultimately help us.

For the past few weeks, I have been serving as a model bodywork client for a small supervision group. I knew going in that the work would be deeper than I am inclined to receive, but the practitioner is a friend of mine who knows my body well after years of massage work in my dancing days and her touch and knowledge is highly skilled. I knew I was in good hands. She wanted to work with the connective tissue affecting the curves in my spine and thought it would be a good challenge and investigation both for her work and for the colleagues/students watching. Last week, as I laid there and felt the sensation of the stretching tissue, one of the observers closest to me noticed I was smiling and gently asked if the work tickled. The question made me smile even more. The experience has me thinking a great deal about our responses to pain. It doesn’t matter whether it is physical or emotional pain, our strategies are often the same. We can get angry at it, avoid it, distract ourselves, make a joke of it, cower from it, shut down in reaction to it, get busy trying to fix it, or maybe even smile at it. What I have learned with physical pain and what I continue to learn with emotional pain is that there is a way to be with what is uncomfortable that can either close us off or opens us up.

The first time I remember feeling deep physical pain was in high school when I sprained my ankle rehearsing for a dance performance. The physical therapist at school instructed me to submerge my ankle in a bucket of ice water and stay for 5 minutes multiple times a day. The ankle hurt to walk on, but nothing hurt like that ice water did. It felt like something was in the bucket breaking my ankle. Everything in me tensed up as I sat next to the bobbing, crackling cubes ready to moan once the sensation hit. I survived those few ice age days and my ankle was better in no time. After massage school, with my hands still not strong enough for the amount of deep tissue work I was doing, I had to repeat this chilly procedure with my hands and wrists. It was here that I started to work with my reaction to the painful sensation and discovered that we have an amazing ability to cope if we train ourselves to. I didn’t know how to do it in high school, but I now believe that all the years of meditation since then have taught me how. Since pain is going to keep on coming in this life, why not have it as a goal to keep training?

Back to last week…there I was, lying on the table as an un-lotioned fist was making its way through my pectoral muscles, I could have scrunched up my face, tensed up my legs, arms and fists, pulled my back muscles in and away from the table. All of that would have braced me against what was happening, but it also would have made it worse by adding tension to something that was already hard. I’d be creating more work and more pain. Or, I could do what I did, which was to surrender to the sensation, to let go and give in, softening to the benevolent hand treating me. Tensing up would have made this voluntary treatment feel like abuse or at the very least, as though something was forcing its will on my tissue. Instead, it was as though I said, “yes, you are welcome here.” I also removed the idea that pain is “bad” and chose to feel the sensation without naming it as something. This is what this feels like and that’s all. In doing that, I could actually feel how amazing the sensation was. If I could have said it out loud, it would have sounded like, “wow, that’s incredible.” Now if I thought I was in danger or if I didn’t know what was happening, I might have to take an action, but I wasn’t in danger. I could feel what I was experiencing and stay with it. This ability to stay with what is happening and not feel the need for a distraction or something to do takes concentration, but the there is a gift in it. It’s the gift of knowing that inside, I am okay. The pain is not all of me. When I, for the first time, experienced one of those back spasms that lasts for days, the kind where the simplest action feels monumental, I found myself laughing even more than usual. It was a profound experience of “holy cow, this is incredible! We humans actually go through this!” Of course, laughing with a back spasm is excruciating, but it would have been worse not to. When I was upset, it wasn’t the pain, it was the fear that I wouldn’t be able to work. The fear required more attention than the physical issue at hand, but actually the technique is the same. The relief comes in simply feeling what I am feeling as sensation and not adding labels on top of it. I can breathe with whatever is there and, in feeling acceptance and self-compassion, something inevitably shifts. 

The other morning, I had a painful emotion welling up in me as I sat in meditation. It was one of those dark feelings triggered by past events, casting ominous clouds over the future. Quick sand. But, I sat there anyway and tapped into the part of me that could observe and sense. I felt the darkness reside in the front of my head and I let it be there. Slowly more room opened and I could see that this was only one part, other things were also true. I could breathe with those parts, too. Though I didn’t want the darkness there, I let it be and gradually it opened the curtains, letting more light in. We can choose to stay with the sensation and stop resisting it until there is a solution. If we resist it, there is no room for change to happen. Even if it were to happen, we might miss it because our energy is still tied up in what was.

When we can find the “wow” behind anything difficult, we are doing well. For me, this is something worth working on. How can I, in those moments of emotional discomfort, get enough distance to say, with a spirit of delight, “wow, that’s painful!” Don’t laugh. I’m not being ridiculous. Well, actually, please do laugh because that is exactly what I want to be able to do. Laugh with my pain, taking in the sensation with compassion and wonder as opposed to resisting it with wanting something else. I will get something else, just maybe not in that very moment. And some days, we just can’t find that wonder, laughter, or delight in what is happening and that’s okay, too. Everything keeps changing, despite ourselves. Yesterday I couldn’t laugh, but today I can. That alone is a wondrous thing. This is the way life is…beautifully painful. It is awesome, in the true sense of the word.