When living with pain or illness, it’s important to be aware of our breathing. Breathing is a very powerful practice. Mindfulness of the breath can help us move from tight, constricted breathing to more wholesome breathing. When we breathe with the whole body, we begin to open, release, and settle. We can cultivate calm energy and positivity, even happiness. I have lived with a spinal injury for the past forty-five years, which I can break down into four very distinct phases: denial, bargaining, acceptance, and flourishing. And each of these stages connected back to my breath. I’m sharing my story in the hope that you may recognize your own experience in it and it may give you some encouragement.

The first stage of my journey with pain was denial. I injured my spine when I was 16, had two major surgeries when I was 17, and then went into a period of denial. I’m quite a stubborn sort of character, and I kept up this denial for about ten years. I’d been very sporty and active, and then I lost that identity quite suddenly over a period of months. I was no longer that girl. I became a girl who was living with a disability and living with pain. I could not come to terms with what had happened, so I went into denial and kept on trying to do the things that I used to do. And then, of course, I got exhausted. The pain would flare up. I would get heartbroken, upset, and distressed, and my health would get worse. I kept trying to shoehorn myself back into my old life when, actually, my life had changed. 

When I think back to my breathing during those years, it was very high in the body. It was tense, shallow, and tight because I was tense, shallow, and tight. That became my default setting, my nature of being. 

Five years after my operation, I fractured another part of my spine in a car accident, which made my pain much worse. And still, I went back to, “It didn’t happen.” My breathing was narrow and inhibited, and my mind was uptight and fearful. I can look back on that time now with good humor, compassion, and understanding, but it was extremely unpleasant. And I was probably quite difficult to be around because I was aloof to myself and to others. 

***

The next phase, bargaining, began when I was 25. In 1995, I reached a point of severe crisis with my health, particularly with my back, because of all the denial and strain of trying to do too many things. After some treatments had gone wrong, I ended up bedridden for a number of months, and eventually, I had to be hospitalized. There was one night in particular in the intensive care ward where I had an incredible existential dilemma because I was asked to do something that I couldn’t do. I’d had a particular treatment that required me to sit up for twenty-four hours afterward. I hadn’t sat up for months. So in the middle of the night, my mind got into a tussle between two sides. My logical, rational mind thought, I cannot do this, I will go mad. And another part of my mind said, But you have to. 

I can’t! But you have to. I can’t. But you have to. 

During all this back-and-forth, I grew obsessed with the morning, because that was when I would be able to lie down again. 

I can’t get through this until the morning. Yes, you can. No, I can’t. Yes, you can. 

Eventually, a third voice came in very clearly and said, You don’t have to get straight to the morning. You just have to live this moment, and this one, and this one, and this one. Something in me relaxed. I wouldn’t say it was a pleasant experience. I was still tormented, but my mind had changed. And I think that was partly because I knew in every cell of my being that it was true. I knew that the absolute truth of things is that we only live life one moment at a time. That realization of that truth awoke within me an enormous curiosity.

What does it mean to be present? What does it mean to live life one moment at a time? It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a past or a future. Of course there is, we’ve got memories and we plan. But the only time that we actually live is now. The future arises out of now, and the now, to some extent, is a consequence of the past. The only moment that we can experience directly is now. So I will be glad to get through till the morning. Ever since that night, I have been driven to understand that experience of knowing. How can I really embed that in my awareness? How can I live from that place? 

Another realization I had while in the hospital was that I needed to take responsibility for myself. Until that point, I wanted someone else to take the blame so I could pretend that nothing had ever happened. But I realized that how my life unfolds, to a large degree, will depend on me. Because there weren’t any medical solutions to my difficulties, the medics advised me to learn how to adapt my life to this new reality. So I gave that a go. I didn’t return to my career in film—where I was constantly pushing, shoving, and striving. Instead, I started meditating. 

One day a chaplain came to see me at the hospital and guided me through an awareness practice. Within ten minutes, he helped me take my mind to a memory when I’d been happy. I took my mind to the Southern Alps of New Zealand, where I’ve been ecstatically happy before. When he brought the meditation to a close, I felt significantly different. In reality, the only change was my awareness when I filled my mind with beauty and happiness. The possibility that I could choose made me feel happier and much more positive. So I started doing things that were good for me. Along with meditating, I started rehab swimming, yoga, and taking my nutrition seriously.

Still, I had pain and a broken spine. 

The bargaining phase is quite tricky in the sense that it’s not as deluded as denial, but it’s still delusional, painful, and confusing. If I’m doing all the right things, why am I not getting my desired outcome? Well, the issue is that the desired outcome is the thing that’s at fault, not the practices themselves. You do the right things, but you do them with a false agenda. My fantasy was that if I did these things, all my back pain would go away and somehow, miraculously, I would be cured. I know that sounds ludicrous, but I think many of us want to believe this kind of fantasy. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that’s very unlikely. What you can do is heal your attitude to what you’re experiencing. There’s an interesting distinction between prioritizing healing and searching for a cure. While we might not be able to cure ourselves of our illness or our pain, we can take steps toward healing our attitude. I recognize this is difficult.

During the denial phase, my breathing was constricted, as I struggled to continue with things that were not working for me. In the bargaining phase, there was a prevailing inability to truly be with what is. Even when I tried more intensive meditation and yoga, my breathing was tight and strained. So the phases are not completely discrete. Although bargaining is wiser than denial, it reveals an inability to be with the self fully. During those years, I did a lot of work on myself and a lot of grieving. Even then, I was still caught by this unrealistic fantasy of what the outcome would be if I was a good meditator, good practitioner, or a good person—whatever that means.

***

Eventually, I started moving into a much deeper phase of acceptance. This was a much more realistic, wise, and kind phase in life, which came out of another crisis. When I was 37, my back and mobility deteriorated significantly. My bones and bladder became paralyzed. This period was quite bleak. I would think to myself, I’ve been doing these practices for ten years. What is it that I’ve missed? What memo did I not read from the universe to help me make peace with my situation? 

I realized two things, the first being that I was using my spiritual practice to escape my illness rather than coming closer to my experience. I definitely grew and developed, but I was still caught up in that impossible dream of a perfect life, and I disliked the life that I had. So I realized that I needed to profoundly change my attitude and energies. As I moved toward acceptance, I relied on my practice, awareness, kindness, and Buddhist wisdom to help me land in this life, just as it is. Let me love this life as best as I can. And let me let go of all these layers and layers of tightness and contraction, grasping and confusion. I also developed my ability to take my practice into all the moments of my life, not just when I was meditating.

Let me love this life as best as I can.

In the acceptance phase, my breathing began to change. My voice dropped and became more resonant, and my breathing was reaching much deeper into my body. My breath went down into my belly, my pelvis, and then to my lower back, where all the trauma and pain lived. I had previously been using my practice to avoid that pain, but as my acceptance grew, my breathing was able to gradually open and drop down into that part of my body. I was able to come into relationship with my lower back with an attitude of healing rather than fantasizing about a cure. It has been an exquisitely tender and beautiful healing. 

***

I always thought that acceptance would be the goal, the end of the line. If I could be more accepting and live this life with a little more grace, that would be a wonderful thing. The final stages of grief, as taught by various people, often end with acceptance of something that has happened. But what has surprised and delighted me is that out of acceptance grows a new phase, which I call flourishing. When you let go of the battle, let go of fighting with your spirit, then more energy will rise up. You will gain the energy to grow and move into new possibilities. In this flourishing phase, my whole body was breathing. I was breathing in the belly and the back and the chest, because all of myself could be brought into this flourishing phase. 

When I talk to people about living with pain and illness, I tell them that, yes, it’s important that we come to terms with it and accept our situation as best we can. But out of that acceptance, we can also gain a new lease on life, a new way of being that’s more open, abundant, positive, and openhearted. 

And although I’ve described four separate phases, I also experience movement between the phases. I do believe that I’m in a flourishing phase now, but I still have really low days when I go back to bargaining. It’s not like you move out of one phase and then it’s complete. It’s more about the general trend of your life and going in and out of these phases depending on your circumstances. That’s inevitable and very human. I think if I’d heard someone’s story like this forty years ago, I would have felt like that person was talking to me directly. I hope you find this encouraging.

So those are the four stages of denial, bargaining, acceptance, and flourishing. And who knows what will come next? Who knows? 

The post From Fighting to Flourishing appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I have lived with spinal pain and paralysis for 46 years as a result of accidents and surgeries in my teens. It has been a harrowing path at times, but the dharma has provided a clear map for training my mind and heart to work with me rather than against me. This has been remarkably encouraging and has given me great confidence in the Buddhist path.

I’ve gained much guidance from an early Buddhist text, the Sallatha Sutta (Samyutta Nikaya 36.6), in which the Buddha gives practical, accessible, and wise counsel about how to change our relationship with pain.

Asked to describe the difference between the response of a wise person and that of an ordinary person to pain, the Buddha uses the analogy of someone pierced by an arrow:

When an ordinary person experiences a painful bodily feeling they worry, agonize, and feel distraught. Then they feel two types of pain, one physical and one mental. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, and then immediately afterward by a second arrow, and they experience the pain of two arrows.

And of course, in reality, when we are struggling with pain, it can feel as if we are pierced by a whole volley of second arrows that quickly traps us in a web of suffering and despair.

The Buddha also clearly states that the wise person will still experience the first arrow, as physical pain comes with having a human body. But he adds this:

When a wise person experiences a painful bodily feeling, they don’t worry, agonize, and feel distraught, and they feel physical pain but not mental pain. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, but a second arrow didn’t follow it, so they only experience the pain of a single arrow.

I love the way this is so simply stated: that the difference between an unwise person and a wise person lies in how they respond to pain, not in whether or not they achieve an absence of pain. It’s a relief to know that pain comes with life so that we can stop judging ourselves when it arises. But the Buddha shows clearly how the pain of one arrow is infinitely easier to bear than the pain of multiple arrows.

The Buddha very clearly states the cause of the second arrow when he says:

Having been touched by the painful feeling (of the first arrow), an ordinary person resists and resents it. They harbor aversion to it, and this underlying tendency of resistance and resentment toward that painful feeling comes to obsess the mind.

This corresponds exactly to my own experience living with a painful body. I have watched my mind closely over many years and have taught tens of thousands of other people, and I can report from the front line: it is indeed true that it isn’t the unpleasant sensations in the body that cause the bulk of distress. It is the resistance and resentment and the rapid cascade of physical, mental, and emotional secondary reactions that can ruin a human life.

So how can we go beyond this resistance and resentment? How can we learn to let go of these understandable tendencies? And does the sutta’s teaching apply only to physical pain, or can we apply it to other kinds of suffering?

Through my own practice and teaching I have come to see how the core principle of letting go of resistance and resentment applies to any kind of difficulty. Perhaps we can take heart from this knowledge: in the turbulent times we live in, with their widespread social difficulties, climate change, and geopolitical instability, we can’t control the externals of our world, but we can have agency over how we respond and move from resistance and struggle to resilience, courage, and compassion—both toward ourselves and toward others.

How wonderful that such a pure and simple teaching from twenty-five hundred years ago can give us practical guidance in the modern world!

It’s a relief to know that pain comes with life so that we can stop judging ourselves when it arises.

For the past twenty years I have been passing on these precious tools through my work of offering Mindfulness-based Pain Management (MBPM) to others who are suffering. It never fails to move and inspire me when I witness people, sometimes living with great pain or illness, harnessing the power of their minds to reclaim their lives.

A core practice within MBPM is the Compassionate Acceptance meditation. In this practice we learn to open to whatever is present and to cultivate a middle way between practicing denial and avoidance on the one hand and allowing oneself to be overwhelmed on the other. And crucially, we learn to respond to whatever is arising with kindness, tenderness, and love, and to feel into the fluid and changing nature of all experience.

This practice also shows us how letting go of resistance and resentment is not the same as passive resignation. It requires a quality of awareness that is an exquisite balance of being receptive to whatever arises, just as it is, while one also cultivates a creative response. I always say that the behavioral outcome of mindfulness and compassion is choice. Rather than feeling like a victim of circumstances, we can choose a wise and kind response in every moment.

Start by establishing a comfortable posture—either sitting or lying down, whichever posture will be most comfortable for you.

Gently surrender the weight of your body to gravity so the body settles and rests on the bed, the floor, or the chair. Can you let go into a sense of how gravity gently draws your body down toward the floor and holds you and supports you? Can you get a sense of yielding into the surface you are resting upon rather than perching on top of it? If you’d like to, take a few deeper breaths, then let go and release a little bit more with each out-breath. Let yourself arrive in the body and the moment more and more fully.

When you’re ready, allow your breathing to find its own natural rhythm, and allow your awareness to rest inside breathing, inside the whole body, rather than thinking about breathing as an idea. Allow your whole body to be rocked and cradled by the breath—the front, the sides, and the back of the body.

And now, with great tenderness, gently open your awareness to include your pain, discomfort, fatigue, or any difficulty that you’re experiencing. Include it in your awareness with the kind of attitude that you would naturally have toward a loved one who is hurting or injured. If your difficulty is more mental or emotional, see if you can find its echo in your body—maybe tight hands or jaw, or a tight belly—and rest your awareness there. Breathe softly with this experience for a few moments.

If it feels frightening to be with your difficulty in this way, then gently breathe with the fear, coming back to rest your awareness in the breath in the body. And if your breathing becomes disturbed for any reason, then feel free to move into another stabilizing “object of awareness.” This could be the hands, the feet, the bottom sitting on the chair; you can also rest your awareness in sounds. Move back inside breathing if or when you feel ready.

As you open to your experience a little more, notice how you respond to your pain or difficulty. You’ll probably find that you are tending toward a hard, resistant, blocked, or numb stance; or you may be tending toward a sense of overwhelm, such that your pain is dominating your whole awareness. Both attitudes are normal expressions of resistance, and we all tend toward one or the other at different times.

If you notice that you’re a bit blocked or numb, then choose to open a bit more to the painful or tight sensations in your body and very, very gently breathe into the experience. Softening, softening with each breath.

If you start tipping into overwhelm, then choose to broaden the awareness to include other experiences as well: different parts of the body, including areas that aren’t in pain; different sounds, smells, or other senses. Stay grounded and embodied, but choose to place your pain within a broad field of awareness.

Spend time exploring your experience in this way, coming closer to your experience, applying tenderness if you feel blocked or avoidant and broadening awareness if you feel overwhelmed. Always look for the middle way between these extremes through this sensitive and responsive awareness.

As you explore your experience in this way, see whether you can notice how sensations are always changing and how no two moments of “pain” are exactly the same. Maybe as you come closer to your actual experience, you realize, for example, that it’s just your lower back that’s hurting, rather than your whole back as you’d previously thought. Can you apply this precise investigation of experience to whatever your particular difficulty is? And maybe you discover that some of the sensations have aspects to them that are pleasant—things like tingling. Or you may even feel a sense of relief in your heart now that you’re finally turning toward your difficulty and meeting it with kindness and curiosity rather than being locked in battle, struggle, and strain with it, which just leads to more and more suffering and tension.

And what about your thoughts and emotions? Are you having any thoughts and emotions about your pain or difficulty? Can you let them come and go moment by moment—neither suppressing them nor overidentifying with them? Can you let them go as you rest with the basic sensations in the body moment by moment, held by the kindly breath?

Be sure to cultivate an attitude that is patient, gentle, and tender.

Now saturate the breath with self-compassion. As you breathe in, let a felt imaginative sense of kindliness flow into your whole body; and as you breathe out, imagine kindliness flowing out into and saturating your whole body. Breathe with a deep sense of kindliness, care, tenderness, and compassion toward yourself.

Allow the whole body, including any pain or discomfort that may be present, to be rocked and cradled by the breath. If you still feel dominated by resistance, allow that to be saturated by the kindly, gentle breath without judgment. Accept all your experience with great tenderness.

When you feel ready, bring the meditation to a close.

I hope you have found this practice helpful. The central approach of cultivating a middle way between denial and overwhelm, softening resistance, and releasing into flow and kindness can be taken into all the activities of daily life. Moving again and again from fighting to flowing can indeed be a beautiful gateway to freedom.

The post A Gateway to Freedom appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

First is knowing an illness to be an admonition to virtuous action.
Second is knowing an impediment to be the divine chosen deity.
Third is the patient’s awareness of intrinsic awareness.

—Ko-brag-pa Bsod-nams-rgyal-mtshan (from The Hermit of Go Cliffs, Cyrus Stearns, trans.)

I have a chronic, painful illness. Actually, to call the illness an “it” is a bit off the mark. It’s an event in the body, an event of the body. It’s my dancing partner, my teacher, my enemy, my friend, my curse, my blessing. It constantly surprises me, sometimes shocks me, and continues to shape my life like a river shapes the land.

Until I was 35, I was strong and capable. I walked the sagebrush hills of eastern Washington as a field botanist, I kayaked in the green waters of Puget Sound, I sat in meditation all night listening to the frogs. I loved dharma practice and long silent retreats. I was a hard worker and proud of my contributions to the natural world and my community. I was also, I see now, strikingly oblivious to my body—I didn’t need to pay attention: it was always reliable.

Then I contracted mononucleosis, a debilitating viral disease with a long recovery period. Illness, pain, and weakness were suddenly the stuff of my life. As the months passed, there were days or weeks when I thought I was recovering, but then the symptoms would return, fierce as ever. I never knew when the illness would hit or how long it would last. I say “knew,” but really it’s “know.” Gradually it began to dawn on me that this thing had moved in and taken up residence in the household. Every time I had a period of weeks without symptoms I would think, “All right, it’s gone. Hallelujah!” Then, when it struck again, I would be devastated.

Nine years later it’s still with me, coming and going in much the same form. After a few years, I discovered that what I had was actually several autoimmune diseases, perhaps triggered by the virus that caused the mononucleosis. At times I’m completely free of symptoms; at other times I lie in bed curled in a ball around the pain and feel nausea so persistent that food—and life—loses all savor and joy. Every plan is subject to the body’s unpredictability: tea with a friend, a hike in the mountains, a retreat with a favorite teacher—all may seem reasonable when first imagined, impossible when the time arrives. When the symptoms return, life becomes very small and narrow—the width of a bed, the space between one aching limb and another. And I feel grief. It’s hard to hurt, again; it’s hard to have to put one’s life on hold, again; it’s hard to be back in the place of illness.

This is the territory of the dark fields.

***

I’ve cried a lot of tears of self-pity in the last few years, and I wonder why self-pity is such a pejorative term. To feel pity for the person in pain—me—has been the first step toward really understanding that this is the human condition. I’m getting a taste of it a little sooner than most, a little later than some. I know a sweet little girl who developed a rare autoimmune illness just before her sixth birthday, and I watched her parents suffer as she struggled for breath. My friend Michael lies in his bed with Parkinson’s, not able to speak, his eyes locked on mine. Our tears mingle together, a big invisible river circling around the world, and through my tears of self-pity I join everyone who cries.

The most difficult teaching of illness has been unlearning my old deep habit of obliviousness to the body. If I’m feeling well and then begin to experience subtle signals—a little tiredness, a little weakness, a little pain—I may be able to stop the descent into illness. Ignoring those signals is a recipe for trouble. But oh, I’m such a slow student. Even though I know that the road of ignoring the body leads to pain, I forget, over and over again.

I find this just a little bit humiliating. I’ve been practicing mindfulness for more than twenty years. This is illness in its guise as fierce Rinzai Zen master: The student forgets her bowls. The teacher, out of compassion for her stupidity, whacks the student over the head. The student bows deeply, fails again the next day, gets whacked again. Maybe one day the student remembers her bowls. The next day, she forgets, and once again: whack! The word that comes to mind here is restraint. I’ve had to learn both to pay attention to the body and to allow its dictates to take precedence over my will, my pride or my excitement.

Ironically, in my early years of meditation practice, before I was ill, I learned with gratitude that I didn’t need to be subject to every whim of the body and mind. And yet, and yet: there is a fine line between nongratification of the body’s desires and suppressing the body’s needs. I’ve had to learn to respond with compassion to the requests of the body, to treat the body as a partner in the dance. This is most true when the lights go dark and we are once again whirling into the territory of pain and weakness. It’s easy to fight and resist, but I’ve learned the hard way how resistance increases the suffering. Instead there has to be a kind of surrender. The body is firmly in the lead, and my job is to follow it. That’s what this dancing partner has taught me.

I wouldn’t have said this about myself a few years ago, but I now recognize that pride is a big part of my personality. There’s nothing like a good illness to help you release a little excess pride. Proud of your dependability? Illness makes you undependable. Proud of your self-sufficiency? Illness forces you to ask for help. Proud of your career? Illness may very well undermine whatever career you have. We’re taught in Buddhism that the degree of suffering is directly related to the degree of holding on. Despite this teaching, most of us don’t let go of anything very easily. Illness, like a new puppy who chews anything and everything in sight, helps us get rid of things we thought we needed but really didn’t.

Another side of pride is shame. After becoming sick, I thought I couldn’t do meditation retreats because I was ashamed to ask for an easier schedule. When I could finally ask, and sit retreats again, it was like coming home after years of unnecessary exile.

Somehow, miraculously, every time I lose some part of my self-image, something fresh and beautiful comes my way. Because of this illness, I’ve gone from being a well-respected conservation botanist to a wanderer, retreat junkie, and sometime house and animal caretaker. I’m way less impressive, but there’s more room for grace. I have time for everything: for a friend in pain, for the light on the river, for my own wild mind shyly peering from the undergrowth.

A subtle part of the dance is knowing and remembering that although the body may be hurting, the heart and mind have a different kind of freedom. The most important thing I’ve learned in the last nine years is that even in the midst of physical suffering, there can be happiness, even joy.

In the last week I’ve been very sick, but I’ve been caring for a house (and a cat and two dogs) on the banks of the Chama River in northern New Mexico. When the early evening light illuminates the bare trunks of the cottonwoods across the river and catches the first faint spring blush of green in the branches, my heart soars with the beauty of it. I’ve found that happiness is often just right nearby, half-hidden, and part of the practice of illness is learning to recognize and rejoice in it: the forsythia in the window, the taste of persimmons, the joy of a good conversation. I’ve learned from long retreats that happiness is truly less about external circumstances as it is an inherent quality of the mind.

Happiness is a sort of resonance that I can tune in to if I quiet down and listen. If I’m blocked from that natural connection, I can consciously call up times of past happiness—my first Zen practice period at Tassajara, deep in the winter mountains, or the way it felt to gallop a white pony over the vast open moors of western Ireland. Mysteriously, the feeling of happiness in the body, sometimes from many years ago, arises again. It doesn’t have to be transcendent joy; simple, humble pleasure is an enormous gift when the body hurts, as Zen teacher Darlene Cohen teaches in her book on practicing with pain, Turning Suffering Inside Out.

***

Now I get to the tricky part: illness as blessing, as gift. It’s taken me a long time to see this face. I can remember snarling at someone, years ago, when they suggested that my illness might be a gift. Folks, a word of advice here: however much you may want to, refrain from making this suggestion to a sick person. They won’t thank you. Finding the gift of illness can only come from some genuine place far within. From without it feels like a way of minimizing the tremendous suffering of the person who is sick. I couldn’t call it a gift, not for years. It felt like a curse, actually, something entirely undeserved, unwarranted, and unnecessary. I have to say that it still feels like a curse some days, but there are gifts there too. And the greatest and hardest gift? The visceral, direct knowledge that life is not limitless, that tomorrow is completely unknown, and that, literally, there is no time to waste.

As long as I can remember I’ve felt a call to deep spiritual practice, even before I knew such a thing was possible. But for most of my adult life, there was always something that seemed more important, and that called to me for care—a husband and partner, animals, work, activism, household, land. I did my best to integrate times of retreat with an ordinary life, but I was like a tamed wild animal, always looking longingly toward the dark woods.

When death comes, we give up all our responsibilities, no matter how deep. Illness, too, can make it no longer possible to be “the responsible one.” Illness reminds us that we don’t have forever to take care of what most matters to us. I didn’t want to find myself on my deathbed still longing for those dark woods. Even my dreams began to tell me that it was time to let the spirit go where it needed to go. And so, years after first becoming ill, I turned the corner and asked for the impossible: a year’s leave from my work to do what I loved and was called to while I still could. I wandered, I did long retreats, I spent time with beloved friends, I lay on my back in the desert and watched the endless blue sky, and I stumbled into happiness that I would not have believed possible. I chose not to return to my work, and in these years of simplicity and wandering, my life has opened up like a flower and grace has come in a thousand ways like a cloud of butterflies on a summer’s morning.

So, illness is a dance, an admonition, a curse, a blessing, the divine chosen deity. I would not wish it on anyone: it’s a rough, cruel road. Nonetheless, here I am. How can I not bow down to it? It has humbled me and stripped me bare; it has given me my true life.

From the Spring 2009 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 25, No. 2) Text © 2009 by Zenshin Florence Caplow and Inquiring Mind

⧫

 Join Florence this fall in an online class on Dancing in the Dark Fields of Illness and Pain at the San Francisco Zen Center.

The post Dancing in the Dark Fields: The Teachings of Illness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I have lived with spinal pain and paralysis for 46 years as a result of accidents and surgeries in my teens. It has been a harrowing path at times, but the dharma has provided a clear map for training my mind and heart to work with me rather than against me. This has been remarkably encouraging and has given me great confidence in the Buddhist path.

I’ve gained much guidance from an early Buddhist text, the Sallatha Sutta (Samyutta Nikaya 36.6), in which the Buddha gives practical, accessible, and wise counsel about how to change our relationship with pain.

Asked to describe the difference between the response of a wise person and that of an ordinary person to pain, the Buddha uses the analogy of someone pierced by an arrow:

When an ordinary person experiences a painful bodily feeling they worry, agonize, and feel distraught. Then they feel two types of pain, one physical and one mental. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, and then immediately afterward by a second arrow, and they experience the pain of two arrows.

And of course, in reality, when we are struggling with pain, it can feel as if we are pierced by a whole volley of second arrows that quickly traps us in a web of suffering and despair.

The Buddha also clearly states that the wise person will still experience the first arrow, as physical pain comes with having a human body. But he adds this:

When a wise person experiences a painful bodily feeling, they don’t worry, agonize, and feel distraught, and they feel physical pain but not mental pain. It’s as if this person were pierced by an arrow, but a second arrow didn’t follow it, so they only experience the pain of a single arrow.

I love the way this is so simply stated: that the difference between an unwise person and a wise person lies in how they respond to pain, not in whether or not they achieve an absence of pain. It’s a relief to know that pain comes with life so that we can stop judging ourselves when it arises. But the Buddha shows clearly how the pain of one arrow is infinitely easier to bear than the pain of multiple arrows.

The Buddha very clearly states the cause of the second arrow when he says:

Having been touched by the painful feeling (of the first arrow), an ordinary person resists and resents it. They harbor aversion to it, and this underlying tendency of resistance and resentment toward that painful feeling comes to obsess the mind.

This corresponds exactly to my own experience living with a painful body. I have watched my mind closely over many years and have taught tens of thousands of other people, and I can report from the front line: it is indeed true that it isn’t the unpleasant sensations in the body that cause the bulk of distress. It is the resistance and resentment and the rapid cascade of physical, mental, and emotional secondary reactions that can ruin a human life.

So how can we go beyond this resistance and resentment? How can we learn to let go of these understandable tendencies? And does the sutta’s teaching apply only to physical pain, or can we apply it to other kinds of suffering?

Through my own practice and teaching I have come to see how the core principle of letting go of resistance and resentment applies to any kind of difficulty. Perhaps we can take heart from this knowledge: in the turbulent times we live in, with their widespread social difficulties, climate change, and geopolitical instability, we can’t control the externals of our world, but we can have agency over how we respond and move from resistance and struggle to resilience, courage, and compassion—both toward ourselves and toward others.

How wonderful that such a pure and simple teaching from twenty-five hundred years ago can give us practical guidance in the modern world!

It’s a relief to know that pain comes with life so that we can stop judging ourselves when it arises.

For the past twenty years I have been passing on these precious tools through my work of offering Mindfulness-based Pain Management (MBPM) to others who are suffering. It never fails to move and inspire me when I witness people, sometimes living with great pain or illness, harnessing the power of their minds to reclaim their lives.

A core practice within MBPM is the Compassionate Acceptance meditation. In this practice we learn to open to whatever is present and to cultivate a middle way between practicing denial and avoidance on the one hand and allowing oneself to be overwhelmed on the other. And crucially, we learn to respond to whatever is arising with kindness, tenderness, and love, and to feel into the fluid and changing nature of all experience.

This practice also shows us how letting go of resistance and resentment is not the same as passive resignation. It requires a quality of awareness that is an exquisite balance of being receptive to whatever arises, just as it is, while one also cultivates a creative response. I always say that the behavioral outcome of mindfulness and compassion is choice. Rather than feeling like a victim of circumstances, we can choose a wise and kind response in every moment.

Start by establishing a comfortable posture—either sitting or lying down, whichever posture will be most comfortable for you.

Gently surrender the weight of your body to gravity so the body settles and rests on the bed, the floor, or the chair. Can you let go into a sense of how gravity gently draws your body down toward the floor and holds you and supports you? Can you get a sense of yielding into the surface you are resting upon rather than perching on top of it? If you’d like to, take a few deeper breaths, then let go and release a little bit more with each out-breath. Let yourself arrive in the body and the moment more and more fully.

When you’re ready, allow your breathing to find its own natural rhythm, and allow your awareness to rest inside breathing, inside the whole body, rather than thinking about breathing as an idea. Allow your whole body to be rocked and cradled by the breath—the front, the sides, and the back of the body.

And now, with great tenderness, gently open your awareness to include your pain, discomfort, fatigue, or any difficulty that you’re experiencing. Include it in your awareness with the kind of attitude that you would naturally have toward a loved one who is hurting or injured. If your difficulty is more mental or emotional, see if you can find its echo in your body—maybe tight hands or jaw, or a tight belly—and rest your awareness there. Breathe softly with this experience for a few moments.

If it feels frightening to be with your difficulty in this way, then gently breathe with the fear, coming back to rest your awareness in the breath in the body. And if your breathing becomes disturbed for any reason, then feel free to move into another stabilizing “object of awareness.” This could be the hands, the feet, the bottom sitting on the chair; you can also rest your awareness in sounds. Move back inside breathing if or when you feel ready.

As you open to your experience a little more, notice how you respond to your pain or difficulty. You’ll probably find that you are tending toward a hard, resistant, blocked, or numb stance; or you may be tending toward a sense of overwhelm, such that your pain is dominating your whole awareness. Both attitudes are normal expressions of resistance, and we all tend toward one or the other at different times.

If you notice that you’re a bit blocked or numb, then choose to open a bit more to the painful or tight sensations in your body and very, very gently breathe into the experience. Softening, softening with each breath.

If you start tipping into overwhelm, then choose to broaden the awareness to include other experiences as well: different parts of the body, including areas that aren’t in pain; different sounds, smells, or other senses. Stay grounded and embodied, but choose to place your pain within a broad field of awareness.

Spend time exploring your experience in this way, coming closer to your experience, applying tenderness if you feel blocked or avoidant and broadening awareness if you feel overwhelmed. Always look for the middle way between these extremes through this sensitive and responsive awareness.

As you explore your experience in this way, see whether you can notice how sensations are always changing and how no two moments of “pain” are exactly the same. Maybe as you come closer to your actual experience, you realize, for example, that it’s just your lower back that’s hurting, rather than your whole back as you’d previously thought. Can you apply this precise investigation of experience to whatever your particular difficulty is? And maybe you discover that some of the sensations have aspects to them that are pleasant—things like tingling. Or you may even feel a sense of relief in your heart now that you’re finally turning toward your difficulty and meeting it with kindness and curiosity rather than being locked in battle, struggle, and strain with it, which just leads to more and more suffering and tension.

And what about your thoughts and emotions? Are you having any thoughts and emotions about your pain or difficulty? Can you let them come and go moment by moment—neither suppressing them nor overidentifying with them? Can you let them go as you rest with the basic sensations in the body moment by moment, held by the kindly breath?

Be sure to cultivate an attitude that is patient, gentle, and tender.

Now saturate the breath with self-compassion. As you breathe in, let a felt imaginative sense of kindliness flow into your whole body; and as you breathe out, imagine kindliness flowing out into and saturating your whole body. Breathe with a deep sense of kindliness, care, tenderness, and compassion toward yourself.

Allow the whole body, including any pain or discomfort that may be present, to be rocked and cradled by the breath. If you still feel dominated by resistance, allow that to be saturated by the kindly, gentle breath without judgment. Accept all your experience with great tenderness.

When you feel ready, bring the meditation to a close.

I hope you have found this practice helpful. The central approach of cultivating a middle way between denial and overwhelm, softening resistance, and releasing into flow and kindness can be taken into all the activities of daily life. Moving again and again from fighting to flowing can indeed be a beautiful gateway to freedom.

The post A Gateway to Freedom appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Society leads us to think all pain is a mistake. This leads us into constant contention with reality. Discomfort, disease, illness, aging, limitations, and any and all ailments of the body are part of the deal of embodiment. It’s hard to experience belonging in a body that we believe is somehow wrong or faulty. Yet, we can behave as if any unwelcome change in the body is unjust, as Pema Chödrön says, as if “pain is a punishment.” Being diagnosed with cancer at such a young age felt like a huge punishment. I could not understand why I—an early (American) adopter of yoga, meditation, and all the woo-woo—got the big C. I must have done something wrong. I did smoke in my twenties. And there was all the partying. Oh, and the accompanying drugs. But lots of people did that and they didn’t get stage-three cancer. Lost in lamentation, I recited, “Why me?” It was only when in the hospital with kidney failure, awaiting news about whether I would undergo a risky surgery (luckily, I did not) that I released that thought.

I was alone in my room, in pain, frustrated. Visiting hours had passed. Smartphones had yet to be invented. I had no friends or apps to distract me. I was ready to press the red button to call a nurse for drugs when I glanced at the front page of the newspaper lying next to my head. There was a photo of a woman in Darfur, probably younger than me at the time. She was emaciated and held in her arms her dying baby, whose skeletal face gazed up at its mother as she stared into the lens of the camera. In that moment, I thought “Why not me?” What made me think I should be free from pain? Almost two million people are diagnosed with cancer in the US every year. Over half a million die, including thousands of children. Comparison led me to evaluate myself in relation to my friends who were healthy, raising families, seemingly not in pain.

Pain felt like a punishment. I felt like I did not belong. But I belong to pain too. We all do. Mindfulness invites us to get comfortable with this reality.

As I removed the “oh, woe is me” story about pain, I had an opportunity for embodied awareness. Letting go of my stories, I used my practice to check in to what exactly was happening. I attuned to sensations and felt a stabbing in my abdomen, the same I’d been feeling for weeks. It was not pleasant, and it was familiar and tolerable. I acknowledged that if it got worse, I could call someone to help me relieve it. For that I gave thanks. I allowed myself to rest in a place of gratitude. This made space for me to continue feeling the sensations. I followed my breath in the belly; it eased the pain just a little. I rested in that moment. Turning back to the paper, I considered the woman in the picture again and sent a silent prayer for her ease.

Embodied awareness has helped me manage pain better. We can bring empathy to ourselves by meeting pain with embodied awareness, curious about the sensations. It’s not that we long for the pain to continue. We can aspire for a release from pain, but we bring kindness and compassion to whatever is happening. We accept what’s there, without contention. Kindness and curiosity, aspiration and acceptance—these are the keys to belonging.

Whether the pain is physical or emotional, we long for a release. In our attempt to get away from it, we limit our capacity to feel it, thinking that will protect us. Instead, it limits our capacity to feel at all.

We live in a culture that glorifies pleasure without even actually teaching us to feel it. Pleasure becomes a fetish and a status symbol, not an embodied experience. Those in society who experience more material ease and better fit the culture’s idea of a pleasurable life (i.e., having more stuff ) are deemed better off. But fame, money, and power do not necessarily make you free or joyful. If we were better able to feel the sensations of pleasure and pain, perhaps we would not be desperately grasping for the former and compulsively avoiding the latter, swinging between the emotions of happiness and sadness about the two.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains how emotions are made in her book aptly titled How Emotions Are Made. She distinguishes between three biological states (pleasant, unpleasant, and arousal). These are physical experiences. Our various interpretations of them constitute our range of emotions (liking, disliking, fear, sadness, happiness). Pleasant, unpleasant, and arousal are states felt somatically by all humans; however, there is no similar cross-cultural reality of emotions. What we in America deem “sadness” has no direct equivalent in Tahitian culture. In similar situations where we would feel sad, they feel something more akin to “the kind of fatigue you feel when you have the flu.” Barrett believes our emotions are culturally learned habits that we add onto the physical sensations of pleasant, unpleasant, or arousal. She states: “This is partly why mindfulness meditation is so useful to people who have chronic pain—it lets you separate out the physical discomfort from the distress.”

You know who else figured this out? The Buddha. One of the central practices in the teaching on mindfulness is around what’s called vedana. Often translated as “feeling tone,” it describes how every experience contains a quality of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Every sensation and thought, every moment in life can be categorized by one of these three qualities. We add emotion on top of these qualities. We tend to like the pleasant and dislike the unpleasant and ignore the neutral—and thereby watch Netflix rather than work on our book, press the red button for drugs we don’t necessarily need, or don’t notice the color of the sky at sunset.

The past few years I have met one of the most profound spiritual teachers of my life. It’s called menopause. When I was forty-five, after my third diagnosis and second time with stage-four cancer, I had my ovaries removed as part of my treatment. This thrust me into early and full-blown menopause. When they first started, my hot flashes were at their most intense. In New York City summer heat, I felt like I was set aflame from the inside (extremely unpleasant). I was also more irritable than usual, grumpy, and quick to be reactive. I assumed that this was an overall side effect of the hormonal changes—until one fall morning. I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. My mind was wandering here and there when I noticed some irritation surfacing. An annoyance I had about something my husband did popped into my mind. Having practiced for years with difficult thoughts and emotions, I immediately went to my body to sense into my experience. I brought attention to my belly and I noticed some very subtle tingling. Using embodied awareness, I kept my attention there. It was about thirty seconds later that I realized a hot flash was arising. This is when I made the connection. Is my irritation being caused by the initial feelings of the hot flash? I was getting irritated at the very first stirrings of the hot flash, before the heat. By the time the hot flash arrived, I was disgruntled. My husband’s actions were simply a habituated place for me to project the irritating sensations that my body felt but that my mind had not yet registered. I had become accustomed to being annoyed by my husband, something I may have learned in my family— I come from a long line of women who were (perhaps rightfully) annoyed by their husbands. That habit inclined me to be annoyed by him when in fact he was not even there, not even doing or not doing something annoying.

I recognized that my thoughts about menopause may have been affecting my experience of it. As my sex drive lessened and my body changed with the drop in hormones, I developed a similar “why me” bitterness that I had had in the early years of cancer. I was disgruntled about having to deal with this experience “before my time.” None of my peers were facing menopause yet. My husband would never have to contend with hot flashes. Older women are barely acknowledged in our culture. I could already feel how I was less acknowledged or appreciated in certain spaces, how I would soon become irrelevant. Those old feelings of not belonging were being stirred. Since then, whenever an annoyance, a difficult emotion, or an upsetting thought arises, I “treat it like a hot flash.” I recognize that there’s a chance a true hot flash will arise (happens more often than not) but that there is likely a physical experience of “unpleasant” that is happening somewhere in my body and I am projecting my emotions onto it. My emotions are a habit.

This doesn’t mean we have to dismiss all pain, physical or mental. I am simply inviting us to bring more embodied awareness to whatever is happening. It can be easy to go into an instinctual not-liking mode when it feels like someone just turned a furnace on full blast inside your body. I can try “fixing” my hot flash by immediately fanning myself or sticking ice cubes down my shirt (yes, I’ve done that). I could project onto an emotion or mental habit. But practice offers the possibility for a different response: it’s an opportunity to practice staying with an unpleasant experience, bringing curiosity and kindness. Instead of immediately pushing it away, I can notice what it really feels like. I can bring awareness to the sensation of heat.

With embodied awareness, every time I experience a hot flash, I drop any story and allow myself to simply feel the heat. When I did, you know what I noticed? Heat. That’s all. Heat is hot. I can even recognize that there are other times when I love being hot, like at the beach or in the sauna or when I take a hot bath . . . which I do almost every damn night. I enjoy those times of steaming hot heat. But I control those moments. I can’t control when I feel a hot flash and, ultimately, I don’t like change. There is another core teaching of Buddhism. That change or impermanence is a fundamental aspect of life. Every single thing in reality is changing all the time and we have no control over that. It’s said if we could truly understand this, even for a moment, we would achieve freedom and lasting happiness. But there’s a hitch: we don’t like change—not wrinkles, not down times, not loss, and certainly not death. Not menopause either. And now that I admit I cannot control or change my hot flashes, do I suddenly love them? No. It’s not like I wish them to arrive or celebrate every one of them. But I can develop a different relationship to them. I don’t smother them in my expectations or moods. I give them space, and me too. I allow myself to feel them, and this makes me a lot less miserable about them.

We long to live with more freedom, with joy, with love. This begins in the body. The teachings of mindfulness instruct us to first know what is happening as a felt sense and then to cultivate an attitude of curiosity and kindness toward it. I cannot control my hot flashes, and someone else cannot will away their chronic pain. But I can notice when I feel irritated or when I feel heat rising and meet it with openness and acceptance—that’s how we find ease. Sometimes it’s said like this: It’s not what’s happening that matters, it’s our relationship to it. In the beginning of our meditation practice, we may think we need to make something happen, but, in fact, by relating differently, we are practicing belonging.

♦

Adapted from You Belong: A Call for Connection © 2020 by Sebene Selassie. Reprinted with permission of HarperOne, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.

The post Belonging in the Body appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Even the most well-intentioned people often don’t know how to talk to the chronically ill. This is because we live in a culture that treats illness as unnatural. As a result, people have been conditioned to turn away in aversion from those who aren’t healthy, even though it’s a fate that will befall everyone at some point in his or her life. 

The consequences of taking this unrealistic view of the realities of the human condition is that many people feel uneasy and even fearful when they encounter people who are struggling with their health. I admit that this was true of me before I became chronically ill. Now I find it as natural to talk to people who are chronically ill as I do to people who are the pinnacle of health. 

I hope this list encourages people who know someone who is chronically ill to become more mindful of their speech. I also hope it will help those who are sick and those who are in pain feel less alone. I expect that those of you who are chronically ill will recognize many of the comments you’re about to read.

1. “You look fantastic!”

It’s a challenge to respond to comments such as “You look fantastic,” or the dreaded “But you don’t look sick,” because we know that the speaker is only trying to be nice. If we respond truthfully with “Well, I don’t feel fantastic” or “Thanks, but I feel awful,” the other person might be embarrassed or think we’re being ungrateful. I admit that I’ve never come up with a satisfactory response to this comment. I usually mumble “thanks” and try to change the subject.

2. “You just need to get out more often.”

One day, my husband and I were at an espresso place and a woman who knows I’m sick stopped and said to me, “You look so good!” My husband politely responded that actually, I was quite sick. When she then said to me, “You just need to get out more often,” I was at a loss for words. My husband told me afterward that he wanted to say to her, “You don’t heal a broken leg by going for a hike.” He held his tongue because he thought she might take it as an insult.

3. “Give me a call if there’s anything I can do.”

I’ve been on the receiving end of this well-intentioned comment many times. Not once has it resulted in my picking up the phone. The offer is too open-ended. It puts the ball in my court and I’m not going to hit it back, either because I’m too proud, too shy, too sick—or a combination of the three. I’m not going to call and say, “Can you come over and weed my garden?” But if someone were to call and offer to come over and do it, I’d gratefully say, “Yes!”

4. “I wish I could lie around all day and do nothing.”

A friend said this to me over the phone; it’s stuck in my mind all these years because it hurt terribly at the time. It may sound as if it couldn’t possibly have been well-intentioned and yet, given the tone of voice in which it was delivered, I’ve decided it was. I’m sure that my high-powered, overworked friend was genuinely thinking, “Lucky you to have so much leisure time.” 

When she said it, I was still so sensitive about being sick—including being worried that people might think I was a malingerer—that tears came to my eyes. I wanted to scream at her, “You have no idea how it feels to be stuck in bed and have no choice but to do nothing!” Instead, I mumbled something and made an excuse to get off the phone because I could feel the sobs coming—which they did as soon as I hung up.

5. “Disease is a message from your soul, telling you that something is wrong with your True Self.”

This is an excerpt from one of dozens of emails I’ve received from people trying to diagnose or cure me. I must admit that I have no idea what the sentence means. Are the soul and the True Self different entities, and the one that is okay is sending a message to the other one saying that something’s wrong with it? Bottom line: This is not helpful. And while we’re on the subject of “not helpful,” another person said she’d help me get my health back—free of charge—by showing me how to perform a “soul retrieval.” Sigh.

6. “My sister-in-law’s best friend had what you have and said she got better by drinking bottled water.”

Little did this speaker realize that it’s just as likely that my own sister-in-law’s best friend had what I have and told me that I could get better if I stopped drinking bottled water! It would be such a relief if people understood that, despite their best intentions, we’re unlikely to want advice on treatments—unless we ask for it, of course. Most of us have spent hours on the internet, researching possible treatments. We know what’s available, and we know what we’re considering. When people offer treatments, especially based on anecdotal evidence, it puts us in a position of having to defend our treatment decisions.

Another piece of treatment advice that many of us have heard multiple times: “Have you tried sleeping pills?” Sleeping pills? Who hasn’t tried sleeping pills? Even healthy people do. Sleeping pills may be helpful for some people, but they are not a cure for chronic illness. Regarding any comment that starts with the phrase “Have you tried…”: If it’s available by prescription or as a supplement or even as Chinese herb, the odds are very high that I know about it and that I’ve tried it!

7. “Do you meditate?”

Yes, I meditate—although, depending on our relationship, this may be an intrusive question. Meditation and other stress-reduction techniques can help with symptom relief and with the mental stress that often accompanies ongoing pain and illness. However, they are not a cure for a physically based chronic illness.

8. “Aren’t you worried that you’re getting out of shape from living such a sedentary lifestyle?”

Uh…yes. Thanks for reminding me.

9. “Just don’t think about it.”

This comment left me speechless…but still thinking about “it.”

10. “Are you eating enough fruits and vegetables?”

As many as this one body can hold!

11. “Have you googled your symptoms?”

Let me count the ways.

12. “At least you still have your sense of humor.”

Thanks. Truth be told, however, I’d rather be a humorless healthy person.

♦

© 2015 Toni Bernhard, How to Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications, Inc.

[This story was first published in 2015]

The post 12 Things You Should Never Say to Sick People appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Pain, by definition, kind of sucks. So unpleasant emotions like fear and anger often arise along with it, making for an especially demoralizing experience.

We usually try, then, to simply get rid of it. Being cured of pain is the outcome our culture teaches us to expect—we carry a sense of entitlement that life should be free from pain. But one of the worst parts of the pain syndrome—whether the discomfort is short-term, as in meditation, or long-term, with chronic pain—is that our physical pain and our urge to nullify it feed off one another in a most unfortunate loop, and our life comes to revolve around our discomfort.

It is essential to understand that both our pain and the suffering that arises from it are truly our path, our teacher, in that we can learn from them and experience our life more deeply as a result. Once we understand that pain is our path, we can begin to work with our pain and our suffering in a more conscious way. At the very least, we can consider our pain an opportunity to learn from our many attachments—especially our attachments to comfort, to body image, to control, and in the case of chronic pain, to our seemingly never-ending misery.

Related: 12 Things You Should Never Say to Sick People 

Yet practicing with our pain gradually frees us from these attachments. When pain arises, instead of immediately thinking, “How can I get rid of this?” we can say “Hello” to it, and ask, “What can I learn from this?” It’s not always easy to do this, but when possible, it turns the whole experience upside down.

Once we do remember to ask what we can learn, it’s essential that we notice the difference between pain itself and how we relate to it. Often we conflate the two as one confused whole. Pain is the physical experience of discomfort; how we relate to it, meanwhile, is mental and emotional. For example, in meditation, when we relate to knee or back pain with fear or self-pity, it exacerbates the uncomfortable physical sensation. If we relate to pain with an element of curiosity, however, the experience becomes much more tolerable.

That said, there may be times when nothing provides relief. In such cases, it’s healthy to intentionally distract ourselves from our bodies and minds. This might include activities we genuinely enjoy—like walking in nature or listening to music—since it’s so easy, when in pain, to forget about the things that bring us happiness. By diverting our attention in this way, we bring lovingkindness to ourselves and our situation.

Related: Pain Without Suffering 

Even though practicing with physical pain and its related emotional dis-ease can prove difficult, it’s most often worthwhile.

First off, in working with the emotions that we associate with physical pain, we need to recognize our judgments—especially insofar as we normally accept them, unquestioned, as the truth. This recognition allows us to see how our blind belief in thought solidifies our unpleasant physical experience of pain. One particularly pernicious tendency is catastrophizing, automatically anticipating the worst. If we get a pain in the belly that lasts for a few days, we may start believing we have cancer. To counter such thinking, we can deploy a simple phrase to remind ourselves that these imagined ailments are “not happening now.” Another pernicious tendency is selective filtering, whereby we ignore positive experiences and magnify negative ones. In the case of that same belly ache, we may focus all of our attention on how our pain bothers us, rather than how our eyes, ears, legs, and all the rest work fine.

Precisely recognizing our pain-related beliefs is the first step toward loosening their grip on us. Once we recognize these patterns we can begin to objectify them, labeling them or even writing them down. Labeling thoughts like, “I can’t take this,” “What’s going to happen to me?” or “Why me?” allows us to step outside of them. In the absence of labeling we may come to see ourselves as victims of our pain. With the objective awareness that comes with labeling, however, such thoughts eventually appear as just thoughts—nothing more. We begin to realize that they may not even be true.

In addition to working with the beliefs and reactions that arise from our pain, we need to learn how to work with the experience of pain itself. One effective way of doing so is to focus directly on the specific pain sensations. We bring awareness to wherever we experience tightness or pushing away, thereby softening into these painful areas. Then we gradually feel the texture of the pain—the aching, the stabbing, the burning, or whatever painful quality might be present. When we do this with the curiosity of a scientist, it paradoxically allows us to experience the pain, at least some of the time, as no more than a strong sensation.

As we allow ourselves to stay with the pain, we may notice that it doesn’t remain the same. Indeed, the sensations often change rapidly and sometimes even disappear altogether. This realization takes us out of the catastrophic mindset that imagines our pain will always be horrible or unbearable.

While staying with uncomfortable sensations is one way of working with pain, another effective way is to bring attention to the breath. Normally when we’re in pain, the unpleasant sensations fill up our entire awareness. But when we include the breath, some of our attention rests on the rhythm of our inhalation and exhalation, which places the pain in a larger container of awareness.

We can even use the breath to help heal the pain, breathing the physical sensations in and out as though giving a gentle massage. This is especially helpful with long-term or chronic pain, like the periods of nausea I’ve dealt with for over 20 years as a symptom of an immune system disorder. When the nausea gets intense, I curl up into fetal position in bed, breathing into the center of the chest on the in-breath and extending lovingkindness to my immune system via the out-breath. I don’t intend to make the nausea go away, but to relate to it in a more friendly way. When I subsequently perceive the nausea not as pain but as physical energy, I’m struck by a sense of quiet joy, in which it becomes clear that I am more than just this body.

Focusing on the breath in order to bring about a more open awareness is a very popular practice; but, the truth is, such expansive attention to our myriad sensory and environmental stimuli is a rare occurrence. It results from conscious cultivation, with a continuous, soft effort to grow attention beyond our physical symptoms of pain. In this sense the pain actually pushes us to achieve that which we’ve aspired to all along: an awake and present mind.

When practicing with our pain, we also develop compassion for others who may be suffering from similar discomfort. One thing I do during bouts of strong physical pain is picture people I know who are also in pain, and then imagine the countless others who are in pain in that very moment. On the in-breath I breathe the images of those in pain into the center of the chest and on the out-breath I extend the wish for healing to myself and others. In this way, our personal pain connects us with the pain of others, the pain of the world. This can deepen our sense of compassion, and the wish that the suffering of others be healed. It will also diminish the sense of isolation we often feel when in pain.

Inevitably, there will be times when we feel overwhelmed while dealing with physical discomfort—when the experience of powerlessness wraps itself tightly around our small sense of self. One practice that many have found helpful when feeling overwhelmed is to bring awareness to the center of the chest, breathing as if you were breathing the dark feelings directly into the chest center. With each breath you breathe the feelings in a little deeper. Then with a long, slow exhale you just exhale, not trying to change or let go of anything, but rather simply feeling what’s there. What actually happens during this process of breathing into the chest center is a mystery, but you can see for yourself how this practice allows us to gracefully endure what would otherwise feel unbearable. In surrendering to our deepest fears, we put ourselves in touch with the fundamental awareness of just being—the true ground that is always available to us.

Even if we don’t have intense pain, it is well worth working with small aches so we don’t get blindsided by more severe pains down the road. In any case, let’s try to remember that while we may never prefer to have pain, it can nevertheless push us in ways we would not otherwise push ourselves—into a deeper and ultimately more appreciative experience of what it is to be genuinely alive.

[This story was first published in 2015]

The post More than This Body appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I broke my hand last year. I knew immediately it was broken by the exquisite, searing pain. I have experienced my fair share of pain, from kidney stones in rural India to joint pains from 40-plus years of long distance running, but never a fracture. So when the edge of my hand hit the corner of the wall as I catapulted forward off the last step down the hallway in my house, I knew by the rapid elimination of my many previous causes of pain that this was fracture pain. An integral, internal bedrock structure had snapped like so many trees after a strong storm.

I knew I had broken a bone but went into a state of denial, waiting two-and-a-half days before seeking medical treatment. (And I am a physician.) The X-ray provided clear, irrefutable truths: a clean, nondisplaced fracture of my nondominant hand. I was given a custom-made thermoplastic ulnar gutter splint, velcroed in place, to be worn at all times except while showering. Apparently showering is a sacrosanct time when no harm can befall you.

Related: More Than This Body 

A gutter splint refers to the edge of your palm, to the hand bone between the pinkie and the wrist that looks like a little gutter. Looking at it, I was reminded of another one: the Meridian Gutter, the acupuncture point located on the inner surface of the forearm, slightly above where the wrist creases. This point, when used properly, has the ability to clean out and carry away debris from the body, mind, and spirit, just as the gutters on a house or on the street carry away rubbish. Inspired, I asked myself what obstacles were blocking my path now and what obstructions were blinding me to new insights.

How I fell was perfectly choreographed by myself: I was walking downstairs in a hurry, carrying books in both hands and bending down to pick something up in mid-step. What was I thinking? Am I Nureyev? Of course I was going to trip. I was doing what I always caution my patients not to do. “Be present in the moment,” I tell them. “When you walk, just walk.”

I am clearly not alone in dealing with the subtle perils of modern life. The back room of the hand physical therapy department of the hospital was like a military rehab unit for those of us returning from the front lines of a skirmish with the 21st century. We recognized a kinship, comrades in arms, as we set about to heal from our injuries caused by our contemporary lifestyle: carpal tunnel, Blackberry thumb, repetitive stress, and perhaps most dangerous of all, inattentiveness. My fall was a harsh reminder that multitasking only allows me to do multiple things less well.

Related: 12 Things You Should Never Say to Sick People 

So here I am, at the eve of a one-week planned vacation with my hand in a splint, all my plans and projects suspended. Life can be a hard taskmaster. But it can and does go on—even with just one hand.

Unfortunately, I am far more comfortable and familiar with doing than with not doing. Action, using my both hands, is what I think I do best. And resting, contemplation, meditation: they all require not doing. My insightful wife, keenly aware of my growing restlessness, encouraged me to explore the sound of one hand, a reference to the koan by Hakuin, an 18th century Zen monk. This koan, “Listen to the sound of the single hand,” implores us to contemplate the unity of stillness and action. With my one hand in a splint, my other hand is free to function without opposition. It has nothing to push up against—nothing but the void.

This new space, brought to me by my overdoing and inattentiveness, gave me the freedom to explore my fear of not doing. What am I afraid of by being unopposed? Do I need conflict to assert my being? Can I let go of my past reflections and my future projects? This was the gift set before me: not a quick resolution but an immersion in the present process.

What is the sound of the wind when it silently moves through leaves, or the sound of the sunlight as it illuminates the world? What is the sound of one hand healing? It is, as I came to hear it, the sound of myself. It is my true self, a merging of my ceaseless and seemingly all-important physical activities with a quiet contemplative presence, bringing activity into stillness and stillness into activity with only a single hand.

[This story was first published in 2014] 

The post The Sound of One Hand Healing appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We sat in chairs. It was evening. The room had carpet. I probably wore a wool sweater, because it was my first winter in England and I was a senior in college and I had just discovered wool. All of us, about a half dozen students, sat in padded chairs, except one boy who was so perfectly perched on a zafu that I immediately decided he was pretentious and would never reach enlightenment in any religion.

The teacher, a Scottish man in his fifties, had an open face, the kind of carita that made me think of books I had loved once and mountain ranges I had seen as a child in Colombia. He talked about sitting and noticing the breath, and I tried to focus on what he was saying rather than the lilting sound to his words because it was my first time receiving sitting instructions and I wanted an A even if it was not a formal class. In the silence, I noticed my in-breaths and how silent the room was (had a room ever been so still?) and also how much I hated the boy on the zafu (was he even breathing?). And then it was over. We asked a few questions. The teacher wished us well, and we moved toward our shoes. I thanked the teacher, and out of habit I stuck out my right hand. He took it in both of his and cradled it, while saying something about Buddhism or Cambridge University or perhaps the United States; I didn’t hear him. Instead, I noticed his hands, the indents of the palms, the fingers soft as eyelashes.

In the cold, I rushed on the cobblestone streets to my room at the international house, where I sat at the narrow wooden desk and opened my olive green journal and wrote quickly about hands and how no one had ever held my hand like that before. The phrase “spiritual crush” did not occur to me then, and even now I resist it. Even now, I insist that when he held my hand, I felt palms for the first time and fingertips and wrists and that it all had to do with it being my first experience of sitting.

Of course, that night in England, I had no idea that a few years later I would be forced to notice my hands for hours at a time. That a man from Russia would hold my hands and so would a Jewish New Yorker and a Chinese man in Oakland, too. They would lift my right hand to the glare of lamps in medical offices and the backroom of herbalist stores. They would squeeze and tap, murmur questions and send me home with instructions, because by then my hands had stopped being a gathering of skin and tendons, fingertips and spiritual desires. My hands were nothing but traitors.

When I started sitting no one talked to me about what Buddhists call attachment to views. At least not in those words, and that was helpful. It would have been too easy to shrug off the idea of having views. Who has views? I have ideas perhaps, and opinions, yes, but who uses the word “views”? The direction I received instead was to “drop the story.” Now, that made sense. Everyone has a story, a cuento—a lot of them, really—and what would happen if I just noticed mine? And watched the stories shift and move and I just stayed on the cushion?

It’s hard now to believe what I did back then in the early 2000s. I sat at home and sometimes at the local Shambhala center, and I practiced dropping the stories I had about my father who drank too much and about the men I worked with and all their gender and race privileges. All the while, I ignored my right hand, which felt cramped, and my wrist that was suspended over my thigh but felt as though it were stuck inside a hot stove.

Related: Pain Without Suffering  

I did not think then of my body as a story or consider that I had stories about the body. I was 26 years old. Illness was a cuento, yes, but it was a story for later in life. Much later. Besides, the cramping in my right hand was temporary. I was at the end of a two-year graduate program in journalism and Latin American studies, and at the end of a book project on feminism and race. I had just overdone it. The physical therapist at NYU’s student health center had said so. Everyone had carpal tunnel by then. I was no different. He recommended a hand brace, and I trudged to CVS for what turned out to be a stiff glove the color of eggshells.

Four years later, I couldn’t type. The grocery bag had to be packed lightly. Heavy doors terrorized me and so did pens and keyboards. By then, I had moved to California, where one doctor had me face the closed door of the exam room. She tapped my back a few times. “You don’t meet enough of the criteria for fibromyalgia,” she concluded. A surgeon in San Francisco offered to slice my right arm open and move a nerve. Then he dropped my right hand, peered at my right shoulder clenched close to my ear and said, “You’re pretty stressed. You need to relax.” Later, I googled the procedure he was recommending and the post-op pictures popped up on the screen: arm after arm swollen with a red scar that began above the elbow and ended three or five inches above the wrist.

At some point during those years, I heard the teaching about the two arrows. An arrow hits you and there’s pain. The second arrow is the story we tell ourselves about the first arrow. I’m a loser. This always happens to me. Why me? I heard the teaching, thought it brilliant, and then I put it away for a day when I might find it useful. After all, I was in agony. When the Buddha talked about the two arrows, he was clearly referring to the pain of heartbreak or lost fortunes. He was not thinking about a woman who had just turned 30 and had constant pain and no diagnosis.

The thing about illness is that in addition to its being a series of impermanent and heightened sensations, it is a story that contains many stories. This is the only way that I can explain why I wore a wrist brace for as long as I did. I was around 30 years old. No one could tell I was in pain. People expected me to give up my seat on the public bus for the elderly and for pregnant women, and friends thought I could help to carry heavy totebags. The common cuento about illness is that it is a condition made visible, the body undone. Think of bones punching at skin, eyes so large that the face stops mattering. The only way I could make my body meet the requirements of that narrative was to wear a wrist brace. It was a cuento, too. It said: Look, I have a story you can’t see. The brace did nothing for the actual physical pain. In fact, at times, it gave my already aching right hand the feeling that it was stuck in a bowl of dried clay.

Being sick means trafficking in stories—yours and the doctors’ and everyone else’s. I don’t say this to berate us. As David Loy writes in his enchanting book The World Is Made of Stories: “To see stories as the problem is to blame the victim. Instead of getting rid of stories one can liberate them: storying more flexibly, according to the situation. Shunyata, “emptiness,” is a heuristic device to free us from wherever we are stuck.”

The last physical therapist I saw did not believe in being stuck. She instructed me on stretches and monitored the movements of my right arm and then my left. She tracked my progress on the computer. She recommended I marry and have children. After about six weeks, she said she couldn’t see me again. “There’s been no progress. I can’t do anything else for you.”

That night, I sat on the futon in my apartment and considered how my hands and my arms and maybe my entire upper body would eventually make it impossible to hug people. I began to wonder where euthanasia was a legal practice.

Related: 12 Things You Should Never Say to Sick People

My apartment had a partial view of Lake Merritt in Oakland and of the Our Lady of Lourdes Church. At night, the lake looked like a pool of ink, the bell tower a fat pen floating in the sky. I must have been delusional enough that I thought the despair was going to kill me, because when I woke up the next day and noticed the lake and the church—all of it still there under a bright sun and some “me” still there along with it—I felt surprised. And relieved. I called a friend who had survived cancer in her twenties. She said, “It’s like you’re not happy to be alive, but you’re happy to be not-dead.”

I sat on the futon in my apartment and considered how my hands and my arms and maybe my entire upper body would eventually make it impossible to hug people. I began to wonder where euthanasia was a legal practice.

During the worst time of my chronic pain, I discovered that my HMO had a department called “behavioral” something, which I figured was where all the sick people ended up when the doctors and physical therapists got tired of them. That’s how I met Kathie.

She had large glasses and tight curly hair, and she was a cross between a nurse, a therapist, and a caseworker. I liked that ambiguity. She wanted me in her class on managing anxiety and in another one for people with chronic pain and a third on mindfulness-something-or-other. “I don’t like the people in the chronic pain class,” I whined in her office. “They’re old.” The people were in their sixties and seventies and appropriately sick in my opinion and maybe mostly lonely and adrift in a culture that doesn’t know what to do with people as they age. I expected Kathie to engage with me in a philosophical discussion. Instead, she said point-blank, “You’re with people going through the same experience.” In other words, suck it up and sit on the cushion. In her class on managing anxiety, we sat in a circle, about 15 of us, in silence for a few minutes every week, our eyes closed, counting our breaths. It had been more than a decade since I had sat in England with the Scottish teacher. I had yet to attend a silent retreat, but nevertheless I felt quite smug about my progress as a meditator, though I wouldn’t have been able to explain what that progress was exactly. And then the aching began in my right hand as if a professional wrestler were squeezing the tendons. I fought back tears.

During the interactive lecture, Kathie stood at the front of the class next to a giant easel pad that had circles and arrows showing how beliefs connected to thoughts and to lived experiences—a sort of diagram of the second noble truth. I pointed out to Kathie that my anxiety was legit. No offense to the others in our class, but the pain in my hand was not just me, say, thinking that maybe the plane might crash and so maybe I shouldn’t get on it. I had actual pain.

“But what are you telling yourself about the pain?” Kathie asked.

“Nothing. I’m just in pain.”

“You’re in pain. So what? What happens next?”

I peered at my right hand, the little traitor, as if it might talk to me, but I knew the story. I just hadn’t said it out loud before. “I eventually lose my job, and . . . I end up under the freeway with a woman named Conchita eating cat food.”

“What if you let the story go?” Kathie asked. “And stay with the sensations in your hand?”

“I’ll try,” I said weakly, and while the rest of the class went on with that week’s topic, I looked down at my right hand again and began saying to myself, “Throbbing.” I repeated the word silently, feeling like an idiot and wincing, and then I noticed that the sensation shifted to heat and while many of the lines on my palm did not connect, the palm itself began to pool that heat.

I would go on to practice like that for another year or two before the pain began to recede, flaring every few months, then every few years, and each time I would shift my attention from the stories (again? when will this be over?) back to the sensations. Sometimes now I’m tempted to invoke the Heart Sutra and say: No fingers, no palms, no wrists, no arms, no pain. But that would be another story. I’m finding it more beneficial these days to take guidance from a story that Joseph Goldstein shares in his book The Experience of Insight. He writes about an elephant that would often be walking down the road as he and his fellow meditators, in India, were going to town. “When we saw the elephant coming down the road we did not just stand there saying ‘seeing, seeing,’ we moved out of the way. Use the thought process when appropriate.”

The chronic pain flared recently, and I lay in bed, noticing the craving for stories and the beginning of stories and also the cramping in my right arm. Then I moved, making the necessary appointment with a massage therapist and bringing out the old heating pad. It was only much later that I noticed the tiny plastic elephant sitting on my desk, a purchase I had made months before picking up Goldstein’s book. The elephant has a black-tipped tail and a raised trunk, and it spends its days next to a colorful muñeca called a worry doll, which fits in the palm of my right hand.

The post A Second Arrow Story appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I started going to pain clinics for spinal injections and physical therapy after I was diagnosed with spinal osteoarthritis six years ago. I was given the advice to keep a pain journal to record my symptoms, and for a while I did. And it was so depressing that I started referring to my journal as Fuck This Shit.

I, who had been a brick house, was, in my 40s, crumbling to bits. 

It certainly passes the time for the chronically ill to keep a log of symptoms, but is it healing? I have my doubts. When you have a chronic disease, you know there’s going to be a Greek chorus of tragedies big and small and symptoms that pop up like Whack-A-Moles. The question is: What do you do about it?

Related: 12 Things You Should Never Say to Sick People 

I was deep into the stages of grief when my pain clinic recommended How To Be Sick by Toni Bernhard, a book that approaches illness from a Buddhist perspective. But I didn’t want to learn how to be sick, I wanted to be cured. I resisted the urge to tear it into little pieces and light it on fire in the kitchen sink. 

I opened the book randomly like my sister and I used to spin our grandparents’ globe, letting fate decide where the person we’d marry would be from or where we’d live (Malaysia! Tierra del Fuego!), to reveal this, from Japanese poet Juken:

One, seven, three, five—
Nothing to rely on in this or any world;
Nighttime falls and the water is filled with moonlight.
Here in the Dragon’s jaws:
Many exquisite jewels.

Damn, Juku, you said it.

What had I expected? How naive was I? Where was it written that I’d be well? My mother had chronic pain and anxiety; my grandfather on my mother’s side had chronic pain; and my great-aunt on my mother’s side had chronic pain and anxiety, which, back then in the 60s, they called Hysteria. Chronic pain runs in my family like being able to tell a good joke runs in my husband’s. 

I thought I would be immune from suffering, though I had watched my mother go through sequential mastectomies for breast cancer, and then struggle with her own chronic pain for over 30 years, starting when I was just six years old and my sister three.

I thought I had earned a Get Out Of Jail Free card. I was so angry.

Related: More than This Body

I had “the full catastrophe,” as mindfulness meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn says, quoting Zorba the Greek. I was middle aged, estrogen plummeting, with two children, a husband, and on-campus housing at an elite private boarding school outside of Baltimore, where my husband moved us from the walkable, European city of Boston so he could teach high school biology. 

Shortly after I met my new rheumatologist (bad breath, arrogant; he told me I had “the spine of a 70 year old”), I went out for a walk on one of the school’s many cross-country trails. It was something to do. I despaired. I tripped over the tree roots on the trail—how many times would the word “degenerative” be applied to me? I wandered so far off the trail. I got lost.

I found myself by a little stream, its banks crowded with yellow flowers that I thought were buttercups but have since learned are swamp marigold. I thought, I’ll just lie here. The September light looked dazed.

The sweet little faces of the flowers gazed up at me, all yellow. My favorite color—the color of the third chakra, Manipura, the “resplendent gem,” governor of warrior energy. But what did the flowers know of chakras?

I picked some, and found my way home. Then I returned again the next day with my grandfather’s Field Guide To The Trees And Shrubs of Eastern North America. If I was going to be the kind of person who wandered around outside the main, sick and a little wild, I might as well learn something about the wilderness. 

So walking and observing became a habit, and the best therapy for suffering I ever stumbled across. I had a thirst for it. I started checking books of haiku out of the library and reading nature writing to find a persimmon, a cherry blossom distilled.

The famous haiku poet Basho offered the advice, “If you describe a green willow in the spring rain it will be excellent, but haiku needs more homely images, such as a crow picking snails in a rice paddy.” Boy, did I have some snails. They were my thoughts, my demons.

I gave names to them. Despair was a repetitive overweight Eeyore. Hopelessness smelled like stale Chewels—the gum with the gushy center that was popular in the 80s, and that my sister and I chewed while waiting outside hospital rooms for news of our mother. False Hope whispered in my ear, suggesting that I ought to try giving up gluten, going Paleo, or taking up Bikram yoga, all of which I did. 

I walked in the woods to get away from my world in which I was the centroid. The Main Attraction under the Big Top. I walked to feel, as Thoreau put it in “On Walking,” “part and parcel of Nature,” a thread in the weave of life; just as I did as an 8-year-old kid, summers spent on my grandparent’s farm, watching intently the water flow beneath the dock by the boathouse. When my father came to tell me it was time for dinner, I had to think, What’s dinner? 

The biologic and geologic cycles that were so much larger than my own comforted me. It comforted me to know that in the vast universe, I was completely insignificant. Or rather, I was as significant as any tadpole. 

It opened possibility in my predicament, chronic pain, which is the predicament of so many that there is even humor, classic Zen humor, that takes it as its subject. In Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki uses the frog to illustrate our pretentions. Suzuki says, “If we are like a frog we are always ourselves.” Why was it so damn hard to be like a frog? A frog cared less and that was its intelligence and glory. It knew its exact place in the world. It already had “abandoned hope,” as Pema Chodron suggests. It didn’t get caught up in the absurdity of thinking there was any duality between health and sickness, life and death, pain and no pain.

On one of my walks, I felt this—a direct hit beyond intellect right to my solar plexus, and I tripped on a stick and fell down a small hill and lay at the bottom of it in the clover. My first thought was: We’re all going to die. 

It struck me as so funny. Like a voiceover in a schmaltzy women’s channel show. I burst out laughing. 

I called my Mom, burbling with mirth. “Hi Mom, it’s me. You know what I realized? We’re all going to die.” My mom started laughing too. “I know!” she said, “Haha!”

It’s uncharacteristic of me to laugh. But my funny bone had been located. Death. Fucktardness. Knee-slapping. Hilarious! 

I was laughing so hard I scared a great blue heron out of the marsh grasses. “Graaawk!” it said, getting the joke, deep calling unto deep, its genome linked to mine. I was reminded of the story of the Chinese monk Shui-lao who is reported to have said: “Ever since the master kicked me in the chest I have been unable to stop laughing.” 

I came home, scratched Fuck This Shit off the cover of my journal, and wrote in a new name: Nu. Which is a Yiddish expression, a shoulder shrug, meaning, So?  

[This story was first published in 2013]

The post Swamp Marigold appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.