Pain Archives - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

A Gateway to Freedom

Vidyamala Burch — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 10:00:05 +0000

This article was originally published in Tricycle’s Winter 2022 Issue. To learn more about Vidyamala Burch’s offerings, enroll in her upcoming course, “Freeing the Mind When the Body Hurts.”

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.

A Gateway to Freedom

Vidyamala Burch — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 04:00:17 +0000

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Practicing on the Edge

Joseph Goldstein — Mon, 30 May 2022 10:00:49 +0000

Each month, Tricycle features articles from the Inquiring Mind archive. Inquiring Mind, a Buddhist journal that was in print from 1984 to 2015, has a growing number of articles from its back issues available at www.inquiringmind.com (help Inquiring Mind complete its archive by donating here). Today’s selection from the Spring 2003 issue, Fear and Fearlessness, was adapted from a talk by Joseph Goldstein.

When I imagine the mind of the Buddha, I think of a mind without boundaries, a mind without limits and therefore without fear. I see our own path to awakening in this light. On our journey of opening, we come to the boundaries of what is familiar or what is comfortable. It’s precisely at these boundaries that the deeply conditioned pattern of fear begins to emerge. We find ourselves being afraid of what in any particular moment is the truth of that moment. We need to learn how to work with this fear. Otherwise, our lives become fragmented; we split off from parts of ourselves, from parts of what is true in experience.

In our meditation, when we reach the boundary where fear begins to arise, we can slowly train ourselves to relax and open. Through this practice, we develop a great strength and equanimity of mind. The first step is learning to see what it is that we’re afraid of. In this way, we come to recognize it clearly, to see what limits us and then to explore the possibilities of going beyond those limits.

The most obvious experience where fear may arise—and the one we can work with the most simply—is of physical pain. We’ve been very conditioned in our lives to avoid unpleasant sensations. We can see how this manifests in meditation practice; if we’re not really mindful, we automatically shift our position simply to alleviate discomfort. There’s a teaching in Buddhism that says: “Movement masks suffering.” Usually, we think we move because we really want something. But it’s interesting to see it from the other side, that we’re often moving simply to avoid dealing with what’s present. It’s an instructive exercise to watch throughout the day, to investigate why we move. Seeing this begins to change our relationship to pain.

To work skillfully with pain and discomfort, and to slowly decondition the response of fear, we need to recognize different kinds of pain. First, there is pain as a danger signal. We put our hand in fire; it hurts; we take it out. The Dalai Lama calls this response “wholesome fear,” which is really another word for wisdom.

We also can experience pain when we feel accumulated tensions or old traumas stored in the body. Often, in meditation, it’s the discomfort of that untangling that we’re feeling. Understanding discomfort as an unwinding can create a sense of interest and a certain quality of ease.

There are also stages in our practice, stages of insight, where unpleasant sensation is just what’s characteristic of that stage. It’s very useful to know this, because our common interpretation is that pleasant is good and painful is bad. A painful sitting may well be a deeper place of practice than a comfortable one.

So the first area where we can see fear arising is with physical pain. We come to the edge, the boundary, of what is acceptable, and right there is the place to practice. It also can be helpful to turn our attention to the knowing of the pain, to the awareness itself. We might think of awareness as an open window; everything that’s known is simply appearances, things arising in the openness of the window. But the openness of the window is not affected by anything that appears in it. To the degree that we are recognizing, or abiding in, the openness, we stay in a place of equanimity.

We also come to our boundary of comfort with certain memories or images which arise in the mind. They may come as memories of specific things that happened in our past. Or they may be archetypal images of cruelty, of rage. If we’re not mindful just in the moment when these images arise, they may be the cause of great fear.

When my teacher Munindra first came to this country, he asked me to rent him videos of violent movies, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He kept saying, “Show me the worst!” He was showing me that no matter how frightening, it was really just an image, just a movie. It’s exactly the same for whatever is arising in our minds. When we remember that, we can see through the images that come up so we don’t get caught in fear.

There’s a Zen story of a monk who lived in a cave in the mountains. He spent years making a painting of a tiger on the wall of the cave. It was so realistic that when he finally finished it and looked at it, he got frightened. We do that a lot. We paint pictures in our minds, look at them, and get frightened. When we see this happening, it may be useful to note, “Painted tiger.” We don’t need to buy into the fear.

Fear also may arise when we are not accepting of difficult and painful emotions, such as unworthiness, jealousy, abandonment, rage or hatred. Fear and non-acceptance of emotions leads to insecurity and fragmentation within us. It’s as if some part of us is split off. Through the inner pressure not to feel these emotions, not to acknowledge them, we construct a self-image that we then present to the world. We start looking to others for validation because we have not opened to and accepted the full range of what’s within us.

It’s essential in our practice that we open to these emotions in just the same way we learned to open to physical pain. This does not mean searching for great emotional catharsis. But when such painful feelings do arise, we need to see that they are often bringing us to the boundary of what we’re comfortable with. That’s exactly the place we want to be, a place of further acceptance and opening.

The great power of meditation practice in this realm is that we slowly begin to see the empty, transparent, insubstantial nature even of powerful emotions. Whenever intense emotions such as rage or unworthiness arise, we might try to see them all as kids dressed up in Halloween costumes—ghosts and pirates and witches. When trick-or-treaters come to our doors, usually we’re not frightened. We could see all of the emotions that are arising in the mind in the same way—just little kids in costumes.

Just as with physical pain, certain images or powerful emotions, we also come to an edge in our deepening experience of change or loss. The Buddha would often say, “Whatever has the nature to arise will also pass away.” (In truly hearing this, the listener would often become awakened.) Although the truth of this is obvious, we don’t usually plumb the depth of what it means. Decay and falling apart—impermanence—is inherent in all conditioned, constructed things. It’s not that something goes wrong or that something’s a mistake. Change is the nature of every single aspect of our experience. Not opening to the truth of change and impermanence often becomes a fear of death. As a way of freeing our minds from this fear, the Buddha recommended that we reflect on the inevitability of death every day.

There’s a teaching story of somebody jumping out of an airplane. The first reaction to the freefall is tremendous enthusiasm and exhilaration. But when the jumper realizes that she doesn’t have a parachute, there’s tremendous fear. Then, at a certain point, she realizes there’s no ground; so she relaxes and enjoys the ride. We go through similar stages in our meditation as we see the truth of change; we move from exhilaration, to fear, to a place of equanimity and ease where we understand the empty nature of it all.

Here are a few last thoughts on ways to work with fear. First, we need to recognize it when it appears. It can be helpful to note, “Fear, fear, fear,” watching that the tone of voice is friendly. This noting is a shorthand for that quality of mind which is open and accepting. Relating to fear itself with the quality of lovingkindness and of interest in what’s happening gives us the courage to be with things just as they are.

In our meditation practice, we might experiment with playing at the edge of our comfort zone. Maybe it means sitting a little longer; maybe it means what Goenka-ji, one of my teachers, called “vow hours.” We might take some period of time in a sitting when we make a determination not to move. This may bring us right to the edge of what we’re willing to be with, and at that edge fear may arise. In this way, we learn how to relax, to accept that “It’s okay; let me feel it.” Of course, we need the wisdom and courage to know when the suffering or the pain is too much. We may need to back off from it until we again find some balance.

The Dalai Lama, with his usual wisdom, has given some simple advice on working with fear: “If you have some fear of pain or suffering, you should examine whether you can do anything about it. If you can, there is no need to worry. If you cannot, then there’s also no need to worry.”

⧫

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

The post Practicing on the Edge appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Burning Among Stars in the Night

David Edwards — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 15:44:31 +0000

I traveled with my dad—‘H’, as we called him—in the back seat of the car. It was the same route we’d driven a million times: to Tesco, to drop me off at the station, to drop me off at the airport, to drive up the M25 to my sister’s at Christmas. It was a suitably cold, drizzly afternoon, our destination emptied of people by rain and virus.

Our tiny group trudged through the rain to a large oak tree, the designated spot. The whole place appeared to have been designed by computer. I took the plastic lid off the long cardboard tube, which was both disturbingly heavy and disturbingly light. I broke the paper seal and there was ‘H’—as fine as flour, as white as rice—and I poured him in pluming, wind-blown arcs across the grass. There was a stiff breeze and I had to take care to avoid him being blown back over my new trainers.

Out of everything connected to my dad’s death, this was the most grotesque—that we found ourselves acting and speaking as though living, breathing, vibrant, chuckling, grumpy, boozy, Sudoku-filling, paper industry prodigy ‘H’ had become lifeless white ash sinking in semi-circular lines into cold wet grass on a gray September day.

Believing in Father Christmas is one thing, but to believe that a person is a pile of ash who somehow continues in that form! And yet we actually said things like, “He’ll be happy here under this oak tree,” and, “Would you like to go and visit ‘H’ under his tree?”

Family and friends seem to find nothing controversial in the frequently expressed hope, “May he rest in peace.” Yet it implies doubt about the outcome—the suggestion, clearly, is that our loved one might not “rest in peace.” The implication: they might become “a restless spirit”—a ghost, no less; perhaps a zombie! In our age of (selective) political correctness, no one finds this offensive.

Similarly, many of us seem to feel obligated to say, “He passed.” Where to, “the other side?” We’re back among the ghosts! When a soap bubble bursts, did it “pass,” or did it cease to exist? Or we say, “He passed away,” to persuade ourselves that he is not dead at all, not even “resting,” but has embarked on a mysterious journey, like Bilbo Baggins of Bag End. It doesn’t help to be confronted by these delusions of mass pathology and denial at a time when the mind is already reeling.

On the other hand, it did help to know that my dad would have perceived the whole ash-scattering event as risible. I remember him saying something like:

“I don’t give a hoot what you do with me when I’m gone, I won’t be there!”

Indeed, even without the virus, it would have been difficult to have any kind of church “service” knowing that the person being honored would have considered every aspect of the process a meaningless (and expensive!) farce exploiting minds less rational than his own. After the cremation, we had played a selection of his favorite songs and had a drink. Did it “honor the dead” to play, “It’s Not Unusual,” by fellow Welshman Tom Jones?

That night, looking up at the ceiling in the pitch black of the room where he had died, I didn’t “honor” my dad, because I don’t really know what that means, or why it’s relevant, in reference to the death of a loved one. I did find myself reflecting on Ernest Hemingway’s version of honor and heroism, of “grace under pressure”— an old fisherman battling sharks to save his prize catch; a civil war volunteer fighting a suicidal rear-guard action to save his comrades. It seemed to me that real heroism is much more mundane.

Real heroism is trundling to and from Tesco every day, for years, in a little red car to do the shopping when you were once a shooting executive star. It’s falling and cutting yourself horribly because your 87-year-old skin is so thin, and just getting up and carrying on. It’s carrying the empty bottles and rubbish down a flight of stone steps day after day because it has to be done, even though you’ve fallen many times in the house and falling down the steps would be fatal. It’s losing every last one of your friends, until you are the longest-surviving member of your local club, and the village is empty of familiar faces, and just carrying on. Heroism is sitting on a sofa, day after day, watching daytime TV, because there’s not much else you can do, when you don’t believe there’s much point to anything anyway because you’re an atheist, and just carrying on.

‘There Is Darkness and Nothing Else’?

After my dad died, three related phenomena were clearly evident: a storm of thoughts in my head, a searing pool of emotional pain in my heart, and a witnessing consciousness observing both.

Here’s a storm-chasing snapshot of my mind the night after he died. Without himself becoming infected, my dad had been stuck in a COVID-ridden hospital for the last four weeks of his life, unable to see any of us:

‘“I better go, Davy; I’ve got two scoops of ice cream waiting to be devoured. Bye!” My god, those were the last words he ever said to me! How on Earth can he have died within 24 hours of being let out of hospital? Why did they let him go, if he was so ill? They said his heart was at 25 percent capacity, his kidneys the same or worse. He had no idea if he was even on steroids or not. How will we take care of mum during the lockdown? She’ll be alone in the house having lost her partner of 65 years. Sixty-five years! And now she’s alone at the age of 85! How must that feel?! How can we get medical help to her without her getting COVID? She almost fell over this morning because she hadn’t slept. Are we going to lose both of them in the same month? “Please, you can just pick me up and take me home—I’ve been stuck here for weeks; I can’t take it any more. Just take me home.” He must have been suffering horribly to say something like that. “But there’s no care package, if you just leave, Dad; you’ll be on your own.” We should have just taken him out, we shouldn’t have just left him there. How is it possible he could just die within 24 hours of being sent home? Will I end up being poured in white plumes across the crematorium grass? Who am I kidding? Of course I will! How will we take care of mum now? “I’ve got two scoops of ice cream waiting to be devoured.” Mum’s alone for the first time in 65 years! He said to her: “Try to remember the good times.” How could he die the day after coming home?…’.

And so on. This painful, endlessly cycling thought-storm was waiting for me in the treacherous wee small hours of the night. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote so beautifully:

Day’s pain, muffled by its own glare

burns among stars in the night.

— The Complete Poetical Works of Rabindranath Tagore

And this burning emotional pain was the second phenomenon: intense sadness, anxiety, and anguish in the center of my chest. This pain was, of course, provoked by thoughts. But the pain, in turn, fuelled more thoughts.

Surging thoughts, pain, and then a mysterious third phenomenon: my awareness, my consciousness, watching both.

Indian spiritual teacher Osho told a wonderful story of an epiphany on the theme of this witnessing consciousness:

‘One of the great philosophers of the West, C.E.M. Joad, was dying, and a friend, who was a disciple of [mystic] George Gurdjieff, had come to see him. Joad asked the friend:

‘“What do you go on doing with this strange fellow, George Gurdjieff? Why are you wasting your time? And not only you… I have heard that many people are wasting their time.”

‘The friend laughed. He said:

‘“It is strange that those few people who are with Gurdjieff think that the whole world is wasting its time, and you are thinking that we are wasting our time.”

‘Joad said: “I don’t have much longer to live; otherwise I would have come and compared.”

‘The friend said:

‘“Even if you have only a few seconds more to live, it can be done here, now.”

‘Joad agreed.

‘The man said:

‘“You close your eyes and just look inside, and then open your eyes and tell me what you find.”

‘Joad closed his eyes, opened his eyes and said:

‘“There is darkness and nothing else.”

‘The friend laughed and he said:

‘“It is not a time [for me] to laugh, because you are almost dying, but I have come at the right time. You said that you saw only darkness inside?”

‘Joad said: “Of course.”

‘And the man said:

‘“You are such a great philosopher; you have written such beautiful books. Can’t you see the point, that there are two things—you and the darkness? Otherwise, who saw the darkness? Darkness cannot see itself—that much is certain—and darkness cannot report that there is only darkness.”

‘Joad gave it consideration and he said:

‘“My God, perhaps the people who are with Gurdjieff are not wasting their time. This is true, I have seen the darkness.”’ (Osho, The Razor’s Edge, e-book, 1987)

It is true! There is the darkness—the storm of thoughts driven by intense emotional pain in the chest—but there is also a witnessing presence observing the darkness. The darkness is not observing itself. The darkness and that which is aware of the darkness are not the same.

When this witnessing awareness focused on the thoughts in my head, they proliferated and the emotional pain in my chest increased. By contrast, when the witness focused on the emotional pain, something very different happened. At first, the pain actually seemed to increase, because I was facing it directly for the first time. But as I continued to divert attention away from the thoughts to the pain, as I delved into the pain as deeply as possible—feeling the sadness, the anguish—my thoughts were deprived of the energy imparted by attention and started to subside. As the thinking subsided, so did the thought-driven pain in my chest. The more I focused on the painful feelings, the less energy was available to maintain both thoughts and pain.

Even this slight improvement was a relief, an encouragement. I continued to focus on the pain, which lessened even more. Thoughts continued to pop into my head, of course, but they now had less emotional pain to feed off and so couldn’t reinforce that pain so easily.

Eventually, it reached a point where I was enjoying watching, feeling the pain; I didn’t want to stop. In fact, I was no longer sure if it really was pain now. What was it, then: pleasure? In the immediate aftermath of my dad’s death? It seemed almost indecent!

The darkness and that which is aware of the darkness are not the same.

As the pain continued to reduce and thoughts lessened, a moment came when I was so focused on feeling that a tiny gap appeared in the chain of thoughts. Through that gap, a minute but intense point of bliss sparked in my chest. It was a blazing, ecstatic spark of love and delight.

I focused attention on this tiny spark, which dissolved, spread, and deepened, so that it formed a shimmering pool of bliss and love across my chest and upper back. It wasn’t that I felt love for anyone in particular. Rather, love was there and I felt love for whichever person popped into my thoughts, or for whatever object popped into my sense perceptions.

The burning anguish had now completely disappeared. I felt ecstatic delight, happiness, peace—I was overflowing with a loving warmth. This loving bliss—why not call it loving bliss rather than the tautological “loving kindness,” as if we’re reluctant to admit we feel bliss?—stayed with me for the rest of the day. In reference to this experience, I made this short entry in my journal four days after my dad had died:

‘Bliss in the afternoon meditation.’

This is an example of one tiny moment of nonattachment and it was the result of passive observation, not an act of will.

Attachment and the pain of attachment are ultimately made up of thoughts—when we stop focusing on thoughts and start focusing on perceptions, sensations, and emotions, the thoughts subside. When a tiny gap eventually appears in the chain of thought, an internal source of love and bliss ordinarily obscured by the cloud of thought is able to blaze through this gap in the clouds.

This doesn’t mean giving up parental or filial love to diminish attachment, and it doesn’t mean mollifying sadness by ascribing emotions to a pile of ash; it means an outpouring of love that flows to children and parents, and in fact, to everyone and everything.

Other attachments then begin to fall away. Ambition for sensual pleasures, attention, applause, fame, and gain starts to lessen because we know their pursuit generates vast clouds of thought that painfully obscure our inner bliss. When we have tasted this authentic delight even once, our priority instantly becomes that of refining and deepening the art of self-observation.

Unspoken Secrets

I’ve written about my experience, not because I think it is in any way exceptional—millions of people have been experiencing this and far more profound results from meditation for many thousands of years. I’m sharing it because it has radical implications for our whole approach to suffering and happiness.

Like so many of us, I grew up in a culture that persuaded me to believe that my emotions were too much for me to handle. Powerful forces in our society encourage us to view anxiety, craving, sadness, and grief as illnesses that require therapeutic and pharmacological intervention. That may indeed sometimes be true in the case of severe depression, for example. But there is a deep problem here.

In his important book, Undoctored – Why Health Care Has Failed You And How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Own Doctor, US cardiologist Dr. William Davis blows a loud whistle on modern health provision:

The unspoken secret is that providers prefer treatment over prevention, expensive over inexpensive, patent-protectable over non-patent protectable, billable procedure over non-billable procedure, BMW over Toyota Prius. . . Healthcare is a business, a big business (the biggest business of all in the United States), a business that continually seeks to grow its revenues and profits.

— William Davis, Undoctored (Rodale, 2017)

The logic of this will be familiar to anyone who has been following Media Lens over the last 20 years, and it surely rings true for anyone who has interacted with Western health care.

The damning conclusion from this courageous insider reads:

In other words, neglect the cause, profit from the treatment. It is the unspoken but defining mantra of modern health care. Health is not part of the equation.

This helps explain why so many of us have been persuaded to believe that we can’t cope with our emotions, perceived as overwhelming, unmanageable. Our militarized culture even uses the term “panic attack” to suggest we are being assaulted by some vicious enemy.

But these are our emotions; they are part of us. They contain crucial information, deep wisdom about the wrong paths we are taking. Very often, they are psycho-physical dissidents challenging the follies and ambitions of our ego, utterly detached as it is from the reality of our bodies and the rest of the natural world. The head is full of hot air, dreams; the body and its emotions are rooted in reality. Feelings are far more honest, a portal to truth.

There is a terrible price to pay for medicating, silencing, and numbing our emotional dissent. The whole lesson of so many mystics over millennia is that the art of living involves precisely overcoming our head-trapped numbness, in becoming acutely sensitive to the cryptic messages of our feelings, no matter how painful. The more closely we listen, the more deeply we understand. Not just great but entirely unimagined treasures may then pour into our life and world.

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A Practice for Breathing Through Pain

Radhule Weininger — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 11:00:17 +0000

Personal hang-ups and over-reactions can occasionally throw us for a loop and even sabotage important relationships and projects. They often escape a person’s understanding and control and force them to endure their problems, leaving them increasingly insecure. I have come to call these constellations LRPPs (pronounced: lurps), or Long-standing, Recurrent, Painful Patterns of hurt. A person’s early experiences, especially the painful ones, predispose them to a heightened sensitivity to certain problems and to reacting to those problems in self-defeating ways. Being insecure and self-preoccupied in this way keeps people from fulfilling their purpose and from applying themselves meaningfully. Psychotherapy, as well as mindfulness, compassion, and awareness meditation practices, have helped me during the last four decades to find a measure of peace and freedom.

I found that working with painful patterns is especially necessary in these times, as many of our old painful patterns are getting triggered by the difficult circumstances in our country and in our world. Uncertainty, trauma, danger, and divisiveness are regularly unearthing our own woundedness and fears.

Over the years I have learned that when I bring steady compassionate awareness, understanding, and choice to such recurring, painful challenges, these obstacles can become opportunities. My own LRPPs have been a doorway to a new kind of wisdom, to an opening of the heart. By looking at our own old wounds, identifying them, and being with them compassionately, we can all find healing and contribute to our world in a meaningful way. The following practice allows us to do just that so our experience can transform, and doors can open in creative and life-giving ways.

***

There are three parts to the following Breathing Through Pain Meditation. In the first step, we carefully attend to and relax into our breath. Then we become one with the sensation of breath. By doing so, we connect not only to breath but also to the interconnected flow of life itself. It is important to ground ourselves in this first stage of “being breath” while allowing breath to be part of the field and flow around us.

In the second step, we bring attention to the center of our chest. We notice what is happening in our heart and feel whatever pain is found there right now. We notice how our body is holding that pain and how we experience it. We notice our feelings, attend to those feelings, and feel our feelings, being fully present.

In the third step, we return and expand our awareness of the sensation of breath. We let the pain in our heart be as it is and allow ourselves to immerse totally into the sensation of breath. While sensing breath, we feel ourselves being carried along by the effortless flow of our body’s breathing. We pay more and more attention to breath flowing through. Then we come to attend gently to the pain in our heart. Finally, our attention returns to the sensation of breath as part of flow.

Throughout this practice, we let go of trying to “fix” ourselves or our pain. Instead, we let the breath of life flow through the pain. In this way, we gain a wider, wiser perspective. We abandon an ego-motivated position, which itself comes out of isolation. When ego governs our relationship with the world and our LRPPs, our emphasis is on strengthening, aggrandizing, and justifying our separate sense of self. What is “I, me, or mine” is most important: the “I” who did or did not do something, the “me” who got snubbed by someone, or the “mine” that was taken away or denied. When we are in pain, we also tend to retract, contract, cut off, curl up in a ball, and separate ourselves from others. Pain that is trapped in isolation like that typically perpetuates itself. When we are stuck ruminating on our hurt feelings, that only makes things worse, like a snake biting its own tail. Pain in isolation is the very definition of suffering. When we practice the Breathing Through Pain Meditation, our pain is still there, but our suffering is less. With this practice, we connect to a wider perspective. We feel our feelings as we surrender into the web of life. Having grounded ourselves in interconnectedness, we experience the flow of life energy. We expand our awareness, letting our heart rest in its natural state.

Breathing Through Pain Meditation

Let your awareness descend into your body, right down to the ground, right down to the earth.

With a quiet, attentive mind, simply be present within your body as you allow your awareness to fill the whole space of your body right up to the top of your head.

Now allow your awareness to drop deeper into the sensations of breath, allowing your awareness to become one with the sensations of the breath stream. Allow yourself to be carried in the flow of the breath stream: breath stream flowing in with the in-breath, breath stream flowing through with the out-breath. Allow your awareness to be carried in this effortless flow, like a particle awakened in the stream.

As the breath stream continues to flow through, bring your attention to the center of your chest to the area of your heart.

Allow your awareness to drop down into this area. Notice how you are feeling in your heart right now, and notice whatever pain is in your heart. There may be a tightness, an ache, a sense of spaciousness, or numbness. Stay with the felt sense of this experience.

For just a few moments, allow yourself to merge with your suffering . . .

If you find yourself getting carried away by thoughts, by the narrative of what this is all about, relax, release, and return to the sensation of body and breath.

Now, while being with that experience, bring your attention back to the effortless flow of breath, the effortless flow of the breath stream. Back to the breath stream that flows in with the in-breath and flows through with the out-breath.

Now, open the cave of your heart to the breath stream.

With the exhale, allow the breath stream to wash through and around your heart, carrying in its flow the pain or whatever is there.

All you have to do is to let go to the breath stream, let go to the washing through of the breath stream that is carrying all life in its effortless flow.

There is so much to do that you don’t have to do. You don’t have to move the clouds in the sky, you don’t have to make the rivers move, or the honeybees find their favorite pollen flowers.

All you have to do is to allow a sense of flow to happen.

The choice is yours: you can hold on tight, or you can let go; you can release your pain, or the energy of your pain, to the breath stream, to the always effortless flowing through of the breath stream.

Let go to the breath stream that is flowing in and flowing through, carrying all into the deeper stream, for the sake of all beings, into the deeper stream.

Slowly repeat the following to yourself: “May all beings be happy, may all beings be safe, may all beings be free, and may I become what I need to become to allow this to happen.”

♦

Visit Shambhala Publications for a free audio version of this practice and more.

Excerpted from Heart Medicine: How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom—at Last by Radhule Weininger. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

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Mute the Commentary

Charlotte Joko Beck — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 10:00:47 +0000

Lift your arm straight out in front of you. Make it just as tight as you can. Contract every muscle. Now, let go of all the tension you can, without letting the arm fall. Let go of everything but the functional tension your arm needs to stay up. Take three slow breaths, inhaling and exhaling. Then let it come down. Pause for a moment and try the other side.

Now, contract your face. Close your eyes and make your face as tight as can be. Imagine you’re worried, upset, or angry. Now, without altering the basic outlines of your face, begin to feel the same way you did when you relaxed your arm. Keep your face the same (scrunched up), but let all the extraneous tension out. Notice when you let it all go. Can you hear the sounds outside more clearly? Can you take in more?

It’s very rare for our body to hold only the tension it needs to keep functioning. See if you can observe your body during the day. If you have a minute between tasks, take a look and see what tension you’re holding. Most of the time, we’re doing what we’re doing, and we’ve added tension. It may be almost imperceptible or it may be very, very noticeable.

Of course, we need to have enough tension to do whatever we’re doing. If we’re holding a cup of coffee, there has to be some tension to hold the cup up, or the coffee will spill. If you’re sitting up, you need some functional tension or you fall over. But the only time the body is really freed from that kind of tension is when you’re flat on your back.

Life is a very simple matter. We’re just doing what we’re doing. But we add extra tension all the time. If you stop and feel your face, you’ll notice it’s usually a little bit tight. We don’t need that tension. We have a face; we don’t need to have an extra face. A Rinzai Zen master once said, “Add no head above your own.”

We’re hardly ever operating with just the functional level of tension. Even if you don’t know what your automatic habits are, you probably know how they feel. Our unconscious habits and reactions make us rigid. Our bodies get tight. We may even get sick.

Functioning is what Zen practice is all about. Our practice is to function according to the demands of life, not according to our personal agenda for what we think life should be: “I want this.” “I’m nervous about this.” “Maybe that meeting won’t go right.” “Maybe they won’t like me.” Every time you have a thought like that, tension builds up in your body. A thought—poof! Tension—up, up, up. Nobody who is human is entirely free of it. But, as the need for life to be a certain way eventually leaves us, the tension slowly releases, and we are more and more free. The more our practice matures, the more the body is free of anything but functional tension. It has taken me decades for my body to be naturally relaxed most of the time.

Get back to the body. The thoughts are repetitive; they just go round and round and round. You aren’t going to lose a thing if you just let them be for a moment. They’ll all be back.

Our difficulties are so important in our life. They remind us to pay attention. When something hits our life hard, it goes through our body like a jolt. We feel some discomfort. Our true experience is in there, but it’s mixed up with our opinions, judgments, and worries concerning how it should be.

Someone who was new to sitting practice once complained to me, “This practice is not making me feel good.” If you need something to make you feel good, practice is not much help. But if we just experience the pain, without thinking and overthinking, the pain transforms. Nothing stays painful forever. Not at all. And when we experience the pain and the challenges fully, they don’t stay as long. They lessen. Because so much of our pain is in trying not to feel it.

When we experience that pain without thinking, judging, or hiding, then it begins to slowly fade. It changes. If you get your mind out of the way, the pain can start to dissolve. It opens up, and finally it just disappears. It’s a different way of living. It takes a lot of daily sitting to keep the courage available to do this kind of work. The discipline, the bravery, and the consistency of sitting regularly builds our ability to experience our true lives.

Get back to the body. The thoughts are repetitive; they just go round and round and round. You aren’t going to lose a thing if you just let them be for a moment.

How do you stay with the pain? You stay with it as long as you can, and inevitably, you’ll drift off. You might stay with the pain for two or five seconds at first, and then you’ll drift—because you want to drift. But when you do it and keep sitting every day, the ability to stay with it increases, and sometimes, all of a sudden, you’ll find you’re staying with it for ten or thirty seconds. When you get up to thirty seconds, it’s a different world. And it’s not a matter of virtue whether you stay with it or not. It isn’t good or bad. We do the best we can; that’s all we can ever do. Nothing we do is wasted if we’re aware of it.

Nobody likes anguish. But the idea that there’s some other way across the bridge from unreality to reality besides going across it is really an illusion. Americans are good at unreality. Our whole culture is based on trying to alter our reality. It hurts—well, go buy a new dress. It hurts—get a new partner. It hurts—take a pill. We have dozens and dozens of ways to cover that hurt. And, because we live in a society that has so much stuff, in general, those ways are much more available to us than to people in earlier or less affluent societies.

Even for practitioners, usually when we’re feeling some hurt, the mind is going, “It’s so bad. I’m suffering so hard. It shouldn’t be like this for me. And oh, yes, I’m experiencing it.” That’s not experiencing—that’s thinking. When we label our thoughts and go back to the body, we are actually splitting off our thinking so we see it’s just thinking. When we do that, we’re able to see the difference between thinking and sensation. If somebody hurts my feelings, my body gets rigid. My face gets tight. If I just stay there, I may be able to notice the difference between my thoughts and my sensations—and this is the path that alleviates anguish.

I use the word anguish because that’s how most people think of it when they are completely caught up in their thinking-based resistance to reality. In the way I use that word, experiencing cannot involve anguish because there’s no thinking. And that’s a very important difference. They’re always mixing their sensations up with their thinking about the other person, about what happened, about what’s wrong. That’s the drama. If you don’t sit every day, you’re really not doing yourself any favors. Sitting is what builds that ability.

Sitting can be very stark and plain some days. I have that thought, and I have that thought and that thought and that thought. I just return again and again to whatever is going on. You just do it and do it and do it. There’s an inward shift, a maturing that takes place that enables us, when something really does happen in our lives, to do this kind of practice. For the person who doesn’t practice regularly, you think you’re dealing with anguish. But you’re not. You’re dealing with thoughts plus body sensations.

Look at the thoughts first, and then just stay with the body sensations. Then you can’t use the word anguish. If I poked my hand, it would be painful. It’s only when I add commentary—”Oh, isn’t this awful? You know this shouldn’t be happening to me.”—that the sensation turns to anguish. Otherwise, it just is what it is. I still take care of it. I still ease the pain. But I’m not in anguish.

♦

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Living with Bears

Phoebe Myers — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 10:00:31 +0000

Bears swish when they walk. Their legs are chubby, with thick fur rubbing smoothly as they amble along. I didn’t know bears made this particular sound until one happened upon me at a meditation retreat as I sat on a bench atop a mountain knoll in North Carolina. My memory of this encounter is based almost entirely on sound alone. I saw the bear for only a moment when I turned my head at the noise, expecting to see a fellow retreat attendee emerging from the woods to join me. Instead I saw her (I am not sure, but I think of the bear as her), head heavy, sunlight flowing down the soft slope of her forehead to the bridge of her nose as she bowed towards the earth.

***

Earlier that morning I lay with my back against the wood of the meditation hall, eyes closed as our instructor Cindy led us through a visualization meditation. She’s a spritely, slight woman, with a cheerful Southern accent and a ready smile. Cindy began in a familiar manner. We were discussing compassion that day, and I expected Cindy to follow the natural course of a metta, or lovingkindness, meditation.

“Bring to mind someone you care deeply for,” she said.

I imagined my mother.

“As we follow this person, pay close attention to how you feel physically in your body,” she continued.

I looked forward to that warm feeling metta provides—the comfort in sending good thoughts towards others.

“Now, imagine you see this person surrounded by fire. Hot flames all around a hell realm, if you will.”

Not quite the comforting visualization I was expecting.

“Imagine they are burning and there’s nothing you can do,” she continued as I struggled to imagine my mother in hell, a concept foreign to me, having been raised in an agnostic household.

“This person who you care so much about is now in an ice realm. They are freezing to death…”

Jesus!, I thought.

The rounds of the visualization continued in this way, without relief. Hell realm, ice realm, my mom going blind and wandering close to a steep cliff-edge. Behind me I heard a woman begin to sob. Distracted, I wondered why I did not have tears as well. I love my mother, so why couldn’t I feel much while envisioning these horrible situations?

Cindy’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Now, imagine this person in the human realm. But they are weak, diseased, and dying. You must watch them suffer and know there is nothing you can do to help them.”

My mother has joked before that when she gets old, too old to stand or to be trusted on her own, that my sister and I just have to park her wheelchair in the woods and she’ll be happy the whole day long. Watching rabbits jump over one another, ruby-throated hummingbirds suspended in the air, feeling a warm breeze on her papery palms. Though I was meant to imagine her struggling, this peaceful scene came to mind instead. It’s what she wanted, what would happen. I felt calm. The woman behind me shook quietly.

***

Since childhood I have looked for bears on those rare occasions when I was in a place where they actually exist, and during the retreat, as I was in bear country, thoughts of these primal, shaggy creatures had crossed my mind several times already. So perhaps it was not a true premonition when I walked up to the bench on the grassy knoll that afternoon and thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to see a bear? I almost felt like, at 22 years of age, I should have seen one already. Memories of missed chances floated across my consciousness as I walked: hoisting a cloth bag of beef jerky and oats high into a tree in the Sierras while backpacking; gazing out the car window on annual trips to Maryland when I was a girl, searching between flashes of pine for a stubby snout. On the first day of the retreat the staff had gone over the local natural hazards, black widow spiders and cottonmouths and black bears. They advised us to write down where we were headed and at what time on a white sheet of paper pinned to the communal cork board, and before heading out I almost didn’t put my name down. The map indicated the knoll was only a 15 minute walk—what could happen? I unlaced my hiking boots outside the sala and went in at the last minute to scribble my name on the list.

I had thought about seeing a bear the same way anyone thinks of seeing something dangerous and awesome—abstractly, almost as fantasy. In my imagination I would perhaps be up on the crest of a snowy hill, peering down to a creek or river and see a bear approach the flowing water and bend down for a drink. Or maybe I would be on a wooded trail like ones I walked so often in Ohio, and spot a bear far down the path in front of me, both of us staring at one another for a moment before darting off. I tried to remember what I had read about what to do in a grizzly bear or black bear encounter—for which species did you back away, make yourself bigger, or curl into a ball? The only bear tip I was certain of was to make noise as you walk, but it would seem overly precautious for me to follow that rule on this silent retreat, as I walked past the quiet wooden cabins of the dharma community.

A clearing on the hill opened as I left the woods, like a painting being created all at once. The grass spread wide, the sky unpeeled overhead. In the center of the knoll a bench overlooked far away mountains that rippled, slate-blue, as if freshly risen from the Earth’s core. I sat almost giddy in the silence and hot sun. I was there for some time before I heard the footsteps approaching behind me, quite close. I turned with a smile, expecting a fellow retreatant, and then I was standing and I couldn’t tell you what emotion my face was showing. For a split second I thought the bear was a dog. It was less than ten feet away and walking through the tall grass straight towards me.

“No, no, no!” I heard myself saying, almost as if I was mistaken. It couldn’t be.

Without thinking I grabbed my backpack from the bench and ran across the field, diagonally opposite the bear, in a dash to get off the knoll and back to the trail. I glanced over my shoulder in pure prayer that I wouldn’t see her chasing me, and I saw in a moment that she had also run from me in the other direction, both of us rustling into the woods at the same time. My entire body felt like stone as I shakily sought to calm my breathing, without success. I remembered the tip to make noise to avoid startling bears, and though I knew it was a little too late for that I started to sing, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember a single song. I assigned a small melody to a strange yodel that popped into my head, too afraid, apparently, to recall lyrics. A “Yodel-lay-hoo-hoo!” emerged awkwardly as I hurried down the path and back to the retreat grounds. On the way I saw another retreatant heading up the path and broke the silence to warn her about the bear up ahead, and to my embarrassment I found it a struggle to hold back tears while issuing my warning.

For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, I could not calm down. Even at the evening meditation I had to fight the urge to open my eyes and turn around. In my mind, she was still behind me. As I lay in my small bed at the end of the day, I noticed my shoulders and back ached from being clenched. I closed the cloth curtain to my room, finally finding the privacy to cry. I didn’t want anyone to see a reaction that I barely understood myself. I was ashamed. Black bears aren’t even particularly dangerous, and I was safe, so why did I still feel afraid hours later? All the times I had thought about seeing bears seemed to mock me. I had always envisioned myself feeling gracious, awe-inspired, invigorated by a bear sighting. I had never felt fear in my fantasies.

***

This retreat was new for me, a yoga retreat connecting movement and poses (asanas) to the Four Immeasurables, a Buddhist conceptual framework I knew nothing about before signing up. Cindy, our trusty guide, described the Four Immeasurables as boundless qualities that exist without end both within us and in the world around us. These qualities are equanimity, joy, love, and compassion.

At first, I doubted these qualities related in any real sense to yoga, which I had practiced mainly as a form of exercise. The connection became clear, however, as the days passed. Cindy led us to notice how it specifically felt, physically, to embody the Immeasurables through meditation and movement. Was there a similar buoyancy in your chest after a meditation on joy as when you arched your low-back in a crescent lunge? Did the same constriction in your throat you experienced during an unpleasant visualization also appear when you became frustrated by failing to force your body to fit an idealized yoga shape?

During the brief session at the end of the day for discussion and dharma talks, several of my fellow retreatants recalled how painful the visualizations of suffering had been. How, they asked, was envisioning loved ones in the hell realm or the ice realm connected to compassion?

In response Cindy referred us to the slips of paper she had handed out that listed the Four Immeasurables in a table form, with categories for “close” and “far” enemies of each Immeasurable. Compassion’s far enemy, which I interpreted as its opposite, was listed as “fear.” Cindy described how the far enemies of the Immeasurables act as blockages that prevent the flow of the immeasurable quality from being felt.

Cindy, perched before all of us on our cushions peering at her with eager eyes, explained that the fear blocking compassion could take many forms. You could fear that a person you love who is suffering could come to depend on you for care, or you might fear the attachment awakened in you by watching someone suffer—but generally, the fear comes from identifying yourself in their pain. Imagining yourself in their situation, fearing pain, prevents you from empathizing fully with the other person and feeling true compassion. The point of meditating on painful visualizations, Cindy explained, is to observe what the fear of suffering feels like in the body.

I realized that all of what I was unable to feel during our meditations came pouring out of me after my encounter with the bear. Because of her, I recognized how much I fear suffering, and the possibility of suffering. Perhaps it was natural for me to shut my negative feelings off during the meditation. Who wants those sensations in their body? But my avoidance prevented me from reckoning with even the hypothetical possibility of my mother’s suffering. What would happen when direct physical suffering afflicted my mother? Would I be prepared?

***

This past Thanksgiving, months after the bear sighting, I stood on the front porch of my aunt Jenny’s house, my parents and I saying our goodbyes after dinner. My grandpa Mickey was leaving as well, escorted by my uncle Todd who lived just one house over. Frail but still chipper, even in his 90s, Mickey leaned onto Todd’s bent elbow as they slowly approached the stairs before pausing.

“Chris, help him down,” my aunt told my dad.

My dad tried to go to Mickey’s other side, but Jenny, whose career has been devoted to elderly care, stopped him.

“No, no, you have to go behind him and hold his belt up.”

As the words left her lips, I saw that what she meant related both to Mickey’s center of gravity and his dignity. Leaning tremblingly over the top stair onto my uncle’s arm, Mickey’s pants had sunk down a few inches, exposing the naked flesh of the top part of his rear end. I looked to my dad and saw, if only for a moment, something that resembled fear flash across his face before he stepped forward and looped his fingers through Mickey’s back belt-loop and the three of them carefully descended the stairs.

As my parents and I walked to the car, I felt ashamed that I had felt ashamed. My first instinct had not been compassion, but rather a recoiling, a burning embarrassment at what I perceived as pathetic. Though we didn’t discuss it, I wondered if my father had been embarrassed as well before stepping in to hoist up the pants. My dad does not work with the elderly as his sister does, and he will sometimes express relief that his more knowledgeable siblings live close to Mickey. My dad will admit he does not feel prepared to care for an aging man.

I understood that my reaction on the porch stairs served a clear but obstructive purpose—my embarrassment masked my fear. My fear that eventually the elderly man would be my father, and I will be the one expected to not feel shame, but to step up and help him, even, or especially, in situations that our culture construes as demeaning. My fear that I wouldn’t know what to do, or how to help him. And the fear that eventually, I may be the one relying on someone else to lift my pants up and help me down the stairs.

I rarely imagined seeing my parents age, and when called to do so, I clung to the fantasy my mother gave me, of her happily parked in a wheelchair in the woods, reading a good book. With luck, maybe it will all be just like that. But now I remember the bear. Our encounter on the knoll was not at all what I had for years imagined. The reality was terrifying, my response confusing.

Perhaps we can’t really be prepared for suffering, but we can approach fear of the suffering in a different way. Fear, with its shoulders of stone and pounding heart, deserves to be met with kindness. And, with kindness, it might yet show us a path toward unending love and compassion should we choose to look for it. There’s an awe in living with bears, an awe of sunlight cascading down the soft slope of her forehead and the bridge of her nose as this creature of such power bows, humbled, to the earth.

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Belonging in the Body

Sebene Selassie — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 04:00:15 +0000

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.

Practice offers the possibility of staying with an unpleasant experience, bringing curiosity and kindness.

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.

♦

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

Forever Connected

Sharon Salzberg — Sat, 02 May 2020 04:00:04 +0000

Once we’ve awakened to an issue or cause and we take action, how do we sustain our response over time?

Trauma, disappointment, and exhaustion saturate our emotional lives, our identities, and our beliefs. Not long ago, May Krukiel was a faculty member at the Garrison Institute wellness program in New York, as was I. She pointed out how we might carry and communicate these effects bodily—in our posture, our facial expressions, and our overall body sense. During a program that offered tools of meditation and yoga to domestic violence shelter workers, May led an exercise to explore that somatic phenomenon, which she adapted from a workbook called Transforming the Pain: A Workbook on Vicarious Traumatization, published in 1996.

In this exercise, people worked in pairs. As May read a script aloud, person A and later person B sculpted their bodies into a posture or position that best expressed their response to the reading. May’s script detailed a typical day for people who work at shelters. With a few adaptations, it could easily apply to other stressful and demanding environments.

May read:

The phone rings. It is the district supervisor, saying the budget you submitted has not been approved. You have to find more places to cut, without disrupting essential services. Your assistant suddenly seems depressed and isn’t communicative. Your office mate has become belligerent and is too communicative. A crisis has erupted between two residents who are frustrated, stressed, and nearly hopeless. And on a personal note, your health insurance company, having assured you they had all the paperwork they needed to process your claim, writes to tell you they don’t have all the paperwork. The doctor’s office says they sent it. The company says it never received it. What more can you do?

And on it went.

Participants listened to the vignette, took a moment to settle into their feelings, and then used their bodies to convey their reactions: posture, facial expressions, eyes . . . a full-body response. Once they found the right manifestation of the reaction, they were asked to freeze for a moment or two and allow themselves to really feel their pose.

Time and again, I looked out over a room of people curled over, trying to push away what they were hearing and feeling with arms spread, muscles rigid, and eyes squeezed shut or holding themselves as though they could ward off the pain and keep from fragmenting . . . not breathing and not ready to hear one more thing. It was so honest. So powerful. So sad. I couldn’t help but think, What if we were all walking around this way, as literal representations of how we are hurting or simply so very tired within? A symbolic exercise maybe, but also very real.

As the exercise of working with vicarious trauma continued, the person who had not molded themselves to the mood brought up by the script would look at their knotted-up partner and gently begin to unwind them. Clenched fists were invited to open. Hands that blocked seeing or hearing would instead start signaling an embrace. Between these gentle urgings and self-guided movement, you could see people uncoiling out of that fetal position and standing in a form that was empowered, calm, and whole. Their posture conveyed balance, harmony, groundedness, and dignity.

The newly unfurled person was then asked to form a body memory of this new, open posture and to consider using it in the future whenever strength and hope were needed.

We look at our habitual reactions to pain and consider whether they still serve us well, even if they once did. If those reactions are rejecting, denying, or trying to not feel anything so as to soldier through, I’d suggest acting them out in this kind of body sculpture to see if that’s the posture you want to maintain in your life. Then, unfurl, open, feel the greater balance in your stance, honor your body’s innate knowledge of how to wobble in coming to balance if that’s what happens. Breathe deep. Remember resilience just demands we respond in this moment for this moment. It’s not the same as a longterm self-improvement plan. Open to what is. Let go of those add-ons we’re conditioned to pile on: don’t be afraid of what you are feeling. One way or another, we need to process the tension, either as a torturous experience or something we can open up to.

As Joel Daniels, a storyteller and activist, said about being present with pain, “It comes down to my trying to come back to my body. Am I sitting up straight? How am I breathing? Am I breathing shallowly? The more I’ve done this, the easier it has become to catch myself when I’ve gone off. No one is always present.”

You can take a small step toward a different relationship to what is by reaching out to someone or allowing someone to reach out to you. Create—with words or images or food or the way you pay attention to strangers or a new way of relating to your body or those you work with and for. Listen. Take one small step toward the unknown, toward acting without depending on an immediate result, thereby relying on a different sense of meaning. “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well,” Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident, writer, and statesman, said, “but the certainty that it is worth doing no matter how it turns out.”

Some things just hurt. And no matter what, we are not alone. Take one small step to allow whatever helping hands are coming toward you to reach you or to extend a helping hand to someone else in some way.

As the Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “So you must not be frightened . . . if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.”

When I’m in some kind of pain, I’ve found that this can be one of the worst components of what I experience . . . feeling that I’m all alone, my nose pressed up against the window looking into the space where everyone else has gathered, to enjoy a moment or comfort one another, to be a part of life. I’m somehow excluded, unaccounted for, and no one even notices I’m outside. It’s the worst and most habitual add-on I use.

I’ve been experiencing this since my childhood, when the habit of feeling different and excluded got acculturated, and working with it since college, when in my Asian philosophy class that habitual reaction was challenged upon hearing the Buddha’s statement “There is suffering in life.” The subtext was “It’s not just you. You’re not weird and different and totally cast aside. You’re just hurting.”

And I’ve come to see, even in the worst circumstances, that life has not forgotten me, it has not forgotten us. No matter how despairing or cut off we can feel at any given time, we are not actually severed from the essential flow of life or from one another. If we get quiet for a while and pay careful attention, this is what we realize.

♦

Excerpted from Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World by Sharon Salzberg © Sept. 1, 2020. Reprinted with permission of Flatiron Books.

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Loving Pain

Bodhipaksa — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 11:00:49 +0000

It may seem utterly counterintuitive to turn toward pain. Our evolved instincts are to avoid or to flee it. Yet mindfully accepting our painful feelings is an essential prerequisite to supporting ourselves with kindness and compassion. Accepting our pain means being willing to be present with it, not pushing it away or reacting to it.

When we observe painful feelings, we needn’t do so in a way that’s cold and clinical. We can work against our inherent tendency to resist painful feelings by encouraging ourselves to remain open to them. We can approach these feelings in a spirit that’s warm, supportive, and loving. In practicing self-compassion, we recognize that there is a part of us that is suffering, and give it our support and our love.

We can be curious about emotional pain as we might be curious with any other sensation in the body—we can look to see what a particular feeling is like and notice exactly where in the body it takes place. We can observe what size it is, what volume of physical space it occupies, or what texture it has. (Perhaps it will feel heavy or dark. Some people observe a color associated with the feeling, although if this doesn’t happen naturally then don’t strive to make it happen; just be present with whatever is arising. Perhaps there may be a sense of tension or pressure or movement associated with it. Labeling our feelings can very useful too—naming them as anxiety, or sadness, or disappointment, for example—although it’s fine if we can’t put names to them.)

Something that can help us to practice acceptance of our pain is to recognize that our feelings are only ever pleasant or unpleasant, and never right or wrong. This is something that Buddhist psychology strongly emphasizes. Feelings are non-volitional and ethically neutral; they are not choices we make and so they don’t have any moral significance. Only how we think, speak, and act in response to them is ethically significant. You need not be ashamed of any feeling you experience. You feel what you feel. Simply accepting this is in itself a profound act of self-compassion.

We may need to offer ourselves reassurance as we turn toward painful feelings. We can say things like, “It’s alright to feel pain. It’s OK to feel this. Let me feel this.” This encouragement helps us build up our confidence, and it also takes up some of the mental bandwidth that might otherwise be occupied by reactive thinking. Turning toward our pain gets easier with practice. Gradually, we become less afraid of our discomfort.

Once we’ve recognized that a painful situation has arisen, dropped the story, and turned our attention mindfully and courageously toward our painful feelings, we can begin to offer ourselves support and encouragement. We can do this through adopting an inner gaze of kindness and warmth, talking to ourselves in a loving way, and touching, reassuringly, the area where feelings are manifesting.

You know what it’s like to be looked at by someone who is kind and reassuring—how nourishing, comforting, and encouraging it can be when we are compassionately acknowledged in that way. You also know what it’s like to be on the other side of that gaze—to look with love. We all have that ability. We can learn to regard our pain with a warm-hearted gaze—not, of course, with the eyes but with our inner awareness—offering kindness in that way.

We can also talk to ourselves as we might talk to a friend who was suffering: “I just want you to know I’m here for you. I know you’re in pain, and I care about you. I want you to be free from suffering.” Expressions of support and solidarity such as these are deeply healing. Just as you might physically comfort a hurt child or frightened animal, or offer a comforting and supportive touch to a friend who is suffering, you can lay a gentle hand on the part of the body where the painful feelings are most prominent, touching that area with compassion. Combining all three of these approaches—a kindly gaze, kind words, and kindly touch—can be especially effective at offering ourselves reassurance.

I think we all go through a phase when we think of self-compassion as some kind of “trick” we can use to rid ourselves of an uncomfortable feeling. We see pain as something “bad” that’s inside of us, and we’d like to evict it. If we try to do this, or even just have this attitude, then we’re still caught up in reacting to our pain. In fact, if we’re trying to use self-compassion as a way to get rid of our pain, then it’s not really compassion we’re practicing, but fear and aversion. At some point, we start to recognize that we’re sneakily trying to resist our pain, and we begin to let go into genuine acceptance.

We offer kindness to our pain not to banish it, but simply because it needs kindness, reassurance, and support. Compassion is the most appropriate response to pain, whether it’s physical or mental, ours or someone else’s. If you were taking care of a baby who was frightened and crying, you wouldn’t yell at it, tell it not to be stupid, or regard it as a failure. After all, it’s just expressing its distress in the only language it knows. Responding out of fear or aversion would just make its suffering worse. All of us have this fearful, child-like aspect as part of our being. We can’t escape it, and treating it unkindly just creates more suffering for us, but we can learn to show it love.

Although I’ve said that we shouldn’t practice self-compassion out of a desire to make pain go away, if we’re offering genuine compassion to our pain, then in some cases it will in fact quickly disappear. Many times I have found myself upset, practiced self-compassion, and have found that I’m no longer in distress, all within the space of a few moments. But there also have been times in my life—for example at times of bereavement—when I’ve lived with painful feelings that have persisted on and off for days, weeks, or even months. Painful feelings pass in their own time, and for as long as they’re with us we need to keep offering them support and love. Wanting to get rid of them has been profoundly unhelpful, and has only served to intensify my pain. During times of chronic distress, I’ve found that I simply had to keep turning back toward those painful feelings over and over again until whatever crisis I was experiencing had passed.

Once we’ve practiced by turning toward our pain and offering it care, we often find that things shift radically. The sacred pause of mindful compassion becomes a conduit for wisdom and other inner resources that we sometimes aren’t aware we had.

♦

Excerpted from This Difficult Thing of Being Human (2019) by Bodhipaksa with permission of Parallax Press.

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