The Skills Necessary To Deal With Anguish
Truly accepting pain is not at all like passive resignation. Rather, it is active engagement with life in its most intimate sense. It is meeting, dancing with, raging at, turning toward. To accept your pain on this level you must cultivate particular skills. Then After you have developed some proficiency in these skills, dealing with pain feels much more like an embrace, or the bond that forms between sparring partners, than it feels like resignation. Resignation is too passive.
So What are the skills necessary for dealing with catastrophe, pain, anguish that you have day in and day out and probably will have for a long time? If you're in this difficult situation, your job is to (1)acknowledge that stuff and what its costing you, and (2) to enrich your life exponentially.
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Acknowledging your suffering, just exactly what it is costing you to live with the painful situation you have, is the first step on the path of penetration into the wellspring of energy we often tie up in efforts we make to get away from our despair. I work with people who have degenerative diseases like arthritis, MS, stroke. Many of them have constant, unremitting pain. They say to me, "Why would I want to acknowledge my suffering? To live in the present moment with all my agony? I'd rather distract myself." Why indeed?
Maybe the bottom line is that if you develop a strategy to deal with suffering that rests on merely distracting yourself, it won't work in the long run. Maybe you can deny it or distract yourself for a short time -- hours or days. Denial is great for the short term -- it can allow you to meet a deadline despite a crisis or it can help you gradually accept an overwhelming circumstance -- but longterm it carries a pretty high price. If you deny your pain or your suffering for a long time, you begin to exist on a bleak tundra of nonfeeling. In order to stay in denial, you have to turn away from all incoming information about your situation: other people's feedback, your own feelings coming up from your gut. So your consciousness gets very narrow and your life continues on one level of your being with no variation or richness or feeling.
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Earlier I mentioned that one of the skills it's useful to cultivate is enriching your life exponentially. What I mean by that is If at any given moment you are aware of ten different elements -- for instance, the sound of my voice, your bottom on the chair, the sound of cars passing outside, the thought of the laundry you have to do, the hum of the air-conditioner, the sliding of your glasses down your nose, an unpleasant stab of sharp back pain, cool air going into your nostrils, warm air going out -- that's too much pain, one out of ten; that's unbearable pain that will dominate your life. But if at this moment you are aware of a hundred elements, not only the ten things you noticed before but more subtle things, like the animal presence of other people sitting quietly in the room, the shadow of the lamp against the wall, the brush of your hair against your ear, the pull of your clothes against your skin, for instance, and you have pain along with all those other things you are noticing, then your pain is one of a hundred elements of your consciousness at that moment, and that is pain you can live with. It's merely one of the multitude of sensations in your life.
As a person with a chronic illness who works with other people who have longterm physical difficulties and the despair/bitterness that accompany such difficulties, I'm very interested in what people do that has some influence on their healing process. Over the years I've noticed that among the most important healing experiences that people can have are experiences of deep pleasure. This is true of both physical and spiritual healing. When your suffering is chronic or intense, you cannot let your pleasures come randomly. You need to take the perception of pleasure very seriously and learn how to build the occurrence of such feelings into your life. If you are overwhelmed by emotional stress or physical pain, I advise you to cultivate the ability to recognize pleasure wherever the potential for its existence may lie.
-- Excerpted from a talk given by Darlene Cohen to the Multiple Sclerosis Society in March, 2000
Darlene Cohen was a Zen teacher who counseled chronic pain clients and gave arthritis workshops, classes, lectures, and pain seminars in private practice and at medical facilities and meditation centers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Spokane, Washington, and Evanston, Illinois.
What do you make of the idea that truly accepting pain is "active engagement" - a kind of "meeting, dancing with, raging at, turning toward" - rather than passive resignation? Can you share a personal story of a time when you shifted from trying to distract yourself from suffering to acknowledging what it was costing you, and enriching your life exponentially? What helps you notice the totality of each moment and a deep pleasure within it?
