The
following meditation was written by self help author and speaker Arjuna Ardagh.
I invite
you into a time of meditation. Each of
you has your own way of entering this way of being. You might take a deep slow breath, let you
eyes rest or close, and turn your attention inward.
Scan
your body with awareness.
Seek out
a place of tension or discomfort,
And rest
there with your attention. (pause)
Feel
this place exactly as it is. (pause)
Feel it,
be with it, just as it is.
Feel it
not so that it will go away,
But with
an invitation that it may stay forever. (pause)
Kiss the
tension with the softness of awareness.
Bring
the breath all the way into this place,
As
though you are pouring water into a dry sponge. (pause)
Wait,
linger, until the flower opens,
Until
your awareness is completely there. (pause)
Move on
to another place of tension,
And then
another.
Discover
the lotus growing in the mud.
Sermon
Please
raise your hand if you have gone to the doctor because you were in pain. Lately they ask you to rate your pain on a
scale from 1 to 10. I have a couple
wonderings about that. I wonder how
subjective pain is. When I was a
psychotherapist, I had a 55 year old patient who told me that she had never
felt any pain in her life until a week before seeing me when she fell down in a
department store and broke her wrist. A
doctor had set her wrist and she had to keep it immobile. But here’s the thing, the pain she has been
expereincing since the moment of the fall continued to be a constant 10 and she
has been unable to to work, or really to function in any way. She had trouble even getting out of bed to
come see me due to the pain. Physiologically
and psychologocially, I believe each of us human being expereinces pain a
little differently. Pain tolerance
varies from one person to another. And
depending on your experince with pain, you may rank some pain higher than another
person would. Another wondering I have
is why don’t counselors ask us to rank our emotioanal pain on this same pain
scale when we come in for emotional distress.
How would you rate the pain from a heartbreak, a divorce, a death of
someone you love, some hard time in your life on a scale from 1 to 10.
What I want to share with you today
is what I learned about welcoming emotional pain from learning to welcome
physical pain. About 25 years ago, I
learned something about myself. I have
rib that pops out of place then right back in.
While this does no real damage, it aggravates the muscle and nerves up
and down my back, and leaves me in significant pain, like drop to my knees
pain, and momentarily debilitated. At
that moment, the only thing I am able to do is make myself breath. Then the pain eases back a little, very
little, and continues for either a few days or a few weeks. When this first started I remember thinking,
“I can’t stand this pain. It is too
much. I can’t live with this much pain.”
We all have hard times when
life takes “you down and laughs when you cry.”
At those times “All that you want is to wake up fine [to have someone] tell
you that you’re alright [and] that you ain't gonna die.” When we are in pain, physically or emotionally
or spiritually hurt, we can be driven to do almost anything to make the pain
stop. And as anyone who has been in pain
knows, pain uses up all our physical and emotional resources, clouds our
thinking, and can dominate our lives.
The first couple times my
rib popped, I have to tell you I was not my old cheery self. I was snapping at Martha and the kids. I was having trouble keeping track of what my
patients were confiding in me. The only
way I felt better was when I was away from people, somewhere quiet and not
moving. After suffering through this a
couple of times, I realized the strategy of being way from people, quiet and
not moving wasn’t a long term solution. If
I was going to stay married and continue being a psychotherapist, I needed to go
see a doctor.
Sometimes when
unpleasantness, hurt, or trauma happens to us or loved ones, our immediate
response is to jump into “fix-it” mode. After all, we live in a solution-oriented
society. We’re constantly bombarded by ads telling us that help is just a phone
call away. There are ads for medicines, devices, exercises, and ways to improve
your love life, memory, energy, and more. Glucosomine. Prevagen.
Zoralto. Prozac. Whatever that 2
bathtubs pill is for, which if it can really can work across 2 bathtubs, watch
out! Patches, shots, drops, energy
drinks—and I’m not dismissing the usefulness and need for these medicines and
approaches. Rather, I’ve come to realize—and I’m speaking only for myself—that
when my automatic response is a frantic scramble to distance myself from the
pain, then I’ve already let the pain win.
Here’s the truth of it, physical, emotional, or spiritual pain isn’t the
entire problem; it’s our tendency to negatively react to and resist the pain
that creates prolonged and intense suffering.
And I’m not saying we should react to pain by saying, “Oh, joy! Wood
Hoo! It hurts! Yea!” But if you believe
every experience has the potential to teach you something about yourself—as I
do—then you must spend some amount of time with the pain in order to learn from
it.
Back then, I felt like I had
no control over this recurring pain in my body, and that feeling of being out
of control, of the unpredictability of that rib popping out intensified the
pain even more. I had some thoughts that
were not so productive take over my mind while unproductive emotions demanded
my attention. I will not share the
thoughts with you, because I don’t use profanity in public, but you can imagine
from your own experience of pain, what kinds of thoughts and emotions I
had. And those reactions made me even
more frantic to get rid of my pain.
Our fourth Principle states
that we affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and
meaning. What is the meaning we make out
of pain? This is an important question. For some, pain can result in feeling that
life is unfair. Pain might result in questioning
one’s purpose in life. For some, pain
can result in feeling that they are being punished by their god or that pain is
the result of karma, that they have done something wrong or bad, or hurt
someone and now the universe is returning the harm to them. For some, pain can result in questioning
one’s belief system—the beliefs that keep you grounded and connected to life. Pain can even affect our search for truth, meaning,
and purpose in life. How do we search
for truth, meaning or purpose in life when all we can only think about is our
hurt, our pain? But what if we
intentionally reframe our view of pain. What
if we consider pain an opportunity to learn about ourselves and grow? What if we approach pain as friend? Or a teacher? What would change?
I have to say that it took
me some time before I was able to positively respond to, and learn from my
pain. One doctor, in a long line of
doctors I had been going to fix the problem, sent me to physical therapy. I am now a huge fan of physical therapy,
because it puts the control of my symptoms back in my hands, at least to some
extent. I am encouraged to pay attention
to the pain, where is it, how is it affecting me, what movements make it worse,
what exercises make it better, what I need to do to reduce the frequency of the
pain. These many years later, I still
regularly do about 30-45 minutes of stretches and strengthening exercises taught
to me by physical therapists; this has built resilience in me and I recover
more quickly when pain does occur. But
an unexpected effect of physical therapy was that it helped me to realize that
physical or emotional or spiritual pain and their many internal reactions need
attention, they do not always need fixing, but they do need healing. In order to heal, and I use heal in a very
broad sense of becoming healthy again, which includes reconnecting with life, I
need to be intentionally present, to accept what is happening, and to keep my
mind, heart, and spirit open in the moment. To do this I would have to learn and practice
ways to compassionately welcome pain.
I have been meditating since
college, but other than using it to relax, I hadn’t considered using meditation
to get to know my pain and thus learn more about myself. In my Buddhist meditation practice, the first
thing I learned was to be a “compassionate witness” —with a loving spirit I allow feelings, thoughts,
and sensations to flow through me without judging them. And so years ago I decided to be a
“compassionate witness” to my physical, emotional, and spiritual pain, thus I
neither cling to nor actively reject pain and the mental, emotional, and
spiritual reactions to pain. I am not
perfect at this, but I am now able to allow the destructive and negative and
reactive thoughts and feelings to pass through me without letting them control
or escalate me. This also helps me
differentiate between pain and suffering.
Pain is a feeling, I can recognize and isolate it. Suffering is when I let the pain control me
and emotionally impair me.
One other tool that I have
learned in my Buddhist practice is mindfulness.
Mindfulness is when we connect to the present moment as fully as we are
able—everything going on within and around us.
When we practice mindfulness, we can more easily recognize any
disconnection we may have from whole selves or our surroundings. When we are in pain, it is easy to become
disconnected from ourselves and the world around us. We become reconnected in that moment when we
recognize that pain and our reactions to pain are the only thing we are focused
on and then intentionally reconnect with our body, mind, heart and spirit and
the world around us. It’s a pivotal moment when we can choose to respond to rather
than react to the pain.
As Rumi wrote “The cure for
pain is the pain.” I have also trained
myself to lean into the pain, much in the same way as was presented in the
meditation that Jenny led you in today.
The purpose of the meditation was not to try to change the tension or
discomfort you were experiencing, but to change how you might interact with it. Welcoming the pain, showing the part of you
that is in pain compassion, even love, and gaining something from the
relationship with pain, not to change it, but to meet it, interact with it, learn
from it. There is both a distance and an intimacy that results from welcoming
the pain through meditation. When
meditating on it, pain no longer defines you.
It is still part of you, but it is not all of you. When meditating on it, you can welcome it as
a part of you that is in need of love and support.
When someone sees you in
pain and offers a kind word, it can feel like being offered a cold glass of
water on a hot summer day, soothing, calming, even taking away the heat of the
pain, at least for a little while. But here’s the thing, the first person to be
aware that you are in pain is the person experiencing it, and that’s you. So it’s incumbent upon each of us to be the
first one to welcome pain when it enters our life.
Now when I am in pain, I try to welcome it. That doesn’t mean I refrain from talking to
my doctor or therapist, or taking appropriate medication or any other appropriately
considered medical options, it means I try not to react and frantically try to
fix or blunt the pain. Instead I trust
that the pain is there for a reason, something needs attention in my body, mind,
or spirit. I accept that I can’t control
what’s happening, but I can respond to what is happening within me. I can accept that there are waves of fear and
resistance rising up within me. I am
mindful of where the pain is located—physical part of my body or somewhere
within my mind or heart or spirit—and I am mindful of my mental, physical,
emotional, and spiritual reactions that result from the pain. And I offer the pain, my pain, love and
compassion. Sometimes I see the pain as
a child in tears. And I see myself
putting my arms around the child and telling him that “I am with you” or “You
are not alone”. The same things I would
tell anyone who was in pain. I do not
say, “I can fix it or make it go away,” because that is not true. Being honest with myself is important and
builds trust, just as in any relationship.
As I do these things, the reactions and negative thoughts and feelings that
are passing through me become less frequent and less desperate, though they may
not completely go away. I also say to
myself in a soothing loving way saying something like: “I am not going away, I will be here when you
need me.” Sometimes I even ask that part
that me that is in pain questions. To
some of you how I respond to pain may seem a little unconventional, perhaps
even weird, but this is my practice and it helpful to me. And I believe that finding your own way to
welcome pain into your being will be useful to you.
After I welcome pain, I
begin to be more mindful of what is going on in other places, within and around
me, reconnecting me with the details of my life. Pain is no longer the center of my attention. You see connecting with the hurt part of me,
gives me the capacity to reconnect with my whole body, mind, and spirit, as
well as the world around me, and the people I love and care about.
I started my relationship
with pain by treating it as something to be gotten rid of, a part of me I
didn’t want, couldn’t learn from, and would do anything to avoid. But misdirecting my energies this way made me
suffer, feel less in control, and desperate.
Freedom from suffering came when I realized that I can choose how to
respond to pain and more importantly to welcome it into my being. My friends, may you be free of suffering and
may you live your lives in peace.
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