more on pain

            Pain is an event that unfolds in our lives. Even though it may be chronic or recurrent, it changes from day to day and sometimes from moment to moment. It is an experience. It is not us.

            The Scriptures say that God “has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Hebrews 10:14). In Christ, we are perfect in every way. Yes, we experience imperfection - we sin, we fall short, our bodies ache and get sick, we have negative emotions - but all that is not us. We have been made perfect forever.

            If you bring wise attention to bear on pain in your life, you may discover that part of you is detached from that pain and is calm. You may also come to the realization that how you react to pain is your choice. You may further come to realize that, while pain may create obstacles in your life, those obstacles are made much larger if you choose to react to pain with aversion, dread, a sense of helplessness, etc., and that those reactions are not your only options. In other words, you can change your relationship to pain in your life in a way that decreases your suffering.

            How do you do that? Pain management training offers many solutions, but we will look here only at how meditation can help you change your relationship to pain in your life.

            First, think in terms of a longer time frame than a few days because you are changing the thinking habits of a lifetime, and that takes time. So relax and be patient with yourself.

            People experiencing chronic pain are encouraged to start with the body scan. Medical experiments have shown,[1] and Christian writers and psychologists are coming to understand,[2] that tuning in to pain is a more effective way of reducing the level of pain we experience than is running from it or raging against it or distracting ourselves from it. And it is the only way to discover and fellowship with the God within you. It is also probably the only way to discover your own wholeness. If you become fixated on getting rid of pain in your life (and for some, we will be talking about serious, chronic, disabling pain), then pain can very easily become your identity. You’re the disabled person, the person with fibromyalgia, the crazy guy in our church who’s in therapy, the lady in the wheelchair. But you are not your disability. You are so very much more than the pain you are experiencing. And you still have the capacity for a fulfilling life and for experiencing the good things in life like joy and love and hope - and God.

            So step one is to stop running from your pain. Yes, pursue medical help and therapy and whatever else might work, but in your daily life, if today has pain, then that is your reality. You accept that and you work at living today with that pain. Stress and anger and other negative emotions that we aim at pain only serve to intensify it and hence our suffering. Acceptance that today will be a day with pain stops that escalation from happening. It may also allow you to focus on other things that bring joy: the tulips have finally blossomed in the garden, the baby cut his first tooth, dinner is going to be your favourite meal, it’s finally sunny and you can sit on the deck while you have your morning coffee. Acceptance also means that you are kind to yourself. People with pain often try to be as busy and active as anyone without pain. They wake up with their “to do” lists jam-packed, only to find that today is a day with pain. What do they do? Sometimes they push themselves to do everything on their list anyway. And they may end up paying big time at the end of the day or for days thereafter for having pushed themselves too hard. Acceptance means that you are mindful of what you can do and what you cannot do today. It means listening to your body and your soul to see if you can discover what they need and what their limits will be today. Life being life, there may be days when you have to push the limits and pay the price. But this should not be your lifestyle. Acceptance means being as kind and compassionate with your hurting self as you would be with any other hurting person you might encounter.

            Remember, too, that pain in your life shouldn’t start a war. It’s not a question of locking yourself into hand-to-hand combat with it until it gives up and goes away. It’s more a question of letting it into your awareness to learn from it, know it better, find out more about it. It’s also about learning to observe your thoughts about this pain. Those thoughts are not you either. And they’re not the pain itself, although they can significantly increase the amount of suffering you experience. What can you learn from these thoughts? And can you let them go?

            As you practise accepting and observing, you may come to notice that the part of you that is observing is not in pain and is not caught up in your anxious thoughts about the pain. It knows them, but is free of them. When you identify with this part of yourself, you experience less suffering than if you identify with the turmoil in your body or your emotions and mind.

            And so, you are encouraged to start practising a new relationship with personal pain. If you have no personal pain of any kind, count yourself very fortunate indeed. But it is hard to imagine a life on any given day without a single problem, pain, stressor, or anxiety-producing situation. So take a really good inventory before you decide this exercise has no application to you. Here is the exercise, given in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn in his book Full Catastrophe Living.[3] The exercise as he describes it is for anyone. Christians, however, take note, that as you disengage from your personal experience and step into the realm of pure being, you are stepping into that quiet place where God waits, and you are very much in His presence whether you sense Him or not. You are entering into a state of contemplation. 

When practicing the body scan or any of the other mindfulness techniques, you may come to notice that when you identify with your thoughts or feelings or with the sensations in your body or with the body itself for that matter, there is much greater turmoil and suffering than when you dwell as the non-judgmental observer of it all, identifying with the knower, with awareness itself.

                We adopt this witnessing perspective throughout the meditation practice, but [there is also an exercise] that encourages what we have called choiceless awareness, a disidentifying with the entire play of inner experience, whether it be the breath, sensations, perceptions, thoughts, or feelings. As [the meditation we are doing] comes to an end, after we have intentionally let go of it, we invite our thoughts and feelings, our likes and dislikes, our concepts of ourself and the world, our ideas and opinions, even our name, into the field of awareness and we intentionally let go of them as well.

. . . you tune in to a sense of being complete in the present moment, as you are, without having to resolve your problems or correct bad habits or pay your bills or get a college education or anything else. Can you identify yourself as being whole and complete in this moment and at the same time part of a larger whole? Can you sense yourself as pure “being”, that aspect of you that is beyond your body, beyond your name, your thoughts and feelings, your ideas, opinions, concepts, even beyond your identification of yourself as a certain age or as a male or female?

                In letting go of all of this, you may come to a point at which all concepts dissolve into stillness and there is just awareness, a knowing beyond any “thing” to be known. In this stillness, you might come to know that whatever you are, “you” are definitely not [pain]. As you learn to dwell in the domain of being, your relationship to pain . . . can undergo profound changes. These experiences can guide you in developing your own ways to come to terms with pain, to make room for it, to live with it . . .

                Of course, regular practice is necessary . . . The domain of being is easier to talk about than to experience. To make it real in your life . . . takes concentrated work and determination. A certain kind of digging, a kind of inner archeology, is required to uncover your intrinsic wholeness, covered over as it may be with layer after layer of opinions, likes and dislikes, and the heavy fog of automatic, unconscious thinking and habits, to say nothing of pain. There is nothing romantic or sentimental about the work of mindfulness, nor is your intrinsic wholeness a romantic or sentimental or imaginary construct. It is here now, as it always has been.  

            So have patience with yourself, being gentle and kind, and don’t try to push for breakthroughs. The breakthroughs will come on their own. For those seeking God, His revelation of His presence always comes by grace, not through your efforts in turning to that quiet place within yourself where He dwells. However, revelations are not needed. The reality is that you are in His presence and experiencing His goodness the minute you turn within. Hold to that by faith because contemplation is not about knowing God in your outer person or soul (your mind and emotions); it’s about knowing Him spirit to spirit, and this knowledge often cannot be translated into anything your mind and emotions can express. 

exercises 

Days 42 to 44 

Do the 30-minute breathing meditation, which provides 20 minutes of breathing meditation followed by a guided 10 minutes of contemplation.