Pain and Suffering
All of us have times of deep emotional, and sometimes physical, pain in our lives. For some people, it is a great deal of the time, perhaps even clinical depression. I don’t feel qualified to speculate on how this ‘noticing storylines’ approach to being present will help or affect someone with chronic sadness or depression. In those kinds of situations, I think it’s most important to get counseling and potentially medication.
But what of the everyday emotional and physical pain that everyone encounters? Our habitual pattern is to run away from it, repress it, tighten against it. The ‘seeing’ approach would suggest another avenue: developing more intimacy with your pain. This means getting to know it at a deeper level. Where is it felt physically? Does it move, and in what way? Does it feel like it has a shape? A colour? A texture? A density?
We turn away from our pain for various reasons. As human ‘animals’, our conditioning over the millions of years of our development is to avoid pain, and that conditioning is strong. Over time I became aware that I avoided some kinds of emotional pain because I felt that if I faced into them, or took them in, I would break into countless pieces – I wouldn’t recover from the intensity of it. Our unconscious conditioning tells us to ‘avoid pain or risk death’.
One small personal example of working with pain:
I remember a very specific day – it was in February of 2002 – sitting on the couch in my living room. Over the previous few months I had become very aware that there was a kind of blackness that I was always running away from, mostly unconsciously. Somehow that day I got the courage, and the curiosity, to say to myself: “What’s in there, anyway? What’s in that darkness?” It was almost physical – the feeling of stopping and turning and looking.
It’s hard to describe what I saw, but I can best describe it as a long hall in my mind that I call Ripley’s House of Horrors. Every horrific or heartbreaking thing I’d encountered was lined up there, like an exhibit along the wall of the hall. Stories about torture that I heard as a volunteer with Amnesty International; events and moments observed, or narrated by friends and family, that have so much sorrow they twist a knife in your heart; first-person narratives about slavery, murder, war, that one encounters in the news or books or magazines. Not just the average unpleasant news events, but the ones that seem completely unbearable.
It seems strange to say, but I didn’t actually realize that all of that was stored up in my body in that way. It was very difficult to brace myself to see it (even now, writing this, at least three or four ‘exhibits’ came to mind and made me tearful and tight-chested). But the very act of walking into the darkness and shining a light changed me internally. I stopped running. I knew that the blackness (really, the bleakness) inside of me wouldn’t break me – I had faced it and survived. There was a sense in which it made me feel a little more ‘unbreakable’.
I also realized that because I have a lot of empathy, I was finding myself in that Hall of Horrors too often – mostly because of adding to it. Somehow out of this experience I was able to see more clearly that I didn’t have to walk through the door into the Hall of Horrors – yet without fearing it or running away from it. It was as if I could see myself as a little girl, and say lovingly, “I shouldn’t let you go in there alone.”
It’s important to realize that our conditioning has led our organism to repress pain in order to function, and there is some wisdom and protection in this. We don’t need to feel like we are trying to rip off decades of protection in one fell swoop. There is some peace and clarity to be gained by meeting our pain more directly –but, again, gentleness and curiosity are called for.
Next: Slowing Down
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