Dealing With Discomfort & Pain
When I was in my mid-teens, I developed a skin condition known as Polymorphic Light Eruption. Whenever I would be exposed to direct sunlight for as little as 30 minutes, I would break out into a severe rash, sometimes lasting for up to 2 weeks. My wrists, elbows, legs and ankles would become covered with painful hives that would itch like a motherfucker, and I would find myself tormented by the physical discomfort.
There was no clear reason as to why I suddenly developed the condition, all I knew was one day it wasn’t there, and the next day it was, and there was no available cure. I spent several years letting myself be ruled by the fear of this discomfort, and whenever the condition would arise, I found it impossible to be present. It prevented me from going outside, and I would find myself passing on invitations for exciting concerts, day trips, even turning down dates due to the fear of breaking out and spending the day in pain.
When I eventually started working with a teacher, I shared with her my experience of this condition, explaining how I wanted to shift my suffering, but the discomfort I experienced was so pervasive that it was impossible to ignore. She laughed and said, “What an excellent proving ground!” At first I was perplexed, but later realized that she was right: discomfort and pain was a perfect invitation to alter my position of mind, to alter my experience of pain. It’s much easier to alter a reaction when it is created through our patterned thinking, but when we are reacting to physical discomfort and pain, the stakes seem to be significantly higher. Our brain becomes hell-bent on reminding us that we are in pain, doing everything in its power to activate us into fixing it. While we can use our thinking mind as a tool to approach our pain from one perspective after another, the sensation of pain is so powerful and pervasive that if you shift back into reaction even for a moment, it can become difficult to remember that we have a degree of choice in it.
One tool that I began using, was to imagine how my suffering would be experienced by that which had no consciousness, no story. I remember lying awake at night during a flare-up, feeling like my body was on fire. As I restlessly stared at the ceiling, I began imagining how the ceiling fan would experience the discomfort, and I realized that in reality, the ceiling fan would not experience anything! It has no consciousness, no story, no nerves and no brain that would perceive pain. “How can I be like that?” I desperately thought, staring at the ceiling fan. So whenever thoughts of my burning skin came up, I just muscled my attention back towards the ceiling fan, letting my eyes glaze over, my vision blurring in and out of focus.
The more that I committed my vision and attention to the ceiling fan, the more that the distinction between me and the fan began to dissipate. I realized that in many ways, this ceiling fan and my suffering body were the same: large collections of atoms creating a material form, existing in time and space. All that was really different was the degree in which we existed. This became a welcome distraction for a while, until the sensation of pain began to sneak back into my awareness. As an experiment, I then decided to do the opposite. I began to hyper fixate on my discomfort, bringing all of my attention to my suffering. This is generally how most of us would react instinctually, but as when working with reaction, the true power is held in recognizing the conscious decision of where to bring your awareness. Once we unlock the capacity to observe ourselves in discomfort and become curious, it bumps us up to a higher level of consciousness, and becomes an essential tool in our arsenal for re-shaping an experience so that it best serves our peace.
The other day, I was on a bike ride, and a bee somehow flew into my sweatshirt, and stung me in the armpit. My first reaction was discomfort, followed by annoyance. I was really enjoying the ride, and now all I wanted to do was to cut it short and ride home to lather my armpit with aloe vera. After recognizing my reaction, I decided to respond differently. I consciously told myself the story that I wanted: “This is the perfect bike ride, and there is no injury here.” I continued riding, and like with the ceiling fan, I began directing my focus with the underlying intention to alter my commitment to the discomfort. As I rode, and the bee sting would start to irritate, I would plant my focus on the miracles that surrounded me. I noticed the small flowers shooting up from the ground, and the blackberry bushes chaotically weaving themselves together into a dense network of thorns. I considered the great fortune of living on a planet in our sun’s razor-thin habitable zone, allowing for endless complex life forms to develop, perish, and re-emerge, evolving and surviving for millions of years. Incredibly, through what some would call fate, karma, god’s plan, or complete random circumstance, we have been blessed to be born into human bodies that have opposable thumbs and the ability for complex thinking. The very fact that I can even ride a bicycle and consider how I experience a bee sting is nothing short of a miracle. Especially considering that statistically it would have been much more likely to have been born as the bee, due to the fact that there are 1.4 billion insects per human on earth. As a result of directing my thoughts differently, I became completely oblivious to the discomfort I had originally felt. The bike ride actually became more immersive and more enjoyable than if I hadn’t gotten stung, because I chose for the sting to be an inception for a greater level of awareness. By the time I got home, I had completely forgotten that I had been stung.
These examples, while useful for developing our consciousness around pain, are still relatively low-stakes. You may be wondering, what about when the stakes are higher? Surely these responses for dealing with rashes and bee stings wouldn’t work when I am in a life threatening situation. Fortunately I had been given the opportunity to test the effectiveness of these inquiries, when I split my head open at two in the morning a few months back.
I was doing laundry late at night, and as I was going down the stairs to my basement I jumped on the bottom step, forgetting that there was a wall overhang positioned right above it. The top of my head made contact with the sharp corner of the overhang, and in an instant I was on the floor with blood pouring down my face. I had a few minutes of panic, rapidly searching my house for a first-aid kit, and pacing back and forth, trying to figure out what to do. I realized I had never used my insurance or taken myself to a hospital, so I was trying to slow the bleeding while simultaneously having to figure out what hospital provided insurance coverage. Aside from the pain and the immense fear I felt, my reaction also harkened back to my childhood. When I was a child I had to get stitches in my head three separate times, and even though I am no longer a kid, all I really wanted was for my mom and dad to show up and take care of everything. So there were many layers of reaction happening all at once. My body was reacting to the injury by bleeding profusely, I was reacting to my body by focusing on the strange nausea and aching that accompanies head trauma, my adult overthinking mind was reacting to the logistics of my insurance coverage, and my inner child was reacting to the overwhelming scariness of having to face all of this alone.
Somehow, despite everything that was going on, an awareness appeared: As my teacher had proposed with my skin condition, this was an undeniable proving ground to move differently, this was where I got to see how much I can really do. While still bleeding and feeling somewhat fearful, I felt a strange appreciation. How fortunate that I have been given the perfect scenario, motivating me to shift my positioning, or really suffer. Had I not routinely disciplined myself in lower-stakes scenarios with rashes, bee stings, and reshaping frustrations of getting cut off in traffic, perhaps I would not have been capable of perceiving a way to enjoy this experience. Through a history of small repeated moments of practice, my mind intuitively remembered its training, without me having to search for it. Almost instantly, I felt my panic dissolve. My inner child who was so desperately afraid, felt at ease, as this emerging awareness instilled a knowing that I will move responsibly to mitigate the suffering, and he will be just fine.
Once my panic had begun to relax, I easily found the closest hospital that provided coverage and drove myself there. When I arrived at the ER holding blood-soaked paper towels to my head, the receptionist barely looked up, and spent some time slowly rummaging around to find the paperwork I needed to fill out, remarking that she was tired and a little disorganized. Where I once would have created even more suffering for myself by becoming angry at her evident disinterest towards my injury, I decided to find it comical. It felt like I was at the DMV or some bureaucratic agency, and instead of painting myself as the victim of it, I simply enjoyed how the receptionist unknowingly gave me an additional invitation to shift yet another reaction. (As a side note, it’s actually very difficult to stay angry at someone once you notice that they are accelerating your growth, allowing you to enhance your inner evolution towards a greater mastery of your world).
As I sat in the waiting room, noticing the throbbing pain emerge, recede, and re-emerge as I encountered it with the same practices I had with my smaller discomforts, another perspective appeared. I thought about how I had gone to the hospital for similar reasons as a child, and perhaps this injury was some kind of subconscious way for my inner child to take control, and remind me of his presence. I reflected on how reactive and overwhelmed I had felt when I saw the blood on my hands, and realized how my reaction of anxiety was actually misplaced. Because there I was, in the waiting room, giving myself what was needed, providing exactly that which I was afraid I wouldn’t receive without my parents there to give it to me. This awareness granted an additional level of gratitude for the incident, because if I had not split my head open, I may have not recognized the subconscious fear I was holding onto, the fear of not being able to provide myself with what I really needed.
If I had chosen a different position, and simply indulged in my first reaction without curiosity, the situation would have felt entirely different. I would have remained in that state of panic, potentially preventing me from finding the right hospital or feeling confident that I was able to do what was needed. I could have felt sorry for myself, and ashamed for not being more careful going down the stairs. I could have been frustrated that I hadn’t sorted out my insurance earlier, felt anxious about the oncoming hospital bill, or been infuriated that the receptionist was not more attentive. All of these reactions would have generated an exponentially greater degree of suffering. I would have felt completely miserable, and likely would have been closed to the idea that I had any choice in it. Instead, my small practices guided me to move gracefully, and what had at first seemed like a nightmare-scenario, turned into a truly enjoyable night.
In the conversation around pain, I like to reference a passage in Herman Hesse’s novel, “Narcissus and Goldmund.” There is a scene in which the protagonist, Goldmund, falls off of his horse into a creek bed, shattering his ribcage. As he lies wounded, he experiences an unimaginable physical agony, unable to move himself for days. After what feels like an eternity of suffering, he suddenly sees his pain differently, hearing the voice of his mother, an archetype for the universal healer:
“It was my mother’s voice, a deep womanly voice, full of ecstasy and love. And then I saw that it was she, that she was with me, holding me in her lap, and that she had opened my breast and put her fingers between my ribs to pluck out my heart. When I saw and understood that, it no longer hurt. And now, when the pains come back, they are not pains, they are not enemies; they are my mother’s fingers taking my heart out.”
Goldmund visualizes with such dedication and belief, bringing so much awareness to the image, that it actually becomes louder than his brain chemistry. He also made a very particular choice with this re-telling. He created a narrative in which his heart, the source of his very existence and nature, is elevated and exposed, becoming closer to the world and cradled by a divine healer. To put more simply, Hesse proposes that as soon as we let go of our anguished fight against pain, no longer seeing it as an enemy, it makes us available to rest in a position which nurtures more comfort than assuming the position of struggle.
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.” — Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
