Dealing with Physical Pain
Pain, physical pain, is an odd factor in our lives. Of course, it is a signal that something needs help. All of us have experienced physical pain in one form or another but sometimes it is a very persistent visitor, clinging almost like a long-lost friend.
Society has a whole plethora of chemicals, herbs and potions to ameliorate pain. Most, but not all, can alleviate the worst of it, but not always. Then is when a form of meditation might be considered as part of the healing. .
As I wrote the last sentence I was reminded of a remark I have heard in various places around the world, so it must be a ubiquitous sentiment: “He doesn’t want drugs because suffering makes him closer to God.” When I initially heard those words I was confused: how could someone choose not to use drugs that would relieve unbearable physical hurt?
But then I began to look over my own life at illnesses and hospitalizations and falls and breaks, to see how I had coped with pain, and I realized that I had not just “drugged myself into oblivion,” preferring some sort of aliveness even with unremitting pain, to making the conscious decision to become unaware. Yet that pain, that overwhelming, all-encompassing pain, was ever-present, or was it? I began to look and think about the matter.
Yes, in that ever-present state, pain can be embraced, welcomed, incorporated and then it will become everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere, and it is like atoms which can neither be created nor destroyed, and is all and nothing and infinitely existing and non-existing simultaneously.
There is a simple method to understand this varied form of meditating which is specifically directed to dealing with physical pain. (I certainly do not recommend it for emotional pain and turmoil!)
Place the body, the body that is yours and yet not yours, because what is it really but a few elements strung together like a series of lobster pots draped along a weathered fence, place yourself in as comfortable a position as possible and with eyes closed, breathe deeply and breathe again, taking deep, deep breaths. Breathe into the pain, feeling its energy, which is part of your energy and yet is something more, or is it? Embrace and welcome the pain until you are unable to think of anything else.
When the pain becomes overwhelming, it is possible to slip out of whatever place you are in for only a second by gently opening your eyes, then closing them again. It is as if that momentary respite reenergizes the process.
Gradually the pain will become both more and less, and when it is totally encompassed, when it and you are together like lovers, then something almost inexplicable happens, and the pain lessons, and while you continue to breathe out and in, the pain is leaving and returning, but becomes more distant as it dissolves into the clouds and leaves, embracing and expanding consciousness and unconsciousness, until you are not you, not anything, but also you are everything, and you are now joined with pain so absorbed that is also you and not you, and now you are and are not part of everything melting into the universe where all life exists and ceases to exist, but we only think it does as nothing disappears but might be transformed as we are transformed all the time, timelessly and endlessly.