Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (11 page)

How did the pain turn into suffering?

What is actually happening in the moment?

Or suppose one day I wake up feeling sick all over. The days turn into weeks, the weeks turn into months, and the pain and discomfort become more and more debilitating. The mind cries out, longing for relief. “Why is this happening to me?” “This is too much to bear.” “What will become of me?” Naturally there is a great resistance to the physical pain and discomfort. And unmistakably there is suffering.

But how did the pain turn into suffering?

And what is actually happening in the moment?

The process starts with our natural tendency to avoid pain. This is a fact of life: we don’t like pain. We suffer because we marry our instinctive aversion to pain with the deep-seated belief that life
should
be free from pain. In resisting our pain by holding this belief, we strengthen just what we’re trying to
avoid. When we make pain the enemy, we solidify it. This resistance is where our suffering begins.

Again, on experiencing pain, we almost always immediately resist. On top of the physical discomfort we quickly add a layer of negative judgments: “Why is this happening to me?” “I can’t bear this,” and so on. Regardless of whether we actually voice these judgments, we thoroughly believe them, which reinforces their devastating power. Rather than see them as a grafted-on filter, we accept them, unquestioned, as the truth. This blind belief in our thoughts further solidifies our physical experience of pain into the dense heaviness of suffering. And though we can intellectually accept Buddha’s first noble truth that life entails suffering, when it happens to
us
, we rarely want anything to do with it.

How do we live the practice life when we’re in pain? To apply such phrases as “Be one with the pain” or “There is no self!” (and therefore no one to suffer) is neither comforting nor helpful. We must first understand that both our pain and our suffering are truly our path, our teacher. While this understanding doesn’t necessarily entail liking our pain or our suffering, it does liberate us from regarding them as enemies we have to conquer. Once we have this understanding, which is a fundamental change in how we relate to life, we can begin to deal with the layers of pain and suffering that make up so much of our existence.

In early 1991 I had an acute and prolonged relapse of an immune system disease in which my muscles attack themselves. The main physical symptoms were great muscle weakness, painful flulike feelings—as if my cells were polluted—and worst of all, pervasive and relentless nausea. Fortunately the nausea did not result in vomiting, but it was nonetheless very unpleasant. Within two weeks these physical symptoms had been supplemented by classical psychological symptoms: anger, self-pity, depression. I felt tremendous helplessness. I also felt hopelessness—the fear of being forever shut off from
life. I didn’t want to complain, but I also felt isolated because I didn’t know how to communicate what I was feeling. I felt guilt, because I couldn’t fulfill my duties. I felt a sense of shame, in the misguided belief that the illness perhaps resulted from my own inadequacies. Although I didn’t consciously believe I was dying, the fear of death was definitely powering these other feelings. Beyond even that, I felt fear of the pain of dying, fear of the total loss of control, and even fear of dying in fear.

On the one hand, I had definitive and objective physical symptoms with which to deal. On the other, I had layer upon layer of dark, emotion-based thoughts. These strongly believed thoughts not only exacerbated the physical symptoms but also had their own painful quality. Right in the middle of this, my closest friend of twenty-five years died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack. Despite my years of meditation, I was not prepared to deal with all these circumstances. I felt devoid of a spiritual anchor. This was when I first called Joko and received her pointed yet compassionate advice to see illness and suffering as my path. Joko also mentioned that I might find Stephen Levine’s book
Healing into Life and Death
helpful.

My understanding of this idea that we need to see our difficulties as our path changed after that phone call. My belief had been that I couldn’t practice
because
my life was so difficult. To accept these difficulties as my practice would mean I’d have to stop resisting and willingly let them in. For whatever reason it was my good fortune to be able to hear Joko’s words and literally take them to heart. Years later, in reflecting on these events, I thought of Thomas Merton’s words, “True love and prayer are learned in the moment when prayer has become impossible and the heart has turned to stone.”

After talking to Joko, I began reading Stephen Levine’s powerful and comprehensive book on practicing with illness. I began doing five different meditations a day and continued this for almost two years. Over time I learned to see the difference
between the physical pain, the resistance to the pain, and the layers of emotion-based thoughts. I began to see the physical symptoms of discomfort as if they were in the center of a circle, with a concentric layer of resistance around it, and a concentric layer of emotions and thoughts around that.

Since the episodes of nausea were unrelenting, that particular symptom provided a vast laboratory for my practice. Bringing awareness to the nausea over and over, I saw clearly several particularly powerful thoughts that were making up the outer ring of this circle: “I can’t take this,” “What’s going to happen to me?” and “Poor me.” I practiced clearly seeing and repeatedly labeling these thoughts as they arose. “Poor me” may not sound like a big deal, but I can’t overemphasize the power of this mostly wordless emotional state. And the very intensity of the emotional reaction “I can’t take this” is enough to tell us that we are caught in a belief system.

Without awareness these beliefs slip by so easily that we don’t even question their truth. With awareness the thoughts can eventually be seen as thoughts and nothing more. In fact, we can begin to realize that they may not even be true! Thus the suffering is no longer fueled by our blind acceptance of our beliefs as the truth about reality.

Once I clarified these beliefs, it was easier to bring awareness to the resistance itself. Acknowledging the resistance as a physical, sensory experience is a big step. No longer seeing it as the enemy (“The Resistance”), we can begin the process of gradually softening into the sensations of resistance themselves. We bring awareness to wherever we experience tightness, pushing away, holding. We soften those energies with the light touch of awareness, opening the edges around the pain.

At first going directly into our pain may not even be an option. In the beginning I certainly couldn’t encounter my nausea head-on. But gradually approaching the pain from the edges made a more direct approach possible. No longer believing the thoughts, no longer fighting the resistance, left me with just
the physical sensations of nausea. But now it was a physical experience without the suffering! I saw clearly how we hold our suffering in place with fear-based thoughts that arise in reaction to pain. These thoughts are further solidified by our resistance to letting the pain just be.

As often as I was able, I would breathe into the heartspace on the inbreath and then send loving-kindness to my body, to my immune system, via the outbreath. With this sense of spaciousness and heart, I found I could enter directly into the sensations of nausea. In the moments when I could experience the nausea not as “pain” but as intense physical energy, I was struck by a sense of quiet joy. Sometimes I felt a depth of appreciation that, by any ordinary standards, would simply not compute. Opening to pain itself may still not be possible if the pain is intense, but in most cases pain is not as unbearable as we
think
it is. Although the sensations may remain unpleasant, it is often possible for us to actually experience them. Occasionally bringing a softening awareness to the pain can even neutralize the sensations.

Certainly we can’t always transform pain from meaningless suffering into a sense of spaciousness, but at least we can practice seeing into the layers of beliefs and resistance that hold our suffering in place, thereby coming closer to gently opening to what is. But seeing into the layers of beliefs and resistance is often difficult, because our conditioning can go very deep. Yet, left unexplored, these beliefs that are most deeply hidden are the very beliefs that silently run our lives. For example, how many of us, when we get seriously ill, engage in what is commonly known as “the battle against illness”? Even when we understand how to practice with discomfort, it is still easy to get caught in the false belief, so prevalent even today, that we “create our own illness” and that with clearer practice we can “defeat” it. Almost all of us believe on some level that physical symptoms imply a gap in our practice. We have the deep-seated view that if we practice long enough and hard enough, we’ll see
through our problems. Underneath this view is the even more hidden belief that life should be (or can be) free from pain. Yet the Buddha’s basic teaching is that pain simply is.

The hidden belief that if our practice is strong enough and deep enough, we can be free from pain is most often based on fear. We fear, perhaps more than anything, the helplessness of the loss of control. For some, like myself, our reaction may be to cling to identities—of the doer who can accomplish things, of the knower who can control life through knowing—that we hope will ward off our experiencing the fear of helplessness. This fear of helplessness also prevents us from experiencing genuine compassion. It is so much easier to write someone off (including ourselves) by reducing illness to some blind spot that is not being faced than it is to feel the helplessness and loss of control that illness often triggers. But the real key is to surrender to helplessness itself. We can do this only when we give up asking why (again, the mind hoping to control through “knowing”) and instead simply attend to the “what” of the moment. This “what” is not just the physical discomfort but all the deeply held beliefs associated with the discomfort. We get so hooked into trying to find the meaning behind our illness or pain that we often ignore the incredible teachings that are right there in front of us—within the whatness of our presentmoment experience of symptoms/beliefs/emotions.

An old Zen line says, “On a withered tree, a flower blooms.” We often think that being healed means the illness and pain will go away. But healing does not necessarily mean that the physical body will mend, any more than a withered tree will become young again. Healing is not just about physical symptoms. Many people heal and still remain physically sick or even die. Many who become physically well never really heal. Healing involves clearing the pathway to the open heart—the heart that knows only connectedness. When we experience this openness, the flower blooms regardless of what happens to
our body. In
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
, the author—though completely immobilized and subjected to endless discomforts—was still able, at least in some measure, to fly free as a butterfly. To heal, to become whole, means we no longer identify with ourselves as just this body, as just our suffering. We identify with a vaster sense of being.

The fact is that the heart is always open. However, the pathway to this heart is blocked by years of conditioning. It is overgrown with protections, pretenses, deeply held core beliefs, pictures of who we think we should be, fears, anger, confusion, and our resistance to life as it is. Mostly we don’t want our pain or our suffering. Mostly we want to be taken care of. We want someone (such as a mate or a teacher) or something (such as more favorable life circumstances or a big experience) to make everything OK. But until we’re willing to learn from our suffering, the path to the open heart will stay blocked. Until we stop running away from our pain, our suffering will continue. Perhaps the greatest pain is our resistance to pain itself.

But sometimes we can’t run away. Sometimes very difficult circumstances in life make it clear that there’s no easy way out. Who’s to say how difficult things have to get before we stop resisting? Who’s to say how long it will take to learn what it means to become willing? At what point will we be able to recognize that the painful circumstances of our life really are our best teacher? When I reflect back on this period of my life when I felt most lost, I can see clearly that it was the illness, and all the baggage that came along with it—namely, all “my suffering”—that was the catalyst to turn my life right-side up.

I didn’t want my nausea or my illness; I didn’t want my sense of loss. I just wanted them to disappear. Thus “my suffering” arose. Once I understood that my illness was my path, it gradually became clear that real healing was not about the body’s getting better or about having all the suffering disappear. It was about being willing to let all of it just be. It was about bringing
awareness to the layers of emotion-based beliefs that were blocking access to the open heart. Of course, I still cared about recovering physically. I continue to do whatever seems helpful for bringing my body into balance, including seeking traditional medical care, as well as enjoyments such as eating chocolate or outings to the movies. But what I’ve truly discovered is an inner understanding that no longer denies the value of pain, difficult circumstances, and suffering.

Once I got over the worst of the physical symptoms and began to function fairly well, I realized how easy it would be to slip back into old routines. I could use the remission of my immune system disease to pretend that everything was fine. But fortunately I had learned enough to know that this would just be more skating on thin ice. I began the practice of designating one day a week as a “sick day.” No matter how well I was feeling, I would live that day as if I were still sick. Although I would not spend hours on the couch as I had during some phases of the illness, I would intentionally slow down all my movements. I could then appreciate the depths of awareness that are possible when we slow down enough to let life in: observing thoughts without getting caught in them, feeling the texture of life without resisting, seeing how we don’t need to be so busy, dropping attachment to comfort, seeing into the roots of fear, experiencing the quiet joy of mundane activities. I so value this one-day practice for keeping my priorities straight that I have continued it over the last nine years.