by Jill
| Icelandic Landscape by Melina Meza |
I recently presented at a conference for clinicians at Kripalu on the topic “Chronic Pain: Shifting the Paradigm.” I held the place of the professional contemplative in the presenter line up. Everyone else was a top researcher or clinician; although they all had a spiritual practice, their main gig was their medical training and profession. Being a professional contemplative was an interesting position to be in, but what was inspiring was the kindness and compassion imbued by everyone presenting and everyone attending. Working with chronic pain as the sufferer is really difficult, but working with those who are in pain is also very challenging in many different ways.
What was common to all was the knowledge that we must begin to tease apart the physical and the emotional/mental. Physical pain is always compounded by a multitude of thoughts and feelings. There is a story to and often behind the pain, a story that can contain feelings of guilt, doubt, responsibility and shame. But much of the time it’s hard for someone to recognize the entanglement of feelings and thoughts with the sensations of pain. However, with recognition and information, this configuration of emotional/mental and physical becomes optional and can relieve a great deal of suffering. Pain is not the optional aspect but the suffering around it is.
That this is now being addressed by some clinicians is such a relief! I know about this intimately after having lived in chronic pain for over 13 years when I was younger. Fortunately for me, through years of intensive practice in meditation and asana, I was able to heal my issues and am pain free, but this isn’t the case for most. And the experience of pain, both physical and mental, is what has led me to teach practices that can help others. Being at this conference was a way of educating and arming the clinicians a bit more with tools that are accessible and practical so that they, too, can help others separate pain from suffering and story from sensation. Buddhism uses the parable of the Second Arrow to describe this.
“When touched with a feeling of pain,
the ordinary uninstructed person
sorrows, grieves,
and laments, beats his breast,
becomes distraught.
So he feels two pains,
physical and mental.
Just as if they were to shoot a man
with an arrow and,
right afterward,
were to shoot him with another one,
so that he would feel
the pains of two arrows…”
—The Buddha
So why do we shoot ourselves with a second arrow? I think because most of us aren’t aware initially that we are even shooting ourselves. This is where an experienced teacher comes in and why we are on a path towards greater sanity and ease in the first place. The teacher offers us remarkably simple tools (such as, how to witness our thoughts and feelings, how to take care of ourselves, and how to reduce the negativity) to increase skills that add to our happiness and that can be applied to a variety of conditions. Eventually, both relief and a lesson is garnered, so that we aren’t continually repeating the same causes of self inflicted discomfort and stress over and over again.
We can witness our emotional and mental pain in meditation, and if we are pointed in this direction, we can witness it in asana as well. Consider really listening to your internal speech next time you practice asana. What most of us will observe at least once during our practice is a harsh critic, an idea of perfection, a comparing of ourselves to others, and the unsavory language that goes along with any of these thoughts and feelings. By taking note and then working with our thoughts and feelings we have the opportunity to re-wire and re-pattern our habits into ways that are kinder, less harsh, and even loving.
This simple task isn’t easy because it takes time and some relaxed vigilance, but it can be done and does make a significant change in how we think and feel about anything. In the situation of chronic pain, if you apply this recognition of the second, optional arrow, and then refrain from shooting it, then something can hurt but you no longer need to add a story onto it. Being with pure sensation is not easy I know, but it’s a lot less cumbersome mentally and not as burdensome and tangled emotionally as having physical and emotional/mental pain all at the same time.
To experiment with this, when you hear yourself criticize or compare, pause for a second and replace the harsh speech with a kinder word or phrase. For example, when I hear a critical voice come into my mind, I metaphorically bow to it and say “no thanks, not right now” and turn to the kinder and infinitely wiser voice in my mind (we all have this wiser voice, but often it is just quieter). Bowing to the voice recognizes that it is there and being polite to it isn’t pushing it away with any negativity—denial and negativity only add fuel to the fire.
If you are interested in working with illness or chronic pain and would like to learn some more skills, please join me March 17-18, 2018 at Namaste in Berkeley for a weekend specifically about this. Also, watch for more writing on this worthy subject, both here and on my website jillsatterfield.org. You can also join the mailing list for the School for Compassionate Action for news about programs specifically designed to teach applications of meditation, mindfulness, and yoga therapy to at-risk and in-need communities.
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