From Suffering to Peace

To live a life beyond suffering and pleasure and include them both in great measure is what my life is about.

Darlene Cohen was a courageous meditation teacher who suffered from a debilitating form of degenerative arthritis for some decades. Her life was an inspiring example of how we can turn to meet our physical pain with a kind mindful attention, however hard that journey is. Her writings and teachings were testament to her finding joy and ease despite the terrible suffering she endured. Her book Turning Suffering Inside Out is a beautiful expression of that journey. Her arthritis was her teacher and also her ally in learning how to surrender to the truth of the moment, no matter how challenging. And with that practice, she grew in patience, wisdom, and compassion.

Her life serves as an inspiration for all of us to develop a wise and sensitive relationship to our body. Cohen wrote: “People sometimes ask me where my own healing energy comes from. How in the midst of this pain, this implacable slow crippling, I can encourage myself and other people It comes from the shadow. I dip into that muck again and again and then am flooded with its healing energy.” Cohen stands as a role model for how to lean in to our particular circumstances no matter how unwanted or difficult. I know for myself and for many people I have worked with, physical pain is often what forces us to grow, to open, and to find the courage to face the hard stuff in life. As much as we do not want pain, and would not wish it on our worse enemy, the crucible of that struggle is where we tap into resources and capacity we did not know we had.

I’ve suffered off and on for years with chronic back pain, which has only gotten worse with age. As much as I try to take care of my body and exercise regularly, my body, like all bodies, is subject to wear and tear, aches and pains, and at times chronic conditions. No one is immune. Everyone has a particular burden to carry. So I’m always curious how each one of us shows up to meet our particular physical challenges — with openness and kindness or with resentment and reactivity?

The invitation as a human being is to learn to face what comes with this physical form. Whatever pain or condition you struggle with — arthritis, fatigue, psoriasis, sporting injuries, or anything else — can you welcome it with an open and kind attention? This is the orientation of mindfulness practice, which helps us reframe difficult experiences from being a burden into being a chalice of growth and understanding. In working with our own pain in this way, we learn to open our heart to ourselves and broaden compassion for all those who suffer physically.

Take a moment now to reflect on how you face pain or other hard stuff in life. Mindfulness practice trains us to open to the conditions of this moment with a receptive awareness, yet typically, our first impulse is to do the opposite. Ajahn Chah, a beloved Thai meditation teacher, summarized our usual orientation to pain: “By running away from suffering, we run toward it.” That is so often our go-to strategy. We try to escape pain in whatever way we can, through distraction, avoidance, and numbing ourselves. We get lost in our digital devices, stay busy, or drown our feelings with entertainment or alcohol. And who can blame us? Hanging out with discomfort and physical pain is hard.

However, the body doesn’t let us run away. We can avoid pain for only so long before it catches up with us. And the longer the avoidance, the greater the suffering in the long term, as Matthew’s story in the last chapter proved. So it behooves us to learn to gracefully turn toward and face the reality of any physical challenge. This is the lesson Darlene Cohen wrote about: “It’s staring defeat and annihilation in the face that’s so terrifying; I must resist until it overwhelms me. But I’ve come to trust it deeply. It’s enriched my life, informed my work, and taught me not to fear the dark.”

Another common reason we resist and avoid pain is the belief that if we feel the difficulty, we will be quickly overwhelmed and dragged into a well of suffering and despair. Yet it is the very running away that often adds to our stress and prolongs our misery.

Mindfulness, on the other hand, helps develop a capacity to stand in the midst of challenging experience and develop the skill to bear witness to that truth. By staying in the present moment and not being driven by anticipatory thoughts of future pain, we have more resources to deal with any difficulty. Indeed, not buying into catastrophic thoughts helps us remain steady in the midst of the pain. Research has shown that mindfulness practice helps reduce anticipatory fear of something negative or painful. This can spare us from a lot of anxiety about what is to come. It also allows a much quicker recovery from a difficult experience by being present for what is happening now, rather than being lost in the painful memory of the past.

What does it look like to actually turn toward pain? It means to simply turn the light of awareness toward the experience. This means we take time to feel, sense, and inhabit the unpleasant and difficult sensations with a soft, curious attention. It requires some courage to lean into the physical difficulty and to feel all the nuances of that tender experience. By doing so we sense how pain isn’t a monolithic experience, which the label “pain” implies. It is actually an ever-changing flow of sensations — pulsing, vibrating, stabbing, and searing, along with pressure, density, heat, and tightness — all swirling together.

One thing we discover is that pain does not endure forever. It is always a shape-shifting dance of experience, ebbing and flowing depending on all sorts of factors, many of which are out of our control. Pain may not go away for a long time, but it rarely stays the same for more than two moments.

What is important to understand is how our experience of pain is influenced by the quality of our attention. If we meet pain with resistance and fear, or with an agenda to get rid of it, it often feels worse because we grip in contraction against it. If we meet pain with a sense of surrender, of softening the contraction or the tight muscles around it, this can increase a sense of space or ease, even when the difficult experience continues. This lessening of reactivity is possible, but it requires perseverance and patience, which is why meditation is referred to as a “practice.” Practice requires practice!

For example, Joey, a woman who was on disability leave from work, came to a mindfulness-based stress reduction class I was teaching. Her physician referred her to the course, as she had suffered from chronic neck pain for over ten years, and no amount of surgery or medication had helped. Her life was tormented by this malady and by the feeling of being a victim of pain. Through the practice of mindfulness, Joey was invited, like all participants, to see if she could be with the pain, in her case the sensations in her neck, with a kind, curious, nonreactive attention.

At first she said this was impossible. All she felt was hatred toward the searing sensations, along with fear about the situation worsening. She also felt, as many do, a lot of resistance and tightness around the source of the pain, as if her whole body was bracing in fear and anger around the difficulty. However, after about five weeks, she came into the class excited to report her experience during a meditation session at home. For the first time in a decade, she had been able to soften her defenses around her neck injury and simply feel the center of the nerve pain, which was an intermittent throbbing. Although this awareness did not make the pain go away, it gave her the first relief in a very long time. She saw that the pain was not some permanent monolithic mass of unpleasantness but a pulsing wave of sharp sensations that came and went.

In that moment, Joey realized that fear, contraction, anger, and resistance just compound her pain. When she softened enough to meet her experience with kind attention, she felt the pain ease. As she stopped fighting and blaming, she also stopped adding to her distress. Steadily, through practice, she developed important tools to find some ease in the midst of difficulty, which became an important metaphor for other struggles she faced in life.

• PRACTICE •

Attuning to Pain with Kind Attention

The next time you are in physical pain or feel discomfort in your body, try this meditation, which is an invitation to explore pain with mindfulness. Settle your body into the most comfortable posture you can, either sitting or lying down. Close your eyes and allow your body to rest at ease. Try to release any tension you are holding in your jaw, belly, facial muscles, and shoulders. In general, invite your body to relax as much as possible.

Then gently shift your attention to the felt sensations of whatever discomfort or painful experience is present. Try to release the concept or label of “pain,” and instead connect with the direct physical experience. Can you sense the periphery of the painful area? Can you feel the center of it? What are the sensations like? Notice what happens when you bring your awareness to this area. Does it change the experience, making it grow in intensity or fade? Keep exploring this area as if this were the first time you had ever felt this, and sense all of the changing nuances of the experience.

In particular, notice the “unpleasant” or painful quality of the sensation. This might be a quality of sharpness, pressure, pinching, stabbing, or searing heat. This unpleasantness is what we react to and try to push away, reject, or resist. Yet the more we can accommodate the unpleasant sensations, however difficult, the more we can find a steadiness of presence with them. From the perspective of awareness, these are simply temporal experiences, nothing more, nothing less.

However, our preferential mind seeks to get rid of what we dislike, and this contention, simply put, adds stress to the situation. So notice if you relate to your pain with hatred, fear, or resentment. Do you hope you can meditate it away? If you observe any aversion or resistance toward the pain, bring attention to that reaction. When we hold any experience in the light of awareness, we become less caught up in it. Rather than being swept up in resisting the pain, shift attention to feel the painful contracted nature of resistance itself. Feel how that very reactivity can add more stress on top of pain. When we see that process, it makes it easier to release the reaction.

However, if you find it too difficult to stay with the pain or you feel too reactive to it — which can happen when we hurt too much or have become too weary — switch your attention to something less difficult. For example, feel your breath, listen to sounds inside or outside, or attune to a place in your body where there is no pain, possibly in your hands or feet. Seek a refuge to rest the attention. Or you can simply shift your posture if that helps alleviate the tension. This allows some ease to the nervous system, which is necessary to stay resilient when working with chronic pain.

If there is nowhere in your body that is a calm refuge, then open your eyes for a moment and take in something uplifting, such as the sky, a flower or plant, or anything that is beautiful in or outside your room. In that way you can regulate your reactivity by turning awareness to that which brings ease or lightness. Once a sense of balance is reestablished, then you can again sense the pain but from a more spacious perspective. You may find you need to move your attention back and forth many times from the difficult stimulus to something pleasant as a way of staying balanced in relation to the pain. Utilize this principle throughout your day as a support for finding greater ease whenever physical pain or unpleasant sensation arises.

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