post for 8/23/10 - pain

Yes, the ecstasy for Monday the 23rd is pain. We all need to come to terms with pain, to revel in it, to set aside time for it, to truly enjoy it when it happens. How do we do this? It’s like the yin-yang symbol, how within darkness, there is the seed of light (and within light, the seed of darkness). It’s one of the great paradoxes I think, and it’s partly a matter of disciplining the mind.

I know a few people who are midwives, and I studied for a while myself to be a midwife. Just when I was realizing that attending someone’s labor for days at a time wasn’t a good fit for my family and me, I took a workshop where midwives were talking about hypnobirthing. In the 1990’s it seemed like the best, most workable pain-free childbirth, where women learn to put themselves in a kind of trance in labor, and it allows them to dilate and push with minimal discomfort, theoretically. I’m sure it works for some people, and I think our minds are built for that.

But here are my two examples of pain being an ecstasy, and one of them is childbirth. I won’t go into too many details except to say that I had a hard time at first dealing with the pain of contractions. And because I didn’t want myself or my baby to be groggy, I didn’t want any meds. So I meditated. It was best when my healer arrived and breathed with me. She was completely unafraid and encouraged me to approach the source of the pain. I dropped my awareness to my bottom, and as the baby’s head hit every two minutes, instead of feeling a stabbing pain, as I had been in my fear, I stayed with it, and it ended up feeling like a really hard thud, and not excruciating. As I got the hang of going into the pain, it really got easier, although it took all my focus, to the point of being like, this is really hard, but kind of fun. And then, here’s the next contraction, and let me see how I can disperse this one. And to this day, I still remember the thuds, not pain, with joy.

A few years later, I was taking a walk with a friend along a rocky beach on the North Shore. I was wallowing in self-pity at the time, which took attention away from my footsteps. So I didn’t watch where I was going and fell and got a huge scrape on my thigh. Seriously, the whole outside of the upper part of my leg was raw and bleeding like hamburger. And I felt like an idiot, because I knew what I really wanted was sympathy, but it wasn't the right time or place. So I focused my consciousness on my hamburger-colored scrape, got into it so I could feel the throbbing of blood through the site, and then all I felt was warmth & expansion, not the sharp tenderness I had felt a moment before.

What happens when we bring our focus to staying present with pain, instead of recoiling from it, is that the sensation changes from a tight horrible feeling to the joy of intense focus and accomplishment. Yes, I know, an ecstasy.

A version of this works for emotional pain as well, but that's a topic for another day.