The Only Way I Know to Alleviate Suffering
Self-healing is an area I've explored intensely because I have had
rheumatoid arthritis, a very painful and crippling disease, for
eighteen years. It began in my seventh year of zen practice, while I
was living at Green Gulch Farm. . . . . .Because of my pain I lived in
a world of continual intrusive sensation. It was very much in my
self-interest to notice what circumstances increased or decreased my
pain and then alter my pain level by manipulating those circumstances.
Before becoming so ill, I had trouble interrupting my discursive mind
to make the observations necessary to begin a mindfulness practice. On
a Sunday I would vow to notice all my postural changes, determined to
say to myself when I went from sitting to standing to lying: "Now I'm
standing." Now I'm lying." Then the next time I remembered, Thursday,
say, I would suddenly cry, "Oh! I'm standing!" After becoming ill, I
was highly motivated to make these observations. Changing my posture
was a dramatic event in my life. I needed to heed every little
sensation in my legs and feet in order to go from sitting to standing.
Getting out of my bed and Going to the bathroom took the same kind of
focus and attention as going on safari.
I lived a half-block from the San Francisco Zen Center and used to try
to go to dinner there once a week as a treat to myself. I would walk
down the hill, which brought me to the bottom of a number of steps to
the front door. Going up the steps would be the second leg of a
laborious journey. Sometimes I would make it all the way to the steps
and not be able to go up them. So I would have to strain all the way
back up the hill to my apartment. I asked myself, what is it about my
walking that is so tiring? What I called "walking" was the part of the
step when my foot met the sidewalk. From the point of view of the
joints, that is the most stressful component of walking. The joints get
a rest when the foot is in the air, just before it strikes the
pavement. I found that by focussing on the foot that was in the air
instead of the foot that was striking the pavement, my stamina
increased enormously. After making this observation, I never again
failed to climb the steps to knock on the front door of Zen Center.
I was struck that the focus of my attention could make that much
difference in my physical ability. I began to search out the times my
brain was clumping together many disparate motions into an idea which
would prevent me from overcoming an obstacle, and then I concentrated
on breaking down these aggregates of ideas into discrete units of
smaller experience that I could master. Sick or well, we all do this
all the time. We get into the idea of something, the clump, the heap,
the pile, rather than the actual experience. Someone says, "I can't
practice because I haven't been to the zendo in three weeks" instead of
just going to the zendo when she can. When I haul out the carrots and
the cuttingboard during the arthritis workshops I give, everybody
immediately groans: "I can't cut carrots with my arthritic hands!" But
when you actually hold the knife in your hands, feeling its wooden
handle and sharp, solid blade; and you touch the vulnerable flesh of
the carrot on the cuttingboard; your wrist goes up and down, up and
down; and the orange cylinders of carrot begin to pile up on the board,
you realize: "I can cut carrots." Tears come to people's eyes.
. . . . .When Trungpa Rimpoche wrote in The Sacred Path of the Warrior
that "the human potential for intelligence and dignity is attuned to
experiencing the objects around us, the brilliance of the bright blue
sky, the freshness of green fields, and the beauty of the trees and
mountains," I think he was suggesting that our intelligence and dignity
themselves are developed by our being alive for the mundane chaos of
our lives. If we cultivate awareness of our actual experience, without
reference to any preconceived idea, then we don't prefer any particular
state of mind. Intimacy with our activity and the objects around us
connects us deeply to our lives. This connection -- to the earth, our
bodies, our sense impressions, our creative energies, our feelings, to
other people -- is the only way I know of to alleviate suffering. To me
our awareness of these things without preference is a meditation that
synchronizes body and mind. This synchronization, the experience of
deep integrity, of being all of a piece, is a very deep healing. It is
unconventional to value such a subtle experience. It is not encouraged
in our culture. We're much more apt to strive to feel special, uniquely
talented, particularly loved. It's extraordinary to be willing to live
an ordinary life, to be fully alive for the laundry, to be present for
the dishes. We overlook these everyday connections to our lives,
waiting for The Event.
A client of mine was very annoyed and scolded her husband for coming in
and telling me a joke while I was massaging her at her house. When I
asked her why she minded so much, she said to me, "He was using up my
time with you." She was not in a state of mind that could be satisfied
by simply listening to the sound of her husband's voice as he told a
joke, of feeling my fingers on her body, of sensing the animal presense
of the three of us sharing the room. She didn't even examine the
starved, jealous mind that resented his brief interruption.
Paradoxically, noticing this kind of small-mindedness can actually add
rich texture to the weave of your life. When you include the shadow in
your perceptions, your conscious life begins to be shaded and textured
by your anguish and your petty little snits. Sanitizing your thoughts
and your preoccupations not only squanders vital energy that would be
better spent in your creative endeavors, but your not-so-presentable
life can be enormously enriching and provide the compost for the
development of compassion. If you have never given into temptation of
any kind, how can you ever understand -- or embrace -- the sinner? I
pointed out some of these things to my client. When I next saw her she
told me that after our session she had begun to be flooded with
perceptions. She had noticed how much pain her tense relationship with
her teenaged son was causing her. Being numb had enabled her to
tolerate their friction, but now it was clear to her that she couldn't
live with those hard feelings. She had to engage him and discuss their
problems.
People sometimes ask me where my own healing energy comes from. How in
the midst of this pain, this implacable slow crippling, can I encourage
myself and other people? My answer is that my healing comes from my
bitterness itself, my despair, my terror. It comes from the shadow. I
dip down into that muck again and again and then am flooded with its
healing energy. Despite the renewal and vitality it gives me to face my
deepest fears, I don't go willingly when they call. I've been around
that wheel a million times: first I feel the despair, but I deny it for
a few days; then its tugs become more insistent in proportion to my
resistance; finally it overwhelms me and pulls me down, kicking and
screaming all the way. It's clear I am caught, so at last I give up to
this reunion with the dark aspect of my adjustment to pain and loss.
Immediately the release begins: first peace and then the flood of
vitality and healing energy. I can never just give up to it when I
first feel it stir. You'd think after a million times with a happy
ending, I could give up right away and just say, "Take me, I'm yours,"
but I never can. I always resist. I guess that's why it's called
despair. If you went willingly, it would be called something else, like
purification or renewal or something hopeful. 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.
It seems to me that when we fall ill, we have an opportunity we may not
have noticed when we were well, to literally in-corp-orate the wisdom
of the Buddhas, and to present it as our own body.
©2005 Darlene Cohen.
I thank you too Cordelia as I had read this a couple of years ago somewhere ( maybe in a Gawler Foundation article....that comes to mind now for whatever reason ) and I had wished I had saved it. Now I can!! Didn't have RA then and now that I do, it totally makes sense.