Opening and Accepting
Opening to and accepting pain is the most critical part of making the best of your situation. It is also the most difficult. Opening and accepting pain to fully experience it seems counterintuitive. Over or under-reacting seems normal. We are conditioned to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and we want the pain to go away right now.
I learned about opening up and accepting when my friend taught me how to stay warm on a freezing day. The cold was painful, and I was trying to fight it off - hunched over, tight, shoulders pulled together and rolled forward to create a circle around my chest. Herb's advice was to straighten up and relax, let the cold in and let your body find its balance. Let the pain in, straighten up, and relax to find your center and gather your wits so you can think calmly and clearly.
The middle way between over and under-reacting is to open, act and learn. It is to respond rather than react. Opening and accepting helps to avoid trauma and post-traumatic stress.
To be clear, opening and accepting does not rule out the use of medication or other pain relief techniques to manage the pain. Opening and accepting make conscious, rational choice possible.
Pain and Suffering
There is a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is an uncomfortable physical sensation caused by illness or physical or emotional injury.
Sadness, for example, is painful. It morphs into suffering when it settles in and becomes depression or anger. The pain of a pinched nerve morphs into chronic pain and suffering when it is ignored or compensated for by poorly adjusting posture or over-medicating.
Suffering
Suffering is a long-lasting, self-imposed form of pain.
Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is the experience of distress, anger, misery, depression, fed by the mind in reaction to the pain. Your thoughts, beliefs memories, and emotional reactions create suffering. Suffering is avoidable.
For example, barefoot, Jules steps on a tack, there is pain. Jules complains "There shouldn't be tacks on the floor!" "Who put that tack there?" Or "Why is it always me that finds tacks to step on?" "Will I get some disease from the tack?” In a rage, Jules might attack the person responsible for the tack. Then, someone soothes the foot and diverts attention, and the pain is gone. Everything following the pain sensation until letting the pain go is suffering.
Chronic Pain and Suffering
Chronic pain lasts for months or longer. It may be the result of an injury, illnesses such as arthritis and cancer, pinched nerves, or other conditions.
Suffering is a form of chronic pain, it is long lasting, and it hurts. With chronic physical pain, it is easy to get caught up in thoughts like "I can't live with this!", "Will it ever go away?" which lead to the mental suffering of chronic psychological pain like despair, anger, and unrelenting grief.
Making the Best of Pain
Pain is an individual experience. Its purpose is to tell us that something is not right. To make the best of pain, you must be ‘awake.’ If you are unconscious, fully lost in panic, nothing can be done. Once you come to your senses, you can:
- Open and Accept: Step back from the pain to observe it as if it wasn't yours
- Act:
- Recognize the pain and its quality
- Do first aid as needed (for example, remove the tack, apply antiseptic)
- Be mindfully aware of thoughts and feelings triggered by the pain experience
- Avoid being caught up in a spiral into suffering
- Carry on. Do what can be done.
- Learn: Review the experience and learn from it. Learn what it feels like to step back and observe. Learn to open and accept more easily.
Mindfulness is needed to recognize the pain and the thoughts and feelings triggered by it. With mindfulness practice you can be both fully engaged and objectively observing the movement of physical sensations, emotions, and thoughts as if it all was an entertaining movie. Sometimes a tragedy, sometimes a comedy. Adding the attitude that everything is fuel for the process of awakening self-awareness, changes everything.