Being here: A Buddhist approach to pain
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Twenty-four years ago, when I was sixteen, I lifted someone out of a swimming pool in lifesaving practice and seriously injured my spine. The injury left me with constant pain that has gradually worsened over the years. This injury, and an additional spinal injury in a car accident five years later, have changed me into a more thoughtful person. I went from being an athletic, active young woman who had not had to think deeply about life, into a woman facing intractable questions about the nature of humanity, sickness, aging and the inevitability of human suffering.
My main area of inquiry has been exploring the distinction between unavoidable suffering that is a natural consequence of having a body that will get ill and age, and the sharper suffering of reacting to this fact. Is this secondary level of suffering - either pushing away unpleasant experience or blindly grasping after pleasant ones - at the root of the restless unhappiness and discontent we so often feel? How do we transform this knee-jerk reactive momentum and create instead a sense of space and the possibility of choice in each moment, no matter what our circumstances? Is this what the spiritual life is essentially about? Is the key to freedom?
In my case the options are stark and immediate: do I have physical and mental misery, which is truly horrible; or do I have physical pain and a sense of space and choice in my mental and emotional responses? I cannot make the pain go away, but I can change how I respond to it. The motivation for finding a creative, positive response is extremely high. This need for creativity in our responses applies to all of us. It is just particularly obvious to me in my circumstances.
These are big questions, but ones I feel fortunate to have had to face, despite the inner struggles they provoked. I would never have had the strength to choose such intensity if there had been an alternative, yet, in a strange way, the pain that is so hard to live with is the very thing drives me closer to the truth of the human condition. That is what keeps those searching questions constantly alive. Sometimes I feel impaled on these questions about the nature of life and human suffering, but the more I grapple with them - probing them, taking them deeper - the closer I am to coming to terms with life, just as it is, and finding peace and understanding.
Although I had experienced physical pain since my first injury, these deeper reflections on responses to pain didn’t emerge in any conscious or urgent sense for 10 years, when I became very ill. Prior to this I had never dealt with my condition nor faced it in a mature way. I lived in an invented reality much of the time that pretended the pain wasn’t real and simply blocked it out with medication and unawareness. I was able to keep this up for a decade but then, inevitably, came a time of reckoning.
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