Being here: A Buddhist approach to pain
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At this crucially important axis I made a decision to live, and my life has felt qualitatively different ever since. It is as if prior to that point I was alive because I hadn’t got around to dying, but since then I have been alive because I have actively and consciously chosen to be. Some weeks later I remember driving along Ponsonby Road, a main thoroughfare in Auckland, and looking at my hands, alive and vital on the steering wheel. I became acutely aware that the next time I confronted death I might have no choice about the outcome and I realised I’d better make the most of my life now I had chosen to live it.
The third major experience occurred during one long, long night. This was when I glimpsed for the first time, with a shattering impact, the meaning of living in the present. I had had a medical test during the day that meant I had to sit upright in my bed overnight. At this stage I hadn’t sat up for months because of the severity of my back pain. It seemed impossible and yet I had no choice. I was between a rock and a hard place.
I was in an intensive care ward, surrounded by critically ill people who were moaning and fighting death. It was like a hell realm. I had never been in this sort of situation before, so there was also the shock and bewilderment of unfamiliarity. In the midst of all this suffering, there I was, sitting up in bed, wide awake, wondering how I could possibly survive the next few hours, and willing myself just to cope.
I spent some hours on what felt like the edge of madness debating with myself whether I could get through the night - one voice saying, “I can’t do this. It is impossible. I can’t last until morning. I’ll go mad.” Another voice was saying, “you have to” over and over again, for what felt an age. It was one of the most intense and demanding experiences my life.
Then, suddenly, out of that chaos and tightness there irrupted a sense of lucidity that contained the message, again as a voice: “You don’t have to get through till morning, you only have to get through the present moment.” Simultaneously my experience completely changed. It was like a house of cards collapsing, and all that was left was space. Suddenly the moment had changed from an agonised, desperate, contracted state to one that was soft, full, relaxed and rich - despite the physical pain.
In that second I knew I had experienced something real, reliable and trustworthy. I also intuited that I would spend the rest of my life making sense of it. It contained such questions as, “What is time? What is space? What is the past? What is the future?” But these questions came later as I considered the experience more conceptually. In the experience itself there was just a knowledge that much of my pain and distress were caused by my reactions and fears, along with a knowledge that I could be utterly free of these things. I also saw for the first time that “the present moment is always bearable”, and this continues to sustain me all these years later.
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