Being here: A Buddhist approach to pain
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The fourth experience occurred some days later and was the first time that I clearly understood that it is possible to be mentally creative and work consciously with the mind in order to transform one’s experience and perception - even in the grip of physical pain. It occurred when the hospital chaplain, an elderly Anglican, came to my bedside to offer help and guidance. I was not a believer in any sense of word, but none the less he gave me a tremendous gift. He took my hand and led me through a guided meditation in which I experienced peace and joy, even while in a lot of pain.
My curiosity was aroused by this initial experience of meditation, and after going home from hospital I had a very good social worker who helped me further that interest. With meditation I sensed I had been handed a key that could help me make sense of what I was dealing with. I spent a year or so lying for hours a day on my bed at home exploring my mind and its reactions and responses, while gradually physically rehabilitating myself. I attended the Auckland Buddhist Centre a couple years later and at last found a context to make sense of what I had uncovered. This process of exploration still continues some 13 years later with the help and guidance of the philosophy and methodology the Buddha taught.
As the years go by I’m clearer about what essentially I am working on with the “physical pain practice”. It boils down to aversion and reactivity. I experience something I dislike in the form of physical pain, so I react with aversion - sometimes grossly, sometimes more subtly. It is as simple and destructive as that, and my moment-by-moment practice consists of trying to re-train this negative attitude and instil a more positive response.
This is what we are all up against in life. I happen to have back pain that makes what I am up against very obvious, but we all have aspects of our lives that we find unpleasant - from the sharp pain and bitter loss of the death of a loved one to the milder frustrations of being stuck in a traffic jam on a winter’s day in a car without a heater. And we all have the basic tendency to push away what we dislike and thereby to increase the experience of tightness and restriction - pulling tighter the densely woven layers of unhappiness.
I was very fortunate to glimpse a more creative perspective in hospital all those years ago. My daily task ever since has been to transform my moment-by-moment reactions so that gradually I can cultivate a positive mental state even when my body is causing me trouble. We all have situations every day in which we can’t make pain disappear, and we will have them as long as we live in this unstable world. But in this very instability we can always find freedom in our responses. We can change our experience of pain - be it mental, physical or emotional - from a “thing” we recoil from into a dynamic and fluid experience of the rising and falling moments of sensations within a broad and gentle awareness.
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