Soaking it up for others

Suffering and joy are universal...
Pema Chodron


A Story About Suffering Pain


When I was a teenager I suffered a tremendous amount of pain every month from endometriosis.  Since I was not diagnosed until I seemed unable to get pregnant in my very late twenties, I had no idea why I was experiencing the pain and what I was supposed to do with such  random and punitive attacks .  I couldn't understand it.  I  honestly thought that every women went through that much pain every month and  there was just something wrong with me because I was too wimpy to handle it. So besides the pain, there was a lot of shame. I felt very much alone in my suffering.

During these bouts I would spend days and nights  pacing up and down the halls of the house I grew up in.  Every few minutes I would buckle over in pain, fall to my knees, curl up in a ball rocking back and forth until I had the strength to get up again.  ( okay...I was a teenager...prone to a bit of dramatic expression lol).  Truth was the pain was completely overwhelming. I wanted relief. I needed relief.  I grasped at every mental and physical  trick my young immature mind knew to get through it and would soak up the advice of others.  Nothing seemed to work...

Getting Beyond the personalized Perception of Suffering

That is  until one day during the center of that pain experience when I found myself curled up in a ball on the floor ...I for some reason imagined my mother, who had passed a few years previous, walking up and down that same hall with her cancer pain. I felt her suffering and had this tremendous retroactive wish to be able to remove some of that suffering from her.  I then  imagined my seven year old sister who suffered from severe abdominal pain from her recently diagnosed nephrotic syndrome walking up and down the hall as well.  I pictured one older sister who was yellow with jaundice from the painful  complications of spherocytosis (again at the time not diagnosed) walking hand and hand down the hall with my  asthmatic sister who was suffering from the pain of trying to get a breath of air into her lungs almost everyday. The hallway was suddenly full of suffering beings.

I  felt all that suffering so intensely and so acutely. I so wanted to be able to end it for everyone in my family.  Then I began to think of all the other people out there in the world who were suffering from physical pain related to one thing or another and I began to cry like a baby. My tears and sense of suffering for the first time went beyond my own narcissistic perception of the pain experience to a universal one. 

I pulled myself up from the floor and I began to pace up and down the hall again but this time I did it differently.  With every step I took , I imagined I was soaking up the suffering of another.  With every intense spasm of pain that shot through my body, I imagined I was taking away some of the pain from  someone else who was suffering more than I was.  My suffering , I convinced myself, was diminishing the suffering in the world. It gave my pain purpose . It gave my pain meaning.  It did not take my pain away :) but it made it so much more bearable. That is how I  learned to cope with this monthly pain.  I wasn't always compassionate and successful in maintaining this accepting, empathetic response to pain. Oh man, there were times the pain was so bad I didn't give a s*&^ about anyone else but for the most part I was able to expand beyond my "little me" experience of suffering during my own suffering.

A Buddhist Practice

I, of course, had no idea I was rudimentarily participating in the practice of Bodhicitta when I did this. In fact anything remotely connected to Buddhism was so taboo in my religious upbringing I probably would have been voluntarily  exorcised if I knew that what I was doing was actually a Buddhist practice. :)

Now I embrace the understanding of this practice...not on religious or even spiritual basis but on a foundation of humanity. It can be, I believe,  a deeply healing human practice.

 Bodhicitta? What the heck is that, crazy lady?

I am no expert and very limited in my understanding of Bodhicitta ( in fact, I am not even sure if I am spelling it right) but from my understanding of the teaching from Pema Chodron, it is a practice of connecting with the tender hearted soft spot within us and staying with it for as long as we can. It is about opening to the feelings and experiences we habitually tend to resist and close to as part of our human conditioning. It is about allowing vulnerability, fear, pain and suffering into our moment in a very empathetic and accepting way and it is about releasing the desire for freedom and  joy out into the world.

Say what?

The Tonglen practice itself involves a four step  breath meditation.  We first  open up to a space within us that is free of a need to judge, select, prefer, cling or push away.  Secondly we focus on the texture of what we are going to breathe in and out.  On the in-breath we imagine breathing in  heavy, hot darkness into every cell of our bodies, when we breathe out (the same length as the in -breath) we breathe out fresh, cool light 360 degrees around us. Then, thirdly,  we focus on a particular situation of suffering, possibly trying to envision  the suffering experience of someone we love ( like I did with my sisters) and then fourthly  expanding that to all  others who are suffering in the same way. When we breathe in, we breathe in the wish that they be free of this suffering and when we breathe out we breathe out the wish for joy, peace and happiness in their lives.

Connect and stay with that as long as we can.

Breaking a human habit

This practice involves breaking a habit that is so established in most of our lives.  Most of us only tend to open to what we deem as pleasurable. We push away what we judge as unpleasurable...like suffering or pain.  We resist and close ourselves to it.   We see suffering in the world around us  and our habitual tendency is to close up to it...not deal with it.  When it hits us personally we resist it and say "this shouldn't be..." We feel we are alone in it.

This practice asks that we do something totally different than what we have been doing...to  open up to the unpleasant...open up to that vulnerable spot within us all...and see this softness as universal. It asks that we soak in the pain of the world and the root of it ( which is always in the mind) and transform it while it is within us.  By allowing and accepting the suffering in our moments ( ours and the worlds) and wishing it to diminish the  hold it has on another, we soften. With connection to this softness suffering  is transformed to fresh, cooling, light that extends beyond our own little experience to everyone and everything.

It is so very beautiful and so very healing.

All is well.

Pema Chodron Lecture: Teaching for Love and Happiness. (June, 2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYR574v4F-A