From Pain Distraction to Reflection

 We who are fearless and hard hearted, despite having seen so many sufferings, of birth, old age, sickness and death, are wasting our human lives, endowed with freedom and opportunity, on the paths of distraction. Grant your blessing so that we may continuously remember impermanence and death.Page10

From the Common Preliminary Practice in the  Tibetan Book of the Dead. Penguin, 2005

I felt compelled to come back and explain something probably more to myself than to anyone else (which is good considering I will probably be the only one that reads this lol).

I keep mentioning the physical pain as the one trigger that takes me back into the moving narrative of my mind.  And that is not true.  I certainly have pain but it is more of a mental pain related to the physical that brings me back to a particular movie.  The pain I am having right now,  as was the pain I had in my armpit a few years ago and the pain I had in my left lower quadrant ( well that one could creep up to a nine at times) and the pain I get in my chest when I am having coronary vasospasms ( well I shouldn't use that for an example  either...that too can go up to a 9 pretty quick)...What I am trying to say is physical pain, by itself, is not a trigger. It is usually not that bad and  I can take pain, I really can especially if I can see and understand the cause of it, whatever that cause may be. This pain I get in my side is more of a deep, dull ache than a pain. At best it is a 6 /10 on the scale , most of the time less than a five.  And it is usually only "bad"  at night.  I didn't stop doing yoga and therefore teaching yoga because the pain is too much to bear. I can bear it.  I can still do yoga though it is very uncomfortable, but the thing is...if I do a full practice during the day, I will really feel the pain on those nights .  It will get bad enough to keep me awake. Sleep seems to be the only reprieve I have these days from all the other stressors in my life, like,  "How am I going to survive financially? or how am I going to handle the suffering of loved ones without getting lost in it?" So I don't want to be awake all night thinking of these things as well as the story connected to any bout of physical pain I get. I don't want the physical pain for that reason. It isn't the pain I resist but that which is connected to it: the story and the not knowing.

Physical pain brings me back to the movie, "Oh Wo Is Me."   There is so little hope, in this movie, that this will be diagnosed and treated effectively when the others have yet to be. Some one keeps calling out in this movie, " Look what assumption  has done! You lost more than just your health and any hope of being treated so you can get better, you lost your job, your career, your  income, your sense of self esteem, your reputation and a purpose. "

 The "me" of this experience  has been really diminished by past pain and fears it will  be farther diminished with this pain...and has so little left to give away to any health seeking venture. 

So when I am walking in the woods really feeling the now...what takes me out of my moment isn't the sudden experience of physical pain but the story attached to it. I automatically go to the story. The story is so darn consuming. 

I honestly believe I could handle anything...any diagnosis and subsequent prognosis.  That isn't it either.  It is the not knowing and this belief I have that I will never know what is happening to my body, that others will never know and never assist me in the way that is needed, that pulls me in. I fear I will never be believed until it is too late..  As someone who taught Pathophysiology for years and someone who has been practicing yoga enough to have established a certain union with her body....I know something is happening to this form, just as I did with the other pain experiences. I don't know if it is something serious or not serious. I just know it is something. I want to know what it is. So I am still clinging ...not to the pain experience... but to the desire to know and understand what is causing it.  Letting  go of a need to know, is very challenging. 

Of course, all this clinging and wanting to know, this feeling diminished  is what is going on in the movie. I am distracted by the movie but he Greater part of me isn't.  It doesn't need to know anything. 

So I recognize, when I am back in the moment,  that all this is just a distraction...just me getting lost in thinking and story whenever I get a bit of physical pain.  I see how everything I was so attached to that I feel I 'lost'  was insignificant in its unreliability.  I see how the suffering I have experienced because of this situation  has led me to something so much deeper and healing than external validation could ever give. I see how it has led me to and continues to lead me  to face some hard truths. It has led me to reflect carefully. on that which most of us run from...the impermanence of things. Our bodies will not last forever. It has led me to reflect on death

Last year, this year, the waxing and waning moons, the days, nights and indivisible time moments are all impermanent. If we reflect, carefully we too are face to face with death. page11

Hmm! I still get lost in this movie in my head related to pain and health seeking but I am able to bring myself back more and more. I am able to  reflect on what is real and important. I understand and accept the impermanence of things.

All is well