From Suffering to Peace

by Mark Coleman

  However, the body doesn’t let us run away. We can avoid pain for only so long before it catches up with us. And the longer the avoidance, the greater the suffering in the long term, as Matthew’s story in the last chapter proved. So it behooves us to learn to gracefully turn toward and face the reality of any physical challenge. This is the lesson Darlene Cohen wrote about: “It’s staring defeat and annihilation in the face that’s so terrifying; I must resist until it overwhelms me. But I’ve come to trust it deeply. It’s enriched my life, informed my work, and taught me not to fear the dark.”

  Another common reason we resist and avoid pain is the belief that if we feel the difficulty, we will be quickly overwhelmed and dragged into a well of suffering and despair. Yet it is the very running away that often adds to our stress and prolongs our misery.

  Mindfulness, on the other hand, helps develop a capacity to stand in the midst of challenging experience and develop the skill to bear witness to that truth. By staying in the present moment and not being driven by anticipatory thoughts of future pain, we have more resources to deal with any difficulty. Indeed, not buying into catastrophic thoughts helps us remain steady in the midst of the pain. Research has shown that mindfulness practice helps reduce anticipatory fear of something negative or painful. This can spare us from a lot of anxiety about what is to come. It also allows a much quicker recovery from a difficult experience by being present for what is happening now, rather than being lost in the painful memory of the past.

  Similarly, a 2008 pain study considered older adults with chronic low back pain who took part in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program. The increased body awareness of participants led to better pain-coping skills, in part through the use of “conscious distraction.” Conscious distraction sounds paradoxical, but it simply means averting one’s attention to something less painful or difficult. This allows a sense of ease and restoration in the moment, and it increases one’s capacity to deal with pain when it returns. This is an invaluable skill to learn when one has chronic pain. I use it often when my own pain levels are high; at times, it is more skillful to shift the attention elsewhere to bring temporary relief, which allows a relaxing of the nervous system.

  What does it look like to actually turn toward pain? It means to simply turn the light of awareness toward the experience. This means we take time to feel, sense, and inhabit the unpleasant and difficult sensations with a soft, curious attention. It requires some courage to lean into the physical difficulty and to feel all the nuances of that tender experience. By doing so we sense how pain isn’t a monolithic experience, which the label “pain” implies. It is actually an ever-changing flow of sensations — pulsing, vibrating, stabbing, and searing, along with pressure, density, heat, and tightness — all swirling together.

  One thing we discover is that pain does not endure forever. It is always a shape-shifting dance of experience, ebbing and flowing depending on all sorts of factors, many of which are out of our control. Pain may not go away for a long time, but it rarely stays the same for more than two moments.

  What is important to understand is how our experience of pain is influenced by the quality of our attention. If we meet pain with resistance and fear, or with an agenda to get rid of it, it often feels worse because we grip in contraction against it. If we meet pain with a sense of surrender, of softening the contraction or the tight muscles around it, this can increase a sense of space or ease, even when the difficult experience continues. This lessening of reactivity is possible, but it requires perseverance and patience, which is why meditation is referred to as a “practice.” Practice requires practice!

  For example, Joey, a woman who was on disability leave from work, came to a mindfulness-based stress reduction class I was teaching. Her physician referred her to the course, as she had suffered from chronic neck pain for over ten years, and no amount of surgery or medication had helped. Her life was tormented by this malady and by the feeling of being a victim of pain. Through the practice of mindfulness, Joey was invited, like all participants, to see if she could be with the pain, in her case the sensations in her neck, with a kind, curious, nonreactive attention.

  At first she said this was impossible. All she felt was hatred toward the searing sensations, along with fear about the situation worsening. She also felt, as many do, a lot of resistance and tightness around the source of the pain, as if her whole body was bracing in fear and anger around the difficulty. However, after about five weeks, she came into the class excited to report her experience during a meditation session at home. For the first time in a decade, she had been able to soften her defenses around her neck injury and simply feel the center of the nerve pain, which was an intermittent throbbing. Although this awareness did not make the pain go away, it gave her the first relief in a very long time. She saw that the pain was not some permanent monolithic mass of unpleasantness but a pulsing wave of sharp sensations that came and went.

  In that moment, Joey realized that fear, contraction, anger, and resistance just compound her pain. When she softened enough to meet her experience with kind attention, she felt the pain ease. As she stopped fighting and blaming, she also stopped adding to her distress. Steadily, through practice, she developed important tools to find some ease in the midst of difficulty, which became an important metaphor for other struggles she faced in life.

  • PRACTICE •

  Attuning to Pain with Kind Attention

  The next time you are in physical pain or feel discomfort in your body, try this meditation, which is an invitation to explore pain with mindfulness. Settle your body into the most comfortable posture you can, either sitting or lying down. Close your eyes and allow your body to rest at ease. Try to release any tension you are holding in your jaw, belly, facial muscles, and shoulders. In general, invite your body to relax as much as possible.

  Then gently shift your attention to the felt sensations of whatever discomfort or painful experience is present. Try to release the concept or label of “pain,” and instead connect with the direct physical experience. Can you sense the periphery of the painful area? Can you feel the center of it? What are the sensations like? Notice what happens when you bring your awareness to this area. Does it change the experience, making it grow in intensity or fade? Keep exploring this area as if this were the first time you had ever felt this, and sense all of the changing nuances of the experience.

  In particular, notice the “unpleasant” or painful quality of the sensation. This might be a quality of sharpness, pressure, pinching, stabbing, or searing heat. This unpleasantness is what we react to and try to push away, reject, or resist. Yet the more we can accommodate the unpleasant sensations, however difficult, the more we can find a steadiness of presence with them. From the perspective of awareness, these are simply temporal experiences, nothing more, nothing less.

  However, our preferential mind seeks to get rid of what we dislike, and this contention, simply put, adds stress to the situation. So notice if you relate to your pain with hatred, fear, or resentment. Do you hope you can meditate it away? If you observe any aversion or resistance toward the pain, bring attention to that reaction. When we hold any experience in the light of awareness, we become less caught up in it. Rather than being swept up in resisting the pain, shift attention to feel the painful contracted nature of resistance itself. Feel how that very reactivity can add more stress on top of pain. When we see that process, it makes it easier to release the reaction.

  However, if you find it too difficult to stay with the pain or you feel too reactive to it — which can happen when we hurt too much or have become too weary — switch your attention to something less difficult. For example, feel your breath, listen to sounds inside or outside, or attune to a place in your body where there is no pain, possibly in your hands or feet. Seek a refuge to rest the attention. Or you can simply shift your posture if that helps alleviate the tension. This allows some ease to the nervous system, which is necessary to stay resilient when working
with chronic pain.

  If there is nowhere in your body that is a calm refuge, then open your eyes for a moment and take in something uplifting, such as the sky, a flower or plant, or anything that is beautiful in or outside your room. In that way you can regulate your reactivity by turning awareness to that which brings ease or lightness. Once a sense of balance is reestablished, then you can again sense the pain but from a more spacious perspective. You may find you need to move your attention back and forth many times from the difficult stimulus to something pleasant as a way of staying balanced in relation to the pain. Utilize this principle throughout your day as a support for finding greater ease whenever physical pain or unpleasant sensation arises.

  • • •

  Chapter 4

  Finding Refuge in Transience and Uncertainty

  No person ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same person.

  — HERACLITUS

  In 2017,1 taught a mindfulness and emotional-intelligence leadership training for employees from an organization in Sonoma County. They were in the midst of dealing with a lot of posttraumatic distress. What were then the worst fires in Northern California history had recently devastated their county, killing many residents, incinerating over six thousand homes, and leaving thousands homeless.

  During the program, Jane, who lived in Sonoma, told a particularly moving story. She had been evacuated when the fires quickly approached her neighborhood and had only minutes to gather any precious belongings. Many days later, when Jane was allowed to go back to her home, she discovered that her whole neighborhood had been lost. As she walked up to her house, there was not a single thing left. It had been razed to the ground. However, she noticed a rock engraved with the word Faith still lying where the front door had once been. She picked up the charred rock, a gift from a friend, and the metaphor of that word inspired her to begin to put the pieces of her devastated life back together.

  No one would doubt the universal principle of change. The rupture in Jane’s life is but one small example of how it manifests. It is a key teaching common to philosophy, science, and spirituality. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus pointed this out twenty-five hundred years ago: “Nothing endures but change.” Indeed, transience is the only constant, and uncertainty the only certainty. Given that, how do we find peace in this changing world? What can we rely on given the flux and flow of every living thing and every experience we love and hold dear? This is the dilemma we face. Nothing endures, but we still feel an urge to hold on to and control our experience so it doesn’t change or leave. My friend, who lost his wife to cancer, described this paradox beautifully. Not long after her death, he said: “I have completely let her go, and I totally want her back.”

  Though most people acknowledge and accept the reality of impermanence, it takes a wise person to live in alignment with this law. Most of the time, we resist it or ignore it. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we easily fall into the trap of expecting things to continue the way they are or have been, only to be caught off guard or annoyed when life upends that assumption.

  Even though I know deeply how things change, I still forget this in simple ways all the time. For example, I can get annoyed when a scratch appears on my new car, or I can be surprised when the beautiful orchids I cherish begin their inevitable deterioration after their long months of bold bloom. I may feel shock when a favorite old shirt suddenly develops a hole, or feel resistance when a beloved friend moves to a different city, as if I’d assumed they would stay nearby forever.

  That everyone gets taken aback by change in small ways is almost as enduring a truth as change itself. But our resistance to the bigger changes in life is what becomes more problematic. Do you resent signs of aging, like graying hair and lines etched more deeply around your eyes? Do you resist slowing down to accommodate your older, less supple body? Do you protest when your perfectly healthy body gets sick or you receive an unexpected medical diagnosis? Do the ups and downs of the stock market and economic uncertainty fill you with anxiety and resentment? The ways we resist change are innumerable, even though we know it is hopeless and even painful to do so.

  These are natural responses to our human predicament, to vulnerability. We live in a changing world and an unreliable body; we live with uncertain relationships, a fluctuating economy, shifting social norms, and rapidly advancing technology. We never know when disaster will strike, whether that’s a life-threatening diagnosis to a loved one, a forest fire that rips through our house, or a sudden economic crash that guts our retirement savings. No wonder we are anxious and restless. No wonder the brain, in an attempt to survive this turmoil, developed a negativity bias, which is always scanning for perceived threats. Where do we find peace and ease amidst these ever-shifting realities?

  Susan, an independent-living specialist, teaches an “adjustment to vision loss” course to individuals and groups. A significant part of the class is teaching mindfulness meditation. Losing vision is an extremely difficult, fearful experience that affects all aspects of a person’s life. Visually impaired individuals can lose friends, who feel uncomfortable around them; lose jobs that they no longer can accomplish; and even lose their normal place in their families. The resulting stress can cause isolation and physical and emotional problems.

  As a way of working with these challenges, Susan introduces patients to meditation. Early on, she noticed how this practice helps people reduce their stress. It helps her patients think more clearly and make better decisions. It assists them to communicate better about their many losses. From there, people can start the process of regaining a healthy sense of themselves in order to self-advocate, retrain for new careers, and regain their general health.

  Simply put, mindfulness helps them develop the clarity to meet their changing circumstances, which necessitate adaptability. Shining a spotlight on the changing nature of experience is what allows all of us to know it in our bones, so it informs everything we do. Such insight shapes and crafts our being. We then flow better with the shifting rhythm of life, like Susan’s patients; we are responsive rather than resistant.

  This requires a careful and sustained inquiry into our lived experience of transience. We need to know this reality intimately. When meditating, it means being aware of how every moment is a changing landscape of phenomena. Sounds ceaselessly come and go. Physical sensations are forever pulsing, vibrating, tingling, shifting, and moving — tensing and relaxing, expanding and contracting. Thoughts flicker like static, constantly generating flurries of ideas. Mental images create movies of visual landscapes. The breath is a restless wave moving through our torso. Emotions ebb and flow like tides or storms. Moods forever arise and pass.

  Nothing is static in our inner world, which is a dance of ephemeral experience. The closer we attend to this reality, the more we see that no thing stays around for very long. The deeper we penetrate this truth, the more it allows us to not hold on so tightly. We see how experience is like water evaporating into thin air. It’s impossible to hold. We learn to release the controlling grip we so often have around our experience, body, friends, work, money, and life. Holding them so tightly, we often squeeze the space or the light out of them. Instead, we can learn to appreciate what we have and not take it for granted.

  In time, we learn to savor life’s transient preciousness and to let go when that is asked of us. Rather than considering impermanence to be a depressing reflection, we can instead think of it as an urgent call to wake up, to be present and taste the exquisiteness of this fleeting moment. When we really get how brief and uncertain life is, then we stop taking things for granted and pay rapt attention to the beauty and richness of life all around us.

  “One less” is a mantra that I developed for myself in relation to this theme of change. Whatever I am doing — whether breathing, watching the full moon rise, the setting sun, spending time with a beloved friend, or visiting with my parents in England — I reflect that it is one less time that I
will get to do it in this life. Each breath taken is one less inhale and exhale. Each lunar cycle is one less to witness. Each summer is one less time to feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. Each time with beloved friends and family is one less time to savor their company, and so on. When I do this, I feel the urgency to really take in each moment. To not get complacent thinking I will have a thousand more just like it. Because the truth is, we never know how long we will get to experience this fleeting and beautiful world.

  • PRACTICE •

  Meditating on Impermanence

  This meditation can be done anywhere, but it is meant to take place where there is a lot of activity and stimulation — the more the better. Seek out a bench in a city park or train station. Sit in a chair in a busy café or restaurant.

  To begin, sit comfortably and lower your gaze; if it is comfortable and safe to do so, you might close your eyes. Become aware of the totality of your experience. Start with being aware of sounds. Listen to all the changing noises, both loud and quiet, distant and near. Attend to people, machines, traffic, birds, and conversations. Notice the constantly changing auditory landscape.

  Next, without losing awareness of sounds, become present to all the changing physical sensory impressions in your body. Notice the ever-shifting variety of touch and physical sensation: pressure, movement, tingling, vibration, ceaselessly ebbing and flowing. Feel the breath, that continual reminder of change, which never stays the same for more than a moment.