Chronic Pain and the End of Resistance
El dolor crónico y el fin de la resistencia
A question about chronic pain, whether it can be "seen through," and the mysterious connection between mental suffering and physical sensation.
Chronic Pain and the End of Resistance
A question about chronic pain, whether it can be "seen through," and the mysterious connection between mental suffering and physical sensation.
Last time you mentioned being in chronic pain and how that changed when you saw through it. I was curious about that. Is it something you ongoingly have that you can see through, or is it connected to mental suffering?
It's a bit of a long story, and it's complex. There were all kinds of pain, some very mysterious, some not.
Chronic pain is not that rare, but in my case, some of the causes were connected to the strangeness of this spiritual work. My teacher forecasted that I was of the type that would likely have to deal with that. He said, "I'm really sorry to say this, but I'm getting the intuition that you're going to have to go through a lot of physical pain."
The onset of working with pain
Shortly after, I had a very strong energetic awakening. You could call it kundalini. Most of it was physical pain. There were also the mystical journeys, the bliss, the ups and the downs, but the physical pain was the core of it. That was the beginning of really dealing with physical pain.
It became the focus, because it was a huge part of the mental and psychological suffering. I was already suffering immensely before that, but the physical pain concentrated everything. So anything I could do to alleviate it, that's where I directed my energy. This was fifteen to twenty years ago. Then there were other kinds of pain too, and some I was able to address more medically.
What shifted
I'm not sure how to answer simply, but what happened is that a lot of it went away. In a sense, it went away as I was able to be with it and not fight it. Then at some point, something shifted where it no longer mattered. Without the psychological attachment of it being pain, without the mental seeing of it only as something unwanted and unpleasant, when it was seen as a certain kind of aliveness and sensation, as one more color in the palette of experience, I was in a sense freed from the pain.
There still is physical pain. If I stub my toe on the table, it's still unpleasant. But the reactivity that used to go with that has disappeared. And the chronic pain itself, most of it is gone. I think mostly due to the ending of the resistance to it. It's almost as though resistance was the cause of much of that pain.
The pain thing, there's a lot of mental interpretation of pain, right? That's what's happening.
Yes. The big thing was this deep belief that if only the pain would stop, I would be okay. Now it literally is just sensation. It's a sensation we call pain, different kinds, but I only experience it as just another kind of sensation. Obviously when it's intense, there can be a reaction: "Wow, that's a lot," or "Damn, that's painful." But there isn't any of what there used to be, which was this very deep sense of not-okayness.
The body doing what the mind is doing
It's almost like every cell has its own kind of thought process as well. When I think of autoimmune conditions, the cells attack each other by mistake, thinking something's wrong. This feels similar. The body is going, "This is really wrong, this needs to change," going into a kind of shock, a "get out" response. And the cells are doing what the mind is doing. There's no separation, is there? I've been compartmentalizing, treating my mind as one thing and the cells as another, but the cells are doing the same thing the mind is doing: deciding there's something really wrong here, that something needs to change, that we need to act rather than just be with it.
You're right that there is no separation between mind and body. It's a lot more complex and mysterious than we can imagine, and there's still a great deal of scientific learning and progress on that front. Some parts of the process work well and are healthy. The body is constantly killing organisms that are unwanted, and that maintains a state of health. But sometimes it tips into disease.
Mind, body, and the remission of illness
One of my teachers was a medical doctor who had an awakening and started leading retreats. Many of the people who came to him were his patients, people with deep illness. For many years he worked with people who were very sick. To his surprise, he saw many remissions from cancer through what we could call meditation and various energetic practices. To this day, he is still very surprised and does not know exactly why it happened. He's written about it extensively, including a medical article on the spontaneous remission of cancer.
He even identified a type of person more prone to cancer, and it was a type of mental structure. He observed different psychological types: one was more likely to get cancer, the other more likely to become schizophrenic. So he brought the schizophrenic patients and the cancer patients together, and they balanced each other out. The schizophrenic patients were able to get off medication, and the cancer patients became less symptomatic, with some going into full remission. He didn't fully understand how it happened, but he knew that it was real.
I'm telling you this because it shows that there is a great deal going on that remains very mysterious, and the connection between mind and body is far more powerful than we think.