Pain, Energy, and Knowing the Difference
Dolor, energía y saber distinguir la diferencia
The teacher shares details of an intense energetic process accompanied by physical pain and illness, leading to a conversation about discerning between energetic phenomena and medical conditions, and the underlying fear of death.
Pain, Energy, and Knowing the Difference
The teacher shares details of an intense energetic process accompanied by physical pain and illness, leading to a conversation about discerning between energetic phenomena and medical conditions, and the underlying fear of death.
I only caught the end of your earlier share because I was actually in the hospital. Is there anything you might be okay sharing again?
Very briefly, I was speaking about an energetic process that for me started in 2008. It started with brutal force: a lot of pain, a lot of mystical experiences, a lot of bliss, a lot of madness. Then it subsided, started coming back, and grew more intense. The last month has been extremely intense.
There is now practically zero effect on the psyche, psychology, or mental states. It doesn't affect me emotionally or mentally. No mystical states. Everything stays the same, but there is a lot of intense sensation, energetics, and pain. Then the pain subsides and there are very expansive, blissful sensations. It has also shifted the way I function, the way I relate to things and to people. In a sense, it is like clearing conditionings, limitations, and form.
Because I had already been on the edge with a lot of work, I was burning out a bit. I caught a very mild pneumonia at the end of about ten days of that energetic wave. I recovered, and then a week later the energy went out with a bang. It had been going for about three weeks, and at the end it went through the roof. I ended up unable to move for a few hours. Someone had to help me just lift my arms. A few hours later, she helped me crawl two meters and practically lifted me onto the bed. The day after, the pneumonia relapsed and I went to the hospital. I got treated, left the hospital, and after that big finale the energy stopped. I had a few days of very blissful physical states, and then I'm here.
I was also recommended to look into what Jiddu Krishnamurti documented and journaled as "the process," which I did. It is startlingly accurate. I was very moved. I was in tears reading something that seems extremely similar to my own experience.
Thank you so much for sharing. Sorry you went through all that pain, but it sounds like you're happy about the positive effects.
No real gain
It's strange. Although there is a clear progression, it doesn't seem to me to be necessary. I read something from Krishnamurti that put this into words exactly. It's like there is no real gain. It just happens, and sure, there is growth, but I think it's important to say: the subjective experience of it is that I don't need that to happen. There isn't a sense of "better," though I can see that it is better. I have no interest in or attachment to that improvement.
It sounds like you don't feel resistance to it.
The only moment I felt resistance was at the peak of that last night, when it went so intense that there was basically a silent cry of, "What the fuck." I've gone through that before, so it was very familiar, but there was a sense of a part of me really wanting it to stop. That is solid resistance. I was just exhausted. Then, literally after that, I couldn't lift anything. I ended up prostrate with my forehead on a concrete floor. Someone had to lift my head, hold it with one hand, put a pillow under it, and then do the same with my arms and legs so I wasn't lying with knees, elbows, and head on hard floor. I was there for a few hours until I could move. I was two meters from the bed. I crawled, she helped me, and then it was a whole maneuver to get me onto it. Around noon the next day, I called the doctor to take me to the hospital because I could feel the pneumonia coming back. I was completely burnt out.
I was also at altitude, almost 2,000 meters, which does not help pneumonia. My blood oxygen was very low. My heart rate went through the roof to keep oxygen going. Now I'm on the coast and it's much easier. My blood oxygen just went up.
It's amazing to hear how dramatic it was for your body, but also that it didn't seem so dramatic for you in your mind.
Where the real challenge lies
The drama in my mind, what I would call the challenging stuff, is very practical. It's work, dynamics with people, processing, learning, figuring out a way, planning. That's the more active thing. The rest is just happening. It was more difficult for the person caring for me than for me.
Something I'll share: the first time I got pneumonia, the doctor came, saw me, and said my oxygen was so low he'd need to take me to the hospital and have me admitted, hooked up for days. But that afternoon, one of the energy surges came without pain and moved through. All of the lung sensations and difficulty breathing disappeared. He tested me again and said he didn't see any signs. He still gave me antibiotics, but I had no symptoms. Then a week later, after that exhaustion and the final energetic peak, the pneumonia came back.
I spoke to someone who is a medical doctor with a lot of experience with energy and with working with cancer patients who had remission through energetic processes (retreats after which they would leave with no cancer). He was not at all surprised that the energy moved and the pneumonia was gone. But then it came back. They took x-rays, so I saw the evidence. It wasn't just subjective. The pneumonia was gone and then back, very quickly, in the matter of thirty minutes.
I remember you sharing about how things were super intense before your awakening and then it sounded like it just stopped.
It didn't stop. It just wasn't that intense for a while. This year it's the second or third round, and definitely the most intense in a long time.
Unbearable but no suffering
But the difference is that the way you experience it is completely different, because you're not resisting and you're not suffering with it.
Exactly. It used to be, "Oh my God, so much suffering and resistance." Now it is still unbearable, but there is no suffering. In an entire month, there were about thirty seconds of resistance, right at the peak of the most intense moment.
I remember Adyashanti talked a lot about his severe pain that lasted something like ten or even twenty years. He described it as unbearable pain. He said that sometimes he even had to check on the awakening, because he wasn't fully sure it was still relevant. The pain was so bad that it wasn't like, "I'm so free of it." It was just pure pain. Now he's healed and out of the woods, but I remember him describing how there was just a tiny glimmer of consciousness and mostly just pain, pretty much all the time.
It's pretty common on the awakening path for things to become very physical. That's definitely been my journey: so much in the way of physical health challenges and pain. I just had appendicitis. At the peak pain, I didn't go to the hospital because I knew the symptoms of appendicitis, but I thought it could just be energetic since this stuff happens to me all the time and it's never anything medical. So I suffered through the pain and then it was kind of gone, even though I still had the local pain. I was okay for days with just the local pain. Then I went to the doctor for a routine thing and they told me I needed to go to the emergency room immediately. They were surprised, because appendicitis doesn't normally go that way. It either gets really bad and then bursts; it doesn't get better. I have no idea what that was about.
I had the surgery, and since then I fainted and hit my head a couple of times. The same kind of dizzy, intense symptoms have been lingering for about three and a half weeks, and the doctors say that's not normal. It's just been ongoing, weird physical stuff. I'm seeing how these are patterns coming up, the emotional things tied to them rising through consciousness. I'm feeling and seeing it. But there's definitely a lot of wanting to fix it, and then there's surrender, and then there's fixing again. It comes in waves. I'm surrendered and it's fine, and then there's, "Oh no, danger," and that's the fear I have to feel. Waves of intense stuff, and definitely resistance.
Discerning energy from illness
I want to highlight something. When I talk about the pain, I'm going to describe it specifically, because I don't want generalizations about pain to be confused with what I'm describing.
When I describe energy, it's a mix of complex sensations, but it feels like a current that moves. It can have different directionality, from bottom up or top down. It feels like electricity, as if you touched something with a slight electrical charge and felt it in your hands. There can be twitching. Part of it is electrical, and another part is as if warmer or cooler water were washing through the flesh and bone. It has a very directional movement: you can feel it moving up the legs, up the spine, through the hips, and you can feel it in the flesh.
There is this electrical charge; the muscles activate. It can go up the whole body, neck, and head, and then reverse from the top to the bottom, which feels more like a waterfall going right through the flesh. There is a very intense electrical aspect, and you can notice how it triggers the muscles. When it gets very intense, the muscles cramp. Very small muscles cramping because there is too much charge. It could be in the back, in the ribs, but it is very clearly muscular and nervous system. All of those intense micro-crampings are very painful.
So it is a very specific kind of pain, very specifically located, and the trigger is always that current. The minute I noticed something in my breathing, in my lungs, a discomfort that was different, I knew it was not the energy. I took a few breaths, felt into it, and sent a message saying, "I think I have pneumonia," having no idea what pneumonia felt like (I don't remember ever having it). But it just came to me. It was a very different sensation, a certain kind of pain in the breathing. I called the doctor, the doctor came, did all the tests, sent me for an x-ray: bacterial pneumonia. Blood tests confirmed it. But it was very easy to recognize the difference.
It happened again about ten days later: the energy, and then the day after, the pneumonia sensations. The energy did not stop for twenty days, but it had different amplitudes, rising at night and waking me up. There were also a lot of radical changes in temperature: the experience of being super hot or super cold, sometimes in different parts of the body simultaneously, sweating at the neck while my legs were chilled and needed covering.
The importance of medical discernment
If you have other pains that are not clearly tied to an actual energetic movement, you should have them checked. I don't want what I'm saying to be interpreted as, "There's pain, and it can all be bundled into 'it's just a spiritual energetic process.'" You have to discern. When I've had these energy movements, they were only energy. This is the first time, because of the burnout and the altitude, that I developed a medical condition alongside it.
Previously, I had gone to the hospital for two weeks, about three times a week. Every single test, blood test, and x-ray came back with no issues. I was in so much pain that I was asking them to keep studying me because I couldn't bear it. I was screaming on a bed in the hospital: "I'm in pain. Please help me stop it." After multiple visits, they said, "If you don't leave, we're going to call the police."
Oh my God.
They did the right thing. They did not know what was happening to me and had no way to help me. What happened is that I went home and allowed the process more fully, because I had been trying to find a way to stop it.
I'm describing the specific sensations of energy because if your pain is different, that matters. I've had many other pain issues, side effects, and chronic pain that I had to address medically. They were tricky, but they were resolved.
I have a combination. A lot of my issues are verifiable medical conditions, but they also can't treat them. A lot of people nowadays have chronic pain and illness without available treatment. I have the whole range. But I also know what you mean about that subtlety of knowing when it's something to get checked versus when it's energetic. This round, that was actually part of the lesson for me. There was a distinction from normal, and part of me recognized that it was serious, but I didn't want it to be. My mind was imagining the whole hospital drama, and I was telling myself I didn't need to go. I'm glad I eventually went, and it didn't become more severe because I waited. There was a knowing that this was a little different.
Then there's the opposite: I have a mind that tends toward hypochondria about things, and I try to counterbalance that part by telling myself it's fine, it's not a big deal, I'll just deal with the pain and it will pass. I feel like I have multiple parts having conversations, and I'm trying to just be present and not have conversations about it. It's a very complex relationship with body and pain. The fear is always about death or suffering.
That's it. And that's what changed for me: really looking at that fear of death.
I keep trying to go there. I want to feel it. I even did a small medical marijuana ceremony with a group, and whenever I take just a little bit, my intention is always to meet death. Then I have this physical response where I feel like my airways are closing.