Pain as Teacher
Many Buddhist traditions share a specific practice for opening the eyes, opening the eyes of the heart.
If you follow the path of enlightenment that Gautama Buddha walked, one who wishes to be free of entangling thoughts and desires – desire for the next and better car, the other better house, a different and better partner – makes an active attempt to embrace impermanence. Meaning: one does everything in his or her power to realize that this life passes with the snap of the fingers, that much of our effort comes to no result, and that in our hurry we often miss opportunities for seeing what truly has value.
In practical terms, you keep bringing your attention to the fact of your own death until it sinks in – finally – that it is real. Instead of letting yourself escape into a fantasy of sights and sounds and senses, to see that each taste or lilt of music or touch of the hand will soon be gone. The senses that register them will fade; the mind that records them will dull. There is a deep stillness when you reach that fruit of the Garden: and all the flowers becoming radiantly, beautifully ephemeral, all the more precious for being short-lived.
I have been fortunate, I suppose, in that I have never had to seek out death; it “kindly stopped for me” when I was quite young, and has made an appearance many times in my life, in one guise or another, at my bedside, through the aging bodies of those close to me. With every visit, it finds me sleeping – or not asleep, but nodding… Did you forget my lesson? Remember! Remember!
So I found early that death is a great teacher. One must never close ones eyes to a teacher: if so you are walking away from gold. We can never close our ears to the real teachers, the ones with the hardest messages: if you do, you miss the words, the alchemy of words that can transform refuse to treasure.
I did not recognize another, similar teacher. Perhaps it had not spoken loudly enough, and I mistook it for a blight, I did all I could to alleviate, dissipate or dissuade its lessons. I thought that pain was simply… an excruciating, sense-stealing, mind-numbing flood, against which you battled to stay head above the waves.
My friend and mentor in Cambridge, Richard Borofsky, recently told me this story of pain as teacher. I paraphrase here, giving him all honor, and hopefully doing him honor by passing his learning on.
A few years back, he slipped on ice and fell to the ground, breaking his pelvis in the process. What followed, he said, was a lengthy period of the most intense physical suffering he has ever had to endure. They gave him codeine, morphine, but nothing touched the depth of this incredible damage, right at the center of him.
He lay in the hospital bed for hours, begging for sleep but unable to find it, hoping the pain would subside but hoping to no avail. He tried to move his body gently into more gentle positions, but without success. Hours of unremitting agony accumulated in his body. The doctors could not set the bone until things had stabilized.
He had tried everything. Tried his physical best to rearrange how he lay, asked the nurses to help him, asked for more pain-killer but he was already at the limit, tried to use reasoning , meditation, anything to change the conditions – but no change came. It was simply pain, and part of that pain was the inability to escape it, even for a few hours’ sleep.
Finally, near 3AM, he had had enough. He let go. He said, “All right – I am beaten. What will happen to me will happen. This vice will continue to crush me. But at least… if nothing else… let what I am going through be of some service to others.”
As I listened to his story, I watched the echo of the anguish in his body, the memory of it causing slight contortions, a furrowing of the brow, constrictions of the voice. Unimaginable pain, but witnessed, at least, in the shadows left in the memory of the stone and sinew of the body.
“When I asked that this pain be of some service… suddenly a great stillness came upon me. The pain did not diminish. My body was still broken. But suddenly a great stillness… and I noticed the man in the bed next to me, and I saw that he shared the same pain. I looked to the other side and saw others lying with their pain, the same pain. And in the whole ward, the pain, in the entire hospital; out on the street, in the city… and I was no longer alone in my pain, I allowed the weight of it to pass away from me.”
Why do we think we can escape pain? We deny it even before it gathers us up in its arms. And in that resistance our bodies clench, our minds close, and we see nothing but our own insignificant life, riveted to the earth by this anguish.
To anguish alone is useless. The dissolution of a partnership of years, and the fears and angers which accompany it, the unwarranted words, the unwarranted silences, may be the smaller of two griefs, but it is not much smaller. To have tried and then found there was no more to try: no comforts, no change in position, no healing hands, no pills or operations or new bodies to dissolve the hurt: that is a kind of hopeless pain that touches nothing and that no one may touch.
But: if we understand that we have been given this life to learn, that we have been given music that we might learn to move to it, given companions to grow in compassion and through compassion, to grow in love. Ah, the pain is not diminished, but the weight of it needn’t drag the heart to earth.
If we listen to pain the teacher, if we listen and clearly hear him, hear her, then the eyes are opened a littler wider, more light leaks in, so that your fellow humans and other creatures and stones and rivers and trees and things are illuminated by it: all of us moving together through a Garden of ephemeral anguishes… and ephemeral delights.