Pain Is Not Wrong
Many years ago when I was pregnant with my son, I decided to have a
home birth without drugs, assisted by a midwife. My hope was to be as wakeful
and present as possible during the birth, and while I knew the pain would be
intense, I trusted that my meditation and yoga practices would help me to “go
with the flow.”
When labor began I was rested and ready. Knowing that resisting the
pain of contractions only made them worse, I relaxed with them, breathing,
making sounds without inhibition, letting go as my body’s intelligence took
over. Like any animal, I was unthinkingly immersed, instinctively responding to
the drama unfolding through me, riding the pain as a natural part of the
process.
Then, suddenly, something shifted. When my son’s head started crowning,
the pain level shot up. It was no longer something I could breathe into and let
surge through me. This much pain has got to mean something is going wrong,
I thought. My whole body tightened, and my deep slow breaths turned into the
shallow, quick breathing of panic.
Like every aspect of
our evolutionary design, the unpleasant sensations we call pain are an
intelligent part of our survival equipment: Pain is our body’s call to pay
attention, to take care of ourselves. Yet, intense pain, even when it’s part of
a seemingly healthy process like birthing, is alarming. When I reacted with
fear, I added onto the unpleasant sensations the feeling and belief that
something was wrong. Rather than Radical Acceptance, the
reaction of my body and mind was to resist and fight the pain.
While fear of pain is
a natural human reaction, it is particularly dominant in our culture where we
consider pain as bad, or wrong. Mistrusting
our bodies, we use “pain killers,” assuming that whatever removes pain is the
right thing to do. In our society’s cultural trance, rather than a
natural phenomenon, pain is regarded as the
enemy. Pain is the messenger we try to kill, not something we allow and
embrace.
At that point of intensity in childbirth, I was fully at war, pitted
against the pain. My midwife, used to seeing fear and resistance in response to
pain, immediately assured me. “Nothing’s wrong, honey… it’s all completely
natural, it’s just painful.” She had to say this several times before I could
let it begin to sink in and, in the midst of the burning pain, the explosive
pressure, the tearing and exhaustion, remember again to breathe deeply and
relax. It was just
pain, not wrong, and I could
open up and accept it.
Whenever we react to
pain with fear and view it as “wrong,” we set in motion a waterfall of
reactivity. Fear, itself made up of unpleasant sensations, only compounds the
pain—now we not only want to get away from the original pain, but also from the
pain of fear. In fact, the fear of pain is often the most unpleasant part of a
painful experience. When we assess physical sensations as something to be
feared, pain is not just pain. It is something wrong and bad that we must get
away from.
Often, this fear of
pain proliferates into a web of stories. Yet, when we are habitually immersed
in our stories about pain, we prevent ourselves from experiencing it as the
changing stream of sensations that it is. Instead, as our muscles contract
around it and our stories identify it as the enemy, the pain solidifies into a
self-perpetuating, immovable mass. Our resistance can end up creating new
layers of symptoms and suffering, since when we abandon our body for our
fear-driven stories about pain, we actually trap the pain in our body.
When, instead of Radical
Acceptance, our initial response to physical pain is fear and resistance, the
ensuing chain of reactivity can be consuming. The moment we believe something
is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat our
pain. This same process unfolds when our pain is emotional—we resist the
unpleasant sensations of loneliness, sorrow, anger. Whether physical or
emotional, when we react to pain with fear, we pull away from an embodied
presence and go into the suffering of trance.
Yet, we need to realize that being alive includes
feeling pain, sometimes intense pain. And, as the Buddha taught, we suffer only
when we cling to or resist experience; when we want life different than it is.
As the saying goes: “Pain is inevitable,
but suffering is optional.”
When painful sensations arise and we can simply meet
them with clarity and presence, we can see that pain is just pain. We can
listen to pain’s message and respond appropriately—taking good care. If we are mindful of pain rather
than reactive, we do not contract into the experience of a victimized,
suffering self. We can meet whatever presents itself with Radical Acceptance,
allowing the changing stream of sensations to simply flow through us without
making any of it wrong.
