Pain Meditation

Who knew there were so many different kinds of pain?! Certainly not me... I barely knew I had a body. I've been escaping it as long as I can remember [flashback:baby, sun]

Today's pain is bad. It's sharp and cutting. A bright ball of almost mind-numbingly waves of intensity. The only thing close I've experienced is jumping into the Aire river to skinny dip. Even in summer it's cold cold cold in the Yorkshire Dales and the iciness of the water took my breath away.

I'm not a strong swimmer... barely a swimmer at all. I was afraid I'd get into trouble from lack of oxygen... my companion was a good swimmer though. She'd swum for the County. But that was before the drugs... today she was buzzing on the heroin. Escaping her own demons in a opiate-fueled fantasy of childhood innocent pleasures. I was enough of a co-addict to be along for the ride... trusting her to let me come to no harm... escaping my demons by pretending I had none. Later I started banging those needles in myself. I wanted my own ride. My own transport out of the pain.

Beloved Husband leans in to kiss me goodbye and I turn into a shuddering ball of twitching pain. I'm not sure if it's the pain or not being able to share my body with him that's more unbearable. It's the Wheel of Sharp Weapons. I know nothing about the text except that it's mentioned by FPMT teachers but the name is a teaching all on it's own. Samsara is a wheel of things that cut and seem to want to harm me. As long as I live on the wheel of life there's no way out.

But I always thought I could find one. Like every addict I believed the rules didn't, couldn't shouldn't apply to me. They were for those who made the mistake of believing in them - I could choose to believe in whatever I wanted. I could make my own reality.

Intellectual bollocks. It threatened to take me under. And when I came into recovery it made it a long, slow journey. I'd sold every shred of integrity I had for my personal opt-out clause and it made knowing true from false peculiarly difficult. I'd been making my own reality so long I could no more identify the real than I could be my own sponsor. Fortunately, I was out of options. I could not carry on misusing drugs - street or prescription. And yet I also could not stop taking pain-killers. How then could I be in NA? Surely I must be kidding myself, deceiving myself? Wasn't I still in denial if I couldn't stop the painkillers? Logically none of it worked... I had to move beyond logic into something undeniable. Pain was undeniable. Pain nails me to reality.

The painkiller is starting to come on a little. Getting up to fetch something still sets of the pain into a shuddering and twitching zombie shudder but the waves are a little gentler now. They don't catch my breath from me. I turn inwards to re-connect with the pain and: Ah... my first moment of stillness... of something between the pain. Buddha mind. Or at least that's how I see it. Tiny tiny moments of liberation from the wheel of sharp weapons. If I can piece enough of those moments together I'll be free.

Do the worst things first I was taught by a fellow alcoholic. And the worst is to face this pain. Look into it's dark and twisted heart. Or rather my dark and twisted heart. It's the Wisdom of No Escape as Pema Chodron calls it. Funny how I remember titles of dharma instruction... they're like slogans. When the going gets tough - and it will - the slogans stay with me when my mind can't focus on all the whys and wherefores of how using will kill me. How I disdained these lifesavers when I first came into the rooms... just happy clappy idiot boards for Americans and other people with short attention spans! Little did I realise I had the shortest attention span of anyone in the room... with my substance misuse and intellectualising I couldn't stay in reality for even a nanosecond. Nowadays, though, I have a chance... now I know I'm fucked ;-)

And so I sit with the pain. Just sit. For as long as I can. It's become a precious teacher. A vicious one in the style of some of them old Zen buggers with the big sticks right enough... but you can't buy instruction like this. The pain will show me my own mind when nothing else does. Greedy for my chance at nirvana, I turn my mind towards the pain as often as I can, for as long as I can. Getting stoned makes that impossible and so as a wanna-be buddha I do whatever it takes to avoid that. My medication regime has been carefully crafted with my the fellowship and reality-checks of other addicts and my doctor; painkillers are slow release and on a schedule I've learnt not to mess with. My enlightenment hopes rest on a ground of me being able to focus on the pain.

That focusing is like the story Pema Chodron tells of Chogyam Trungpa as a young tulku in Tibet running towards the dog that's attacking him. When the pain becomes unbearable I stop running towards it. I stand still by distracting my mind. I do chores. (With the grace and dexterity of a frail 80 year old woman... but the distraction is worth it). If I'm feeling unskillful I might pick a fight. This morning I write a blog post. What I don't do is turn my back on it. I may relax my vigilance but I don't turn my back on this Wheel of Sharp Weapons. Otherwise it kills me! I used to think that my addictions would eventually kill me. The dharma of recovery has shown me that I'm killed the very minute I pick up. It's a spiritual death... a disengagement from reality. These days I'd rather die physically and go into the jaws of the death god Yama than die spiritually and lose my tiny tiny moments of buddha-mind.