Suffering Sucks

I hurt my back the other day by sneezing. I wasn’t pushing an elderly lady out of the way of a speeding, out-of-control truck, or wrassling a bear. I was walking across the parking lot at work, my laptop bag slung over my left shoulder with my umbrella held up with my right hand, ineffectively deflecting the nearly-horizontal raindrops, when I felt that familiar itchy-tickle of a ker-choooo that would seconds later erupt.

Ker-choooo. Ouch.

So I’ve spent the last couple of days enjoying my new regimen of Tylenol and Advil, alternating between shiny red tablets and adobe-hued caplets, and it still hurts. Muscle spasms are a bitch.

It’s not the first time I’ve experienced lower back trouble – more like the 73rd. Fully supportive of the Buddhist concept of impermanence, I know the pain and tremors won’t last forever. Unless they do. And it’s only truly excrutiating when I walk or stand a certain way, so I’m trying to avoid the curse of being upright. Sitting is bearable, and luckily, my sitting position creates a nice shelf for my laptop so I can wallow in my discomfort and tell you all about it.

Didn’t this just turn out to be your lucky day?

Anyway, as I was walking the (seemingly) three miles from the parking lot to my son’s flag football game this morning, each step a reminder of my sneezy ways, I decided to follow my own advice and let the pain and discomfort in. No more fighting it, embracing it, calling it by name. Pain. I feel you. You hurt me with each stride. Come in and make yourself at home. I know you won’t stay long, and there’s no use denying you or wishing you were elsewhere.

It still hurt. A lot. Embracing pain and suffering sucks, man.

What a great reminder of mindfulness and a gentle rebuke of elevated expectations. Why was a part of me anticipating the pain to lessen simply because I acknowledged its presence? That’s not how this works, Boddhavista.

It’s reminded me that I’ve been a bit impatient and easily frustrated of late. Petty annoyances and meaningless inconveniences have bothered me, a cause-and-effect mentality developing where I was feeling put-upon. This has led to me spending way too much time thinking about me, with little regard to the troubles and suffering going on around me. Certainly not right-thought or right-action.

A lesson exists in my back pain, as I’ve struggled with simple tasks like putting on my pants and getting in and out of the car. It’s a lesson that entails understanding suffering in all of its forms and realizing that when I’m having a bad day, feeling all whiny and cranky, I need to look around and observe the pain and tribulations of others.

Rather than feeling sorry for myself, I should continue on my path to compassion and work to ease the suffering of others, because it is only by continuing my growth and healing during difficult times that I demonstrate my knowledge of the role of suffering in our lives.

The Buddha’s teaching on suffering is that we need to accept the things we can’t control, such as loss, sickness, aging, and death. This has been my reminder.

What would the child you were say to the adult you are?

My husband will often call me over as he’s writing, to show me some fantastical something he’s found as he’s read what you all are writing on the web. More often than not, it’s something akin to the Mc Gang Bang (a McChicken sandwich inside a double cheeseburger) from thisiswhyyourefat.com, but today it was site where Chino Otsuka creates double-portraits, pictures of herself today, overlaid with photos of herself as a child (via Andrew Sullivan’s Blog).

Some time back, when I started the work to live with my eating disorder, a therapist took the group I was part of through a visualization exercise. Being cocky, cynical, and 26, I rolled my eyes before I closed them, but decided to play along. After some breathing exercises she began: “Imagine”, she said, “you are walking down a small pathway. You pass lovely trees and somewhere in the background you hear water trickling over rocks. You have nothing pressing to do; it’s the kind of day that makes your chattering mind stop pestering you, the kind of day that you find yourself fully present.”

“You come around a small bend in the pathway, and see ahead of you a wooden bench, and on that bench, a small child with their back towards you.  The child turns to look at you over their shoulder, and you realize that this child is you, at 5 years old. The child says to you:…” – and she paused. “What,” she asked, “does that child say?”

It was the first time, in months of therapy, that I cried. Out loud. In the dark, my eyes closed, surrounded by women who had been raped, been beaten, been neglected, all with lives any typical person would have said had been far worse than the 26 year old me had lived.

Because the five year old who was me had turned to me  smiling. “What?”, she said, kicking her legs in her yellow dress with pink butterflies made for me with love by my Papa’s girlfriend Pam, “What’s happened to you?”.  She feels so bad that I have chosen this suffering.

Today I’m sitting in my lovely house, with my lovely trees, and in the background instead of the sound of water flowing over rocks I hear the sound of the young business man who does our lawn aerating our backyard. And the five year old girl that no longer sits on some bench in some visualization, but instead in my head, fully there most every day, says to me as my husband shows me Chino Otsuka’s photos, “What’s happened to you?”.

And I laughed when I told this story to my husband, before I cried as I wrote this, because today I’m smiling back at me.

“..everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news.” – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest