My adventures as a superhero whose special power is being in pain.
A few years ago, I had a couple weeks of intense back pain. No matter what I did, it wouldn’t go away. I convinced myself that it was a sign of something terrible, a cancer beneath my sacrum. It was terrifying. The fear lasted for a week and a half, until I read something in The Power of Now about accepting your nonacceptance. That was a new idea for me, to stop trying to accept the pain and just accept that I was resisting it.
There once was a man who lived in a cage. It was quite cramped but he made the best of it. He did not know that there was anything outside of the cage. He had good days in the cage and bad days in the cage. He invented games to amuse himself. It was often uncomfortable and confining to live in the cage, but since the man did not know he was in a cage, he did not know why he felt confined.
Although many of the pains I’ve had have gotten better, the two most debilitating pains, in my low back and my right knee, have gotten progressively worse. The amount of time I can stand, walk, and sit without pain have all gotten shorter, and noticing this can scare me, because it’s my inability to do these activities that is the most crippling. It can be quite difficult to live life lying down.
Sometimes I get traumatized by pain, and my fear of it. It tends to happen when I’m already on edge, and I’m in a situation where I feel trapped. It’s happened in an airport security line, on a bus, on a long aimless day in my apartment, in my car. My pain gets tremendous, my nervous system goes on full alert, and I shut down in fear. I cannot hold a conversation. I lose touch with all of my helpful mindfulness tools. And I become very angry, very defended.
“The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should be so humble that even the dust can crush him.” —Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments With Truth
