Can I Be in Pain and Still See Life as a Miracle?
Note: This is another in a series of blogs related to a book project I’ve been writing. The book is called, The Slightly Older Person’s Guide to Graceful Aging.
Being in physical pain is no one’s idea of a good time. I’ve discovered from my own experience that when the pain seemed constant and unrelenting, it became difficult for me to see my life as the miracle it is.
Pain, especially constant pain, can easily undermine our sense of well-being. When well-being seems to have gone absent, it can feel like the miracle has been drained from our lives.
Living without an apparent sense of well-being is a hard, heavy slog. What’s clear to me now is that the sense of well-being I was familiar with was dependent on particular conditions being met, and one of those conditions was being pain-free.
I understandably thought pain was displacing my sense of well-being, that the two sensations, pain and well-being, were mutually exclusive.
It took years of living in constant physical pain to learn what I regard as one of the most important lessons of my life: well-being, and I mean well-being of the sort that’s a constant companion, and knows no conditions.
If you find this hard to believe, you’re not alone. It seems counterintuitive to believe that a sense of well-being isn’t in some way dependent on certain conditions being met. I think it’s only when those conditions weren’t being met, and I had a chance to finally experience well-being amid physical pain that it became clear to me.
But there’s one additional obstacle that was necessary for me to clear out of the way before I could experience unconditional well-being, and it did not occur to me for years. It was resistance. Just that one simple thing: by being so caught up in a world of pain, I couldn’t see that I was resisting my built-in well-being.
When I stopped resisting the pain, the physical sensation of pain didn’t disappear, but the change in my life was as dramatic as it had. I discovered that the difference between intense pain plus resistance, and just pain, with no resistance, was as dramatic as the difference between pain, and no pain.
That made it an easy choice. I’d love to say that the physical sensation of pain disappeared, but that didn’t happen, and I don’t expect it to. That lack of expectation is connected to the lack of resistance.
As long as the pain is present, I understand the best thing I can do is just ride along with it. But it’s the lack of resistance that lets me enjoy hell out of the ride.
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