Is there Zen in Pain?

 

"Instead of running away from pain, try embracing it.  
Be the pain."
- Palzang

It's the 4th morning I'm waking up with this agonizing pain, debilitating really, nothing like I've ever had before. I tried going back to sleep, but it's impossible when there's not a single position that feels comfortable. The only sounds I hear are crickets chirping, the fan creaking, and the clock ticking. 3:30am. I've been awake for a half-hour now, maybe an hour - I had no sense of time before this, except that it was dark. I sighed and gave up on sleep, and dragged myself up into sitting for meditation. As I close my eyes and try to breathe deeply, I realize even breathing hurts. I hadn't noticed till now that I was barely breathing, just taking in shallow wisps of air and letting out thin streams of it, so as not to move a muscle, a lung or even my diaphragm. A funny question came to my mind - is this living?

Strange things come to mind when I can't sleep at 3am - I remember reading a Buddhist book where a part of it had talked about sitting with the pain, rather than swallowing pills to chase it away; and I had thought to myself then that this was how I would like to experience pain myself when I'm older. What a noble way to experience and understand my own pain, by being with it, talking to it, feeling the nuances of it. I had hoped to remember this book when I was older, when I'd have aches creaking in my body. Little did I know then what I had wished for, and how quickly my wish would come true.

So here I am, trying to sit up straight and meditate, but it turns out that the focus for my meditation is not some abstract light in my forehead, but a very real pulse point of pain, alive, throbbing, excruciating. It gives me a perverse pleasure trying to angle my neck this way or that way, just to feel a different facet of the same pain. I was so focused on it in fact, that I hadn't even realized that my feet had fallen asleep, and were starting to have dreams of their own! So I loosened my limbs and buckled down to the ground. My body sighed with pleasure while my neck groaned with pain. And in this strange position - my head resting on two fists layered one on top of the other, my body folded in half, my feet flexed and toes turned under - like a Muslim performing his prayer, I slept fitfully until the cat woke me.

I don't think this pain is going anywhere - it stays with me day and night, but I'm relieved that the night is over and I somehow caught a few winks of sleep. And in a couple of hours, I have to go spend a day in front of my work computer - the thing that probably gave me the pain in the first place. Hmm... I wonder if my neck is trying to say something - in the language that it knows.

Buddhists practice sitting in Za-zen (I believe the Sanskrit word for this is Dhyan) everyday to maintain a balanced state of nervous system. Zazen sitting would help keep my spine straight, and adopt a good posture, which is something I've almost never been good at - so I have many years of bad posture to overcome! A good posture is supposed to take the pressure off my back, relieve stress on my neck, and help strengthen those muscles. In the meantime, this is what I have to practice -

• Not intend to overcome pain
• Not fear pain
• Accept pain as it is
• Just sit with the pain in the present moment