Sunday, March 05, 2006

Damage Without Pain

I have held for a long time to the belief that if it's not broken, you don't fix it.

My grandfather, bless his dead soul, was a big adherent of this one. His other big one was French: Laissez cet endroit aussi propre que vous aimeriez le trouver - Please leave this place as clean as you'd like to find it. That's a pretty good one. Buddhist even. Advice is mixed. Some works, some works for a short time then not at all, some should have never worked at all.

I am here to tell you that it doesn't have to hurt for it not to be working.

I have now gone through three weeks of very intens(iv)e chiropractic care. There's a lot more to do. I can feel all I have held for so long shifting around inside of me, up and down my spine, in and out of my organs. My body is holding out its strongest defenses - skin, lungs, spine; all in the form of pain. I don't know which is sadder/more compassion-arousing for me to see: that my body hurt first to avoid hurt from outside, or that I ignored that pain again and again and again, just as I ignored pain from the outside, too. All I know now is that it hurts a lot less to be present with it.

I am not here to eliminate pain. I am here to learn about suffering. Pain is inevitable; torture, at least for me, inside my own head, within my own box and bounds, isn't. This is all I know today, and I had to say it, out loud, so my body would know that I am listening.

1 comment:

  1. it's an interesting feeling to come out of one's own head and have the rest of the world become real...

    lately I have been saying to myself, "this feeling is how I know I'm alive"...to whatever feeling it is... helps my senses stretch out to meet even the unpleasant feelings, let them suffuse me even to my toes and fingertips, let them be fully embodied in me.

    this hurts less than what I've done up to now... squeezing every muscle tight (like a toothpaste tube) so that in place of the pain is a big tight blank, a squashed flatness... no pain... nothing else either.

    it's so strange to open a little more every day and let in all the multitudinous sensations. I saw an old friend recently whom I haven't seen in six years, and it was as though I'd never seen her before....

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