A Zen Meditation on Pain

A Zen Meditation on Pain April 28, 2016

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A Zen Meditation on Pain

Chris Amirault

After a series of upbeat updates, the last half day has been pretty brutal. I’m writing in the middle of the night thanks to at least five different aches and pains: the surgical incision; the missing rib sections; the incision drainage site and suture; constipation that has produced a hemorrhoid the size of Central Park; and a post-surgery phenomenon that one resident described aptly by mentioning that, “after a few days at home as the general anesthesia wears off, you may suddenly feel as if you’ve been hit by a train.” Trite, yes, but a bloody accurate metaphor — though I might double or triple the number of trains.

This all means that at any given moment I’m feeling sharp pain and blunt pain; aches, jolts, and throbs; pain when I move and am still; pain when I breathe and when I don’t breathe; pain standing, sitting, lying down. There’s usually several different layers to each bite of this Cake o’ Pain, some crispy, potent, and brief, others soft, round, and lingering.

Zen practice has been very useful the last week, but the last day has caused me to reflect on a few different aspects of that practice as it relates to pain. Let’s get the big misconception out of the way: as I understand and practice it, Buddhist meditation is not a simple, all-powerful analgesic. Learning zazen (Zen meditation) does not prevent you from experiencing the thrum of leg cramps, sudden piercing sensations along your surgical incision, or the sizzle of the red-hot steel rods that seem to have been inserted where your ribs used to be.

What zazen does teach you, however, is how to sit with, inside, around, and otherwise immersed in that pain, in each of its particular shapes and flavors. This is a practice that, in my mind, grows from an early Pali sutta referencing the “two arrows”:

“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical & mental…

“Now, the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. He feels one pain: physical, but not mental…”

There are many things to say about the “two arrows” story, but I want merely to focus on the power of a practice that — counter to both instinct and culture — encourages us to turn toward the physical pain, to accept that it is a biological fact of our human body’s existence like sickness, old age, and death. Parking your attention on your body and its pain means learning its textures and flavors, watching its impact on your view of the world and others within it, attending to your breath, posture, demeanor, and attitude.

When I do that, I invariably hear the whistle of the second arrow: what does it mean that this pain happened then? am I getting better or worse? what did I do wrong? why? why here? why now? why ME? and, most especially, what’s the plan? the fix? the solution? how do I MAKE IT STOP?!?

These “second arrow” thoughts are just as important to my practice as the “first arrow” aches and pains. Simply sitting still, shutting up, and paying close attention to them (thank you, James) helps me to see that they are, indeed, a chalky, cigarette-butt and glass-shard riddled frosting atop the original Cake o’ Pain — and if I wait long enough, that frosting will slide off the slice of its own accord. Witnessing those “second arrow” meanings and feelings as they come and go is, in fact, at the heart of my practice, and while it doesn’t erase the “first arrow” realities of broken ribs and severed musculature, it transforms my relationship to them in their own unmediated particularity.

Such awareness has another tangible benefit: I am deeply human, and as such, I’m gonna keep firing those second arrows at myself. I do not like pain; I want plans, procedures, medications, furniture, pillows, dietary supplements, walks, and research-based best practices, because I’ve become convinced over decades of human existence that a purposeful, rational will can triumph over all. I’ve come to appreciate this relentless head-banging, the prattle of the advice columnist on the talk-show radio in my head, whom I call and call again and again knowing how absurd it is to do so. I want a plan, dammit. I want the key, the promise, the map.

And that brings me to the second, final component of my practice within all this pain: trying to find a little compassion for both others and myself as we confront our desires to end it. There’s a lengthy koan (Zen teaching story), case 41 of the “Book of Serenity,” in which a teacher desperately tries to get one of his students to say something, anything in his last hours of life. As they stumble and bumble about, Luopu sighs and declares, “The boat of compassion is not rowed over pure waves. Over precipitous straits, it is wasted effort to set out a wooden goose.”

I love this image of a wooden goose — a tool that Chinese boat captains would use to test the waters downstream and plan the best course of action. I wish I had several dozen, in fact, one for every situation! But, as Norman Fischer states in life we don’t get any wooden geese. We get trust, companionship, and a shared compassion predicated on the knowledge that we have no clue what we are getting ourselves into in this next day, hour, minute. So our practice is to hold each other’s hand, smile as we make eye contact, take a deep breath… and down the rapids we go…..

Chris Amirault currently serves as Executive Director at the Brown/Fox Point Early Childhood Education Center in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a long time student of Zen Buddhism with Boundless Way Zen.


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