Our mind does not want to believe this….the way out of pain is into it.
 Resistance is futile and only makes pain worse.
 Dive in to it.
 Dive deeper than it.
 Know that always,
 Always,  there is something mysterious, sublime, and beautiful that is deeper than the pain.
 It only reveals itself when we have the courage to completely surrender and let go.
 This substantial, holding, supportive, loving presence is the ground from which we can rest and bear our pain. Any pain. All pain.

The way into this presence is through jumping, and not knowing if there is ground beneath us or not.

We must jump, let go, and trust.

Over time and with practice we eventually  get familiar with  letting go and stepping into our fear of more or worse pain. We learn to trust that when we do lean into our pain, with gentleness and kindness, we find true support. Exactly the opposite of what our mind tells us, that we will find more pain and frightening emptiness.

Through true surrender we expose the fears of pain within our mind to be like phantoms. We find that true emptiness is neither empty nor frightening, yet full of sublime peace and profound power.

One moment we are standing teetering on the edge of a 1000 foot  cliff and the next we realize the ground is only  1 foot  below us. And it always is. Right here, right now.

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It seems to me in our journey living with pain, that one of the central ingredients that is really useful is to cooperate with pain. To allow what is showing up here and now today in my life the space to be here. Just this attitude has a transformative effect and impact. When we agree with what life has brought this very day, this very moment, our relationship to it changes, transforms. It sounds basic, to allow things to be as they are, to go with the flow.

Many people use this “go with the flow” in a cliched way. For most people who live with chronic pain telling them to go with the flow will often illicit a response like, well, to put it mildly, f *(*&*&()) off, you have no idea what the  f $#%#%%….its like living with this pain.  If you were in my shoes I don’t think you would be “advising” me to go with the flow!

Those of you who live with serious chronic pain will know exactly what I mean….when other well meaning people advise  about how to deal with pain, yet obviously have ZERO personal experience of it, it just doesn’t work. They just actually don’t understand what it’s like. For some time now I’ve just learned and accepted  that their well intentioned advice is just that. Well intentioned advice.

Yet the fact remains there is a way to go with the flow of pain. To allow what shows up today to be here, to have the space in my life, to have a place in my life. When pain shows up, life has brought this, life is showing up as pain. It seems pretty obvious that pain often shows up as a warning that something is wrong and that something needs to be attended to and fixed, nobody likes being in physical pain, and everyone has the right to live a pain free life. Yet what happens to those of us who cannot be fixed, that no matter what medicine, alternative therapies, or whatever healing modalities we try just don’t work?

What then?

In my experience this is where we need to turn to to a dimension of life beyond our normal day to day experience. This dimension is often accessed by prayer, meditation, surrender, and just simply giving up and giving over to a presence, energy, God, Being, Christ, Tao, Allah, whatever name you put to it, that is deeper, vaster , stronger, more intelligent, and loving,  than the very pain that I experience now in my body.

Turning towards the pain, accepting it, allowing it, even welcoming it, WITH an orientation of surrender to this deeper dimension of ourselves, of God, of Being is the only way that consistently works, that I have discovered to live in freedom WITH pain. Its like some sort of miracle happens. The presence meets the pain and transforms it. NOT taking it away, but giving me the strength and love to bear it.  This is a fact of my experience repetitively, not just  with mild pain, but with the most severe levels of pain that I have ever experienced.

Time and time again, Grace came and showed me this way, that through acceptance, surrender and allowing severe physical pain to simply be here, something more comes, that something more is a mystery, a vast and great presence that can and does hold the pain. It holds it with care, with love, and with complete and utter compassion. That is the balm we need to live well with pain.

We need to do our part though, our part in living well with pain is to practice cooperating with the pain as life brings it. We do all we can to alleviate it, we take our medications, we follow our programme of things that we know helps ourselves, but the most important thing we can do, when we can do no more,  is surrender, to allow and cooperate with life, showing up as pain.

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At the beginning of learning to smile with pain, we will find that there are often times where we just don’t feel like smiling! We feel much more like screaming, or  yelling, or collapsing, or fighting, or hating, or just simply blanking out the pain.

In the process of learning to live well with pain, we do the smiling practice anyway. Regardless of how we are feeling we just smile.  Even if we don’t feel like it .

When I climb with pain, or when I do my fitness work, and my body is in pain or real discomfort, or when I experience severe pain, I certainly don’t feel like smiling. If I took how I feel to be my guide I would not be living in freedom with pain.

There is a dimension of ourselves that is deeper than our feelings, this dimension we use as our guide. We follow that. An inner smile connects us to that part of ourself that is deeper than our pain. It connects us to God at the center of our Being, it connects us to  Essence, to our depth, to ourselves  as a presence of mystery.

Try simply smiling anyways. Regardless of how we feeling. By smile, I don’t mean in some pseudo smile way, but in simple recognition. Acknowledge the fact of your experience in the process of smiling. Accepting that fact that we don’t feel like smiling. Include that in the smile.  Or even scream, shout, let the steam off a little, then smile.

Inner smiling is like leaning forward into the pain. Leaning  with a smile into the actual experience as it is. In real pain, accepting  the pain by gently smiling into it, the pain  changes, it shifts, it takes a new form,  when a smile is added to it. Its like a door opens to another room. This room just has more space than the room we where  in before. This room is a room where a smile is here, and pain is here.

Smiling with pain is a powerful practice to learn to live in freedom with pain.

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One of the things that has really worked for me in learning to live well with pain is cultivating presence. Presence can be in any form, stillness, inner peace, silence, a sense of joy, courage, compassion, loving kindness, it manifests according to what is needed in the moment.

The reality of living with pain is that it is really really difficult to be in presence when I am in in pain. I need to practice my presence cultivation when I’m NOT in pain. This presence cultivation, for me anyways, has always taken the form of mindfulness meditation, my practice has been about cultivating stillness and silence.  I need to do this every single day at some point in the day when I am not in pain……even for a few minutes. The fact is in doing this presence practice it all adds up. Presence builds up into a sort of reserviour of presence which is available for me to draw on when things get tough.

If I don’t practice presence, practice taking time out to rest and be with silence, stillness and the depth of life, when the pain hits, then I have way less capacity to be with presence . I just get stuck in pain being the center of me, rather than presence. There is nothing to hold the pain, and its real, real tough in this place.

This morning as I sat in silence a chainsaw was going next door. That chainsaw is a bit like pain….its so darn noisy, and consumes awareness.  Yet when I truly just let it be there, and moment by moment reorient my attention and awareness to the silence beneath that chainsaw, I can actually still rest in silence. Stillness can hold the chainsaw noise. I am not consumed by it, distracted by it, and swept up in it.

Same with pain. But the fact is  it requires practice. Little by little, presence grows, like a muscle building from exercise. When we practice being present to presence as stillness, peace and silence, like a vast  ocean of peace, this ocean becomes  more and more familiar to us. It becomes more real, more substancial.

There is no other way to cultivate presence. It doesn’t happen on its own, but through our own training and practice.

Each day we are free from pain, take some time to practice presence.

Ocean Meditation

Sit down in silence and simply breath. With each in and out breath Imagine a deep and beautiful calm blue, green ocean. Imagine that you are held in this ocean, let this ocean bathe you with its goodness, its silence, its stillness.  Let it run through you. Let yourself feel yourself as this ocean. As your attention wanders, just bring yourself back to this sense of being the ocean, of being calmed and soothed by its vast and huge presence.  As you breath, keep returning your attention to this ocean. Rest in it, deepen in it, let the ocean become you, and you become the ocean.

Each time your attention wanders, return like a gentle wave to the sense of calm, deep, still, peaceful ocean.

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I notice that we are often so self obsessed that we miss the very thing that we are. We miss the qualities of beauty, divinity and presence. We miss the fact of our own goldeness, brightness, and brilliance.

We stay focused in our limited small painful existence. When we are in physical pain most of the time, it’s really very very difficult to find contact with a dimension of existence that is beyond this pain. Our very identity, who we think we  actually are, is constantly reinforced by our pain. We think we are our bodies, we think we are this physical person that walks around on two legs and is separate from every other physical person and thing. We are so completely sure that is what we are that we rarely get insight into any other view of reality.

What does pain do to reinforce this view, this perspective that we are a body having a purely physical experience?

Pain reinforces it. Each contraction of pain reminds us of the very physical nature of ourselves. Because we are so identified with ourselves as separate phsycial bodies, our attention,  awareness and actual energy goes directly to our experience of ourselves as a  body.

Simply put, pain happens in our body!  We might have emotional pain, which then impacts our body, and heart, we might have mental anguish and disturbing thoughts, that then make us disturbed and knocked off center, which then impact our bodies. But the bottom line is that pain reminds us of our physical existence.

In this pain community most if us are experts at focusing on, and knowing about every minute detail about our condition. We know all about the condition, it’s symptoms, it’s research, it’s public perception. We become so obsessed with all the latest findings and everyone else’s experiences and details about their condition that we magnify the negative.. We focus on the facts of the disease rather than the fact of presence, of stillness, goodness, intelligence and that life giving flow that underlies our existence.

We stay in a suffering oriented perspective. Our bandwidth of experience is limited or stretched by those who we hang about with. If we are not stretched, pushed, pulled beyond our normal range of thinking, feeling, and willing we remain trapped in a small orbit orienting around our own small life of pain.

We miss the very fact of our divine make up as beings made up of intelligent light.  We miss the very fact that we are part of a great cosmic rhythm that is connected to a vast, huge intelligence, unfolding and exploding with dynamic action, moment by moment.

It’s necessary to know about our physical condition, but I wonder how much we actually need to know. What has been very useful for me is to maintain a connection with freedom while I live my life as a spina bifida.  This is the freedom with pain philosophy. I live in Freedom with whatever I have, spina-bifida or pain.

I have never looked up on the net about the spina-bifida condition. I don’t even know at what part of L2 L3 or whatever on my spine the actual site of the condition is. I know my pain, and my life and I just do what I can to attend to it, and get on with things. I don’t obsess over my condition. I take actions to be kind and gently with myself, and I take actions that require me to stretch myself……I have never seen myself, or felt like  a victim of the spina-bifida condition.  This view and attitude has been a significant and important gift to help me not be focused and oriented around a label of spina-bifida. I have not been defined by my condition and never will be. I am way more than this spina bifida condition.

Any more and it just feeds our self obsession and then we lose contact with the bigger picture of positive goodness.

Think a bit about this.

I do think it’s really, really useful to have the support of others in these pain communities, only people who suffer ongoing pain that cannot be fixed, know what its like. Getting support from them is common sense and we need plenty of it to live a life in freedom with pain……

but what is real and I reckon most  important is to anchor ourselves to goodness, to the great presence that underlies all of life. That goodness gives us contact with Freedom while we live with our pain.

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Our attitude towards our pain is everything. HOW we are with our pain is the key to living well with it…….

Thats my take on it anyways. Having lived with various degrees, intensities, types, stages and cycles of pain since I was a small child, one thing I have learnt that doesn’t work is fighting it.

An attitude of fighting pain, beating pain, winning against pain only makes pain it worse. This does not mean we don’t work hard with pain, this does not mean we let pain beat us into submission and become a victim to it.

It does mean that the WAY we work with our pain depends totally on what is needed in each moment. NOT on what we think our attitude should be towards pain.

If we think that we should always be fighting our pain, should never give up, can never let our guard down, must work harder and harder and keep trying more and more, eventually we just exhaust ourselves. We are literally fighting a losing battle.

We need to bring both a gentle kindness and a fierce courage and strength to our pain. We discern what is needed in each moment. We apply what is needed to the situation we are in. We don’t use a preconcieved attitude someone else has told us about, or what we think is right and good for the situation. We look at things as they are and apply what is needed.

Deep inside each and everyone one us we know what is needed in each situation. We know when we are indulging ourselves and lying down and rolling over, or when what is actually needed is to get up, get off our bum and do the very thing that will help ourselves. We don’t lie there like a vicitim, wanting mummy to feed us, we get up and help ourselves……in those moments we take responsibility for ourselves. We do what we can for ourselves, we care well for ourselves. That might mean doing little things like, pausing and breathing, stretching and moving a little, eating some good food, saying no to that extra indulgence, bringing discipline to not indulging in things that weaken my energy and I know make my pain worse….

and

on the flip side …

We allow ourselves to be right where we are. In each moment. If i must rest, and do nothing I must rest and do nothing. I need to be able to allow myself times to just blob out, let go completely and say, feel and experience I have had enough. This is just too much, too hard. I’m too tired. I cant do this anymore. I am really shattered. We need to be able to allow ourselves times where we give up and surrender it all, all that pain, all that suffering. We need to allow ourselves to feel small, and helpless. Simply because when we suffer from so much pain that it becomes too much, that is how we often feel.

Yet don’t stop there.

Magic happens when we let ourselves be true to where we are in any given moment. Where we don’t have a preconceived idea of what we “should” or “shouldn’t be doing. Where we take action from what is arising now, what is right here in front of me, where we listen and are open to what is the required response now….

Living with pain is not only tough, often it feels unbearable and overwhelming. Having the attitude of fighting off the pain only creates more resistance. In the fighting we harden. Yet if we are more like water, softer, malleable, flowing, with our pain. The effect of that softer malleable, flowing,  attitude towards our pain is cooling rather than making our pain hotter, more intense, more fiery. We have enough of that heat already.

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When I really breathe in my own pain, and when I connect  intimately with every other person in this very moment who is in this very same pain as I am, what happens?

When I really do this sincerely, the opposite can happen to what my  mind fears….mind says how can I bear that much pain!  I’ll be crushed, overwhelmed.

Yet what actually happens is different.

My personal pain is shared, NOT magnified. It can be sudden and  miraculous how inner support arises from connecting with others in the same pain as I am. Right here. Right now.

It takes the focus off little ol me, and places it on the great, potent, powerful  life that I am intimately made up  of.  Call that what you like.

Try these 4 steps.

1. For  a moment, Imagine a scene that brings you into contact with deep peace, stillness and presence.

2. Breath in t every pore in your body hot black, burning smoky soot, breathe out of every pore of your body, light, cooling, soothing calmness.

3. Breath in your own physical, emotional, pain….. breath out, send out, relaxed open, peace and calmness.

4. Connect sincerely and intimately with every other person in the world in this very same moment, right NOW,  who is also experiencing the same pain as you are….breathe in their pain, breath out/ send out to them all, pain free relaxed open-ness.

Do this whenever you can for a  few minutes,  finding  your own natural breathing rhythm…….then see what happens next.

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10 minutes on the eliptical machine this morning feels like a massive challenge. my own personal mini marathon, at the last two minutes Im just using pure will power to keep going. My legs just say no, we cant do this, stop, get off, you are killing us with pain!  Yet something in me says OK, I’m sorry guys, but I’ve gotta keep going. If we don’t exercise these legs, we don’t get to keep walking. Simple as that. So I keep going.

Its a fine edge, how hard to push, and how much to rest and let things be. I know right now I have been letting things be too long. My legs tell me, they just stop working, I can’t walk from the car to the house without a struggle. I can’t stand for more than 30 seconds in one place without them feeling like they are going to collapse. Other things are going haywire too, I can’t control my bowels, sometimes the shit just falls out, anytime anywhere. Same with my bladder….

One voice  in me says keep going, come on, keep moving…..get up and go again. Get on that eliptical, keep walking, keep moving. You must do it.

The other voice, just wants to lie down in green pastures and give up. Rest deeply and dissolve into the dark depths of comfort and mystery….and let this funny old body go. Enough struggle it says, enough pain, enough, enough.

I listen to something deeper than both. Both voices have their place. Yet something living in the moment is what I long to be guided by. The presence that can and does include both voices, and wisely knows the way to push and relax. This presence wisely knows that what is needed in each moment changes according to the moment. This is how I work with my edge of needing to workout hard, needing to work my legs with intensity so they don’t wast away.

This presence I follow, and in following it I gradually, step by step,  live a life led by presence, as an intelligent, loving substance that knows that the way forward with this pain and struggle, needs both strength and kind compassion, firmly grounded in each moment.

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Living well with pain is a bit like baking a cake, or cooking a really great meal. Whatever ingredients we use and how well we prepare them and work with them determines the quality of the cake or the meal, and even more importantly whether or not its delicious or not!

Same with working with pain. If the ingredients of our living a great life with pain recipe are say, loving compassion, strength and courage,  peace and power,  will and perseverence, joy and pleasure, then whatever pain comes we bring those qualities to cook with our pain. If we are contracting in pain,  bringing stillness and a deep out breath again and again will change it. What happens to your pain cooking process depends on you. What you bring to it determines the quality of the meal, (or pain)  you get to eat.

Its the same as cooking a good meal, we can cook our pain.

No matter what you might think about, this it’s simply true. If you bring a smile to pain, and cook all along the through the cycle of your pain with a smile, it will change it.  The smile produces something good to eat. You get to smile with pain. Sound’s weird. It is compared to the normal way we deal with pain, with a grimace, and ouch, and crying out. That’s real too. I know it, yet try both. Little by little, gradually  bring a gentle smile to your pain, and see what happens next….

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