When Life is too Big for Pretense: Sometimes, Total Honesty and Authenticity Are the Only way

We’ve all experienced pain, both psychological and physical. It’s one element of being alive, yet can be too complex to figure out, so difficult to live with. It can feel like it could shatter us. Maybe we just want it gone and yearn for a pill to mask it or chase it away. Certainly, it exists to signal something is wrong, but it can take on a life of its own, beyond any apparent purpose. It can also house inside itself impactful revelations.

Just a few days ago, an anecdote in a book I had just started reading grabbed my attention. It was Gerry Shishin Wick’s The Five Ranks of Zen; Tozan’s Path of Being, Nonbeing & Compassion. Tozan was a ninth century Zen Master, and his work significantly advanced the practice of Zen.

A monk asked Tozan “How do you avoid the discomfort of hot and cold?” Tozan replied, “Go to that place where there is no hot and cold… When you are hot, be hot; and when you are cold, be cold.”

Recently, I’ve been experiencing a weird pain wrapped in chills. It can feel like an invasion of cold, and I then treat it as such and just want it gone. Other times, it seems to rise from deep within me. I’ve spoken with doctors and tried all sorts of medical, and psychological approaches. I’ve considered how lucky I am that it’s not something worse.

When I can, I try to notice how and from where it came. I notice my response to sensations, and the labels I use for them; our response to pain is as important as the original sensations. If we think we’re having a heart attack, the pain can become immensely greater than if we think we have GERD.

Sometimes, when that cold-pain overtakes me, I visualize in my mind a warm, beautiful day in a place I love. And sometimes, this works, if I don’t shake so much it shatters the image of warmth I had created.

We can get hooked on pain. Pain can narrow our focus, and we can’t let it go. So maybe we then expand the universe of experience, so the pain becomes only one stimulus amidst hundreds. We let it share a moment of our lives with everything else around us, chairs and tables, trees and birds, spatial distances from our body to the walls of the room, or between our nose and toes. Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins describe this method in Dissolving Pain; Simple Brain-Training Exercises for Overcoming Chronic Pain.

But so far, no doctor has explained, no approach has fully healed the pain. So, this anecdote speaking of hot and cold, this story⎼ or what in Zen Buddhism is called a Koan, a retold conversation of a Zen master with a student meant to lead to awakening⎼ got to me. It felt so right but its reality eluded me.

What if instead of thinking myself separate from the pain and experiencing it as foreign, it became just one moment of a universe experiencing itself?…

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

Ancient Lessons About Reducing Anxiety and Embracing the World

Despite feeling tremendous relief just a few nights ago, when Catharine Masto Cortez was declared the winner of the Nevada Senate race and my wife, and I, danced around the living room⎼ today I feel heavy once again. Why is that? I was so happy the Democrats exceeded expectations and maintained control of the Senate. The outpouring of support for the rights of women and to vote has clarified for all that the GOP war for autocracy can be stopped.

 

But sometimes, we get so caught up in a situation, a worry, expectation, and lose any perspective. We might be too frightened, traumatized, or invested and we see things only one way, as if the moment stood isolated in time. And we lose sight of how the situation came to be.

 

We might lose sight, for example, of just how traumatized we all were by past threats and those still looming. We have the GOP barely gaining control of the House and, of course, keeping control of the Supreme Court. And their leaders, DJT and others like him, are still threatening to seize the Presidency, avoid prosecution for their crimes, and impose their will on the rest of us. And the chaos they might yet cause, with their program of hate, lies, and division, and denying the factual results of this and past elections.

 

But not only is no human an island but no moment. The past sets up the present, as this moment educates the next. One moment’s mistake can lead either to another mistake ⎼ or to insight, when we can allow our heart, mind, and senses to be open to it.

 

I was reading a book by Joan Sutherland, a Zen meditation teacher, called Through Forests of Every Color: Awakening with Koans. In chapter two, she talked about how a new form of Zen developed in China in the eighth century in response to catastrophic times. Over just ten years, two-thirds of the population died due to rebellion, invasion, famine, and disease. The Tang dynasty of the time went from a flourishing empire to, afterwards, a barely surviving one, where life was so tenuous.

 

Of course, this mirrored back to me our own time, marked as we know too well, with so much disease, so many climate disasters, and the threats mentioned earlier of violence, and the attempted destruction of our democratic form of government.

 

No moment is the same as any other, but how did people, in awful times in the past, or going through awful times today, cope? Can we today, or those from the past, reveal ways of living that can help us through the pain to something we could welcome, to ways of living that meet our needs and strengthen our humanity?

 

I especially look to people like Zen adepts, those who have spent years studying the mind, body, and heart, and living harmoniously with others and nature. According to Sutherland, the Zen adepts and innovators of the 8th century,  realized that trying to escape their world through a narrow path to personal peace or religious ceremony would not serve them or their culture. They needed a sense of immediacy and, awful as it was, they got it….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.