“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” ―
Pain torments me from morning to late at night when I slip into a dream-crazed stupor, thanks to an extra capsule of opioids. If, as Lewis writes, God shouts into a megaphone to be heard, I can’t help but pay attention.
But first, I have to cut a path through the thicket of my reactivity: Why me? I hate this! Why do I have only 10 minutes to talk to a clinic doctor — and have to wait 12 more months to see a specialist? I hate getting old. Why doesn’t acupuncture work? Constipation sucks! I have to crawl up the stairs on all fours to minimize pain. People look the other way when I shuffle down the street on a borrowed crutch. Why do I have to suffer alone? How do I ask for help — when several people have offered to provide it?
Poor suffering me.
What I thought of as unique to me is in fact a universal infliction. 2600 years ago, seated under a mango tree in faraway India, the Buddha gave the Sermon of the Two Arrows on just this topic [1]:
“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental: just as being shot with an arrow and, right afterward, shot with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows . . . “
Sooner or later, we come to realize pain’s two component parts: physical as the first and mental/existential as the second arrow. Generally, the first is treated from the outside but the second must be tackled from within.
Stay tuned for the next post on my report from deep inside
Please write a COMMENT on your experiences with pain.
[1] Lewis
[2] Sallatha Sutta: the arrow. (1977). Translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
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