Category Archives: Overcome Difficulties

Dealings With Pain – Guest Post

Here is this post, reposted for the THIRD time. This account is always well received, and there might be some current readers who missed it the first two times. So, here it is published in two parts – tomorrow is the personal account of an experience one night while in hospital.

I’ve returned to read the whole thing in the recent past as I continue to deal with pain. Thanks to Anna, once again.

This article was first published in October 2009. There were many helpful and appreciative comments left at that first publication. Since pain seems to have become a bit of a theme it seems good to draw attention to this Guest Post.

Introduction Due to orthopaedic surgeries and treatments I have been dealing with long periods of excessive physical pain. Because of my body’s condition, being without pain is a rare thing in general. So training with pain is a necessity. The following is an excerpt of sorts, some bits and pieces on my personal dealings with pain. I guess what I am learning in the process is in essence applicable to any form of difficulty or adversary we may encounter in daily life.

Unbearable?
When in hospital, several times a day, you are asked to assess your pain level by giving it a rating between 0 and 10, zero being no pain, ten being unbearable pain. This made me reflect on the meaning of unbearable. There have been a lot of times that the agony I was in completely filled the whole of consciousness, excluding all else, and I felt it was utterly unbearable. But having reached unbearable nothing much happens really, you do not drop dead, you do not explode to pieces, you do not vanish out of existence. Having reached unbearable you just continue to live, your heart simply continuing to beat. The truth is, despite the agony being unbearable you continue to bear it anyway. So however excessive, I thought it would be contrary to the truth to rate my pain a level 10, since if it was truly unbearable I reckon I would have dropped dead. I think this is an important distinction to be aware of when dealing with all kinds of stuff: to see clearly how something feels, how your experience of it is and then how that relates to the truth of how things really are, the bigger reality.

Room for complaint
There is a difference between mild to reasonably severe pain and truly excessive pain in the way it affects the mind. With excessive pain there is no escape, it nails your consciousness immovably to a single point, that is, the now, The Reality Of Pain, that reality excludes all else. One has no option but to face it without flinching and to endure, whether you think you are capable of it or not. With milder forms of pain, there is more room for distraction, room for escape in familiar forms like being grumpy, feeling sorry for oneself, complaining. When I catch myself complaining sometimes, I smile and think “Actually, if I have room for complaint, I am doing not too bad!”

I should say that the above way of differentiating is for internal use only. I don’t think you can reverse it to make inferences about someone else’s pain based on their “complaint level.” That would be trying to step in another’s shoes, which — apart from being impossible — does not really help and can lead to a judgmental attitude, which in turn is bound to heavily tax whatever is going on.

Preserving resilience
There is nothing that drains your energy more than chronic pain that lasts and lasts without giving you a break. This can be quite exhausting and depressing. What helps me to get through bleak times is to find helpful distractions that lift the mood like watching movies and television or chatting to friends and ways of relaxing the body as much as possible to minimize the accumulation of tension and stress. But by far the main thing that preserves your resilience in a situation of ceaseless pain is to not give in to gloomy thoughts, to stay focused and to keep looking at the distinction between the feelings, the experience of the now and the truth, the bigger reality of how things really are. Not losing sight of the bigger reality prevents the mind from getting into isolation where you feel all alone in your agony. I guess that loneliness is the most unbearable of all and can make you apathetic or spiral you down into the pits of depression and despair.

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The ‘Black Hole’

This post has been republished a few times now. I love that this card from my father turned up within the last couple of years amongst some old holiday cards in the monastery stash, which were available to be recycled. I believe my dad found this time of year quite difficult although he would never talk about ‘low mood’ but would mention the ‘black hole’ and note it in cards or conversations to me. So he obviously noticed ‘something’ going on, as I do.

Yes, it gets dark earlier in the afternoon and light later in the mornings until Black Hole Day when the tide turns and the daylight gets longer, nights shorter. Slowly. My dad would mark the weeks when there was little change in the day lengths as The Black Hole. Not an easy time of year for any of us and many supplement with extra light.

From my late father’s card, 1988.

Happy Christmas holiday and new year. Hope you don’t have to do too much cooking. Hope the Black Hole is not sitting on your back – anyway it is nearly black hole day – 21 Dec Winter Solstice which is far more important than Xmas to me.

Note December 2020. Little did my father know that cooking for the monastic community is an honor and a privilege. Currently, I am cooking lunch each Saturday for the community which numbers around 20 monks and postulants.

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Ambling at Alnmouth Bay

northumberland-coast
Alnmouth Beach, Northumberland.

I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE
by Mary Oliver

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Just a couple of hours in early September, ambling along the sandy beach at Alnmouth  Bay, smelling the seaweed, watching dogs run and play, hearing the swish/woosh of the waves, sitting on a rock as the tide went out – all enough to lift my spirits. It is unmistakable the effect being beside the sea has on one’s whole being.

I wasn’t looking for anything, in particular, that day. It just seemed ‘good’ to stir myself and ‘go somewhere’ while I was having some quiet time/renewal time in August/Sept. My natural inclination was towards exploring the fields and lanes locally to where I was staying. On the day I wasn’t feeling 100% wonderful as I stepped out of the car, there are days like that. During the hours drive the exhaust pipe had broken and the sound of it vibrating against the chassis was both defining and concerning. This I could have done without.

However, it just takes a bit of ‘pushing through’ sometimes, in some circumstances, to let go mentally, emotionally and physically. This is spiritual renewal. There will always be ‘conditions’, inward and outward to push through. Not to reach somewhere else, some happier ‘place’ perhaps but when all conditions come together, there you are. Renewed! what a gift.

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Nothing changes – Everything changes

I have been re-reading a journal article, titled Renewal which I wrote in the mid-1980s. I was young monastically speaking, training at Shasta Abbey working in The Journal Department; typing it (on an actual typewriter), doing the ‘layout’, taking photographs, collating,  and mailing. On revisiting this fairly lengthy article it’s clear that change has happened between then and now! The style? I blush! The theistic language? Clearly ‘a monk’ teaching ‘lay people’ with a slightly preachy feel…! Tripple blush!

That was largely the style then, the look and feel of the Journal then is not the same as now. How we pass on teaching and practice has changed, the fundamental heart, however, remains very much the same. The Journal was and is the ‘voice’ of the teaching, originally a Shasta Abbey Journal and a Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey Journal and latterly since the 1990’s they were combined to be The Journal of the OBC. Goodness! Now it is published online with only limited paper copies. A big change, driven largely by economics. And bless desktop publishing.

Jademountains has broken the mould in terms of what and how teaching and insights are conveyed into the world. As you know posts are not necessarily aimed at people who practice within our tradition either or any kind of religious tradition. In addition, I am free to develop content without formal oversight which is a huge responsibility, although what I write is very much ‘within’ the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives tradition. You all, readers both lay and monastic function as informal checks and balances sitting in the background as I contemplate content. I’m shockingly free to exercise choice and to develop a ‘voice’ and to broadcast into the big wide world.

And now to my motivation behind writing about renewal. The historic article, ‘Renewal’ has become a bit of a classic apparently and now the Journal wants it to be edited to bring it up to date for the Journal to publish. The following series of posts might form the basis of a new article or I may ask for somebody to knock the original into the 21st century!

Renewal? Spiritual renewal, a time set aside from the daily/weekly round to ‘be with’ that which, what might be described as ones deepest most profound aspiration, which can frequently be lost sight of in the face of the imperative to get on with life. It is the time set aside which can be a trial – it means making a deliberate decision to set spiritual renewal as enough of a priority to follow through in practice. That’s to let drop some plans, hopes and dreams and to basically exercise the NO (sorry) faculty we all have but infrequently invoke.

Religious traditions have the Sabbath, defined as: A day of rest and worship: Sunday for most Christians; Saturday for Jews and a few Christians; Friday for Muslims. Apparently there are Uposatha days in Buddhist countries practiced for “the cleansing of the defiled mind,” resulting in inner calm and joy. The closest to that we get is the Renewal of The Precepts twice a month, generally on the fist and third Wednesday. So spiritual renewal is on the organized religions map and in societies calendar. However, they are scheduled for the faithful as against the faithful scheduling holy days for themselves. The latter being more realistic given the over-committed lives most face.  Our freedoms to choose how and when we take time to focus in on our overtly religious lives is there. But do we choose, can we choose, what to choose to do or not do?

In the Zen tradition, that we hale from, days with a 4 or a 9 in the date are renewal days, that’s how it was when I was a youngster. We switch to Thursday afternoons and Mondays for renewal to accommodate scheduled weekend retreats for lay guests. On festival days Sunday afternoon is a renewal time too. In principle at least these are times when the monastery has a ‘change of pace’, individuals can exercise choice, deciding how best to spend time to fulfil the spirit of such days. What this looks like in practice changes with seniority, responsibilities, age etc. And it isn’t so much what one does than the attitude adopted.

More tomorrow, or the next day. I cook on Saturdays.

 

 

 

 

 

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Being Nobody, Going Nowhere!

This poem by Emily Dickinson heads the home page of Rita Brady Kiefer’s website, more on her another time. I have bumped into it in a number of places and each time I’m left in a thoughtful mood.

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d banish us – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog —
To tell your name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!”
– Emily Dickinson

Being a shy sensitive youngster I longed to have an identity and at the time that was connected to what I did. ‘What do you do’? was the question I would dread as I struggled to be invisible in the public space! Then it was a common make-conversation opener when sitting on a train or bus, now most people are looking at a screen rather than at each other. Teenagers struggle to be something or somebody, to have an answer as much for themselves as curious others. I wanted my answer to be a casual, ‘Oh, I’m a photographer!’ In time, a long time, I could honestly use that as an answer but by then I didn’t need it. I knew I was a multiple me and nobody wants chapter and verse, at a bus stop!

Fast forward through the decades, now when asked I can say ‘a monastic’, (surrounded by Northumbrian bog)! Identity, apart from ‘function’, is so tied up with appearance, how our face is. Photography is in the hands of everybody, everywhere, anytime. Screens, especially at the moment when less in outdoor public space or indoors for that matter, has become how we know people. How we make contact. For those who have used Zoom, or group Skype or other means of joining online using a webcam, there you are face and shoulders with a ‘sneak peek’ into the life behind the image. On big Webinars, there are multiple screens to scroll through to see ‘who is there’. No questions asked or needing to be answered. At the moment for so many people having contact is to see, and speak to a moving image. Which is both close-up and at a distance on a glass screen. To go deeper than surface appearance is all guesswork, more or less.

The other day I had a photograph of myself ‘taken’ for the booklet of printed photographs we have available for visiting guests although, needless to say, we are not open to live guests, for the moment. This book of faces means visitors can learn the monk’s names which is all part of connecting with the community, and the practice and teaching here at Throssel. Little did I realize uploading this photograph here and in other online places I frequent (Facebook as hounmugo for example) I’d get the multiple responses that I have.

How public – like a Frog —
To tell your name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

With thanks to all those 67, and still counting, people who have responded to that image. It doesn’t cause me to think I am ‘somebody’ going ‘somewhere’. Nor on the other hand, am I, or anybody reading this, a nobody with no direction to life. That would be a sad, sad thing.

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