This morning, and for as far back as I can remember, I embraced and fully felt the experience of having a body. This seem like a ‘normal’ feeling to most people, but it is not to someone who feels pain every day of their lives.
Knowing, being aware of pain, chronic pain specifically, one knows at some level, that experiencing all the physical parts of oneself means coming face-to-face with suffering. And pain is to be avoided at all costs. When one becomes disabling ill, everything crumbles, and both the interior and exterior world is perceived as needing to be avoided. One wants to scream: ‘get out of this’ reality that is the illness or condition that one finds themselves in. There are few to no ‘coping’ mechanisms within reach that truly are helpful.
Furthermore, we live in a society constructed around the idea that for an ailment the only solution is to diagnose, solve, and medicate (or cut). When none of this works, as an internal solution, and by this I mean as a solution for the chronic daily pain that a person feels, then what? Much of the medical community copes themselves by numbing the ‘patient’ who does not know any path out of the agony.
Today, during one of my seemingly regular meditation sessions, something different occurred. I am unsure I can quite put my finger on it. Perhaps I simply let go; I allowed myself go into a space of feeling that which causes me ‘hurt’, or the daily pain that I so desperately avoid. And yet, unbeknownst to me, I made the choice of deeply feeling that which I have been running away from, the pain that I was so desperately escape.
Today I felt my body, in its full integral being. Yes, there was pain, but it was not the focus of my attention. Perhaps for the first time in a very long time, the focus was the sheer joy of the feeling itself, of the depths that it is to be alive in that very moment, of the unity of all my physical parts that made up the whole. And, also for the first time, it felt good; I smiled; I felt joyous; perhaps for a fleeting moment, but so worth it.
Thank you!
