Circle 3: Facing the Realities of Life - Illness
ILLNESS
Illness shows us the unpredictability and impermanent nature of life.
Having a serious illness often becomes the turning point in a person’s spiritual life. It can make them realize that practice is essential for handling the pain and other consequences of the illness. Also, it illustrates that we do not know how much more time we will have left to practice.
Even in the area of illness, the quality of our consciousness can make a significant difference. In the past decade there has been a lot of research in epigenetics. It was previously believed that our genetic makeup was fixed, similar to the color of our eyes not changing throughout our lives. The word, “epigenetics” literally means “above the gene.” It refers to the control of genes not from within the DNA itself, but from messages coming from outside the cell. Epigenetics is showing that a change in human consciousness can produce physical changes, both in structure and function, in the human body. And the speed of these changes can be remarkable.
At the same time, we need to be careful not to become obsessed with our physical health as shown by rigid eating habits, constant exercising, and so forth. The cause of this obsession can be our fear of illness and/or our identification with the body as self.
Pain
Pain or discomfort is typically associated with accidents and many different kinds of illness. The issue we have with pain, or unpleasant sensations, comes mostly from our fear of being overwhelmed by the pain. Instead of “practicing” with pain, we contract around it which inevitably increases the painful sensations.
The Buddha said that someone who has not practiced with painful sensations as they arise is like someone who is being shot with two arrows. The first arrow is the painful sensation itself and the second arrow is the pain that comes from our contraction around that pain.
There is a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable since it arises as a consequence of having a body, but suffering is not. Suffering arises as a mental reaction to the pain when we resist the experience.
We need to learn how to open to the painful feeling, to relax, soften and settle into the experience. We need to become so intimate with the pain that we can penetrate our misperceptions about the unpleasant feeling and see it for what it really is.
By opening to the pain in this way we can become directly aware of the impermanent nature of the pain:
A. Between pulsations of pain, there is the absence of pain
B. The quality of the pain keeps changing. We may first experience the sensation as burning, then have it change as pressure, throbbing, and so forth.
C. The location of the pain keeps changing in very subtle movements.
D. If we can truly stay with the pain it will reach a point where it breaks up and completely disappears for a time.
And by opening to the pain we can discover that the pain is not happening to us. There are just painful feelings in the body of which consciousness is aware.
How do we work with painful feelings to discover the truth of what we are
saying? One way is through a Body Scan meditation.