The Antidote Is Love: Relieving Chronic Pain & Loss Through Meditation
Mexica/Aztec Host Figurines, Tibetan Body Mandalas, Somatic Bliss, Holding Pain with Love, The Limits of Healing Narratives, Disability, Healing as Death & Rebirth + Sneaky Secular Dharma
I recently got back from a week in Mexico City with the Lit & Luz Festival, which my partner was invited to. Thanks to his parents, we went without our kids. Meaning: We traveled with an abundance of energy which we have not felt in nine years. (Not that we don’t love our kids! But they take forever to put on their shoes and they only want to eat pizza, except in Italy, where the pizza apparently has too much cheese.)
We probably could have been dropped off in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and been ecstatically happy buying salt water taffy and visiting a wax museum. Instead we found ourselves in Mexico City’s Roma Norte, a gorgeous tree-lined neighborhood known for its restaurants, bookstores, and artist studios.
On top of a kid-free trip to a beautiful place, we hung out with an incredibly gracious, warm group of poets and artists, and all of us were taken around the city like kindergartners to gawk at art.
I was especially taken by Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli museum of pre-Hispanic Mexican art, where I found this figura huésped, or host figurine:
If you look closely, you’ll see that the body of this clay figurine contains smaller faces and bodies. These are believed to be deities which reside inside the human form. The exact meaning of the host figurine and its ritual usage are lost to time. But the concept of the body hosting deities has a kindred spirit in Tibetan Buddhism and Bön:
These bodily deities, in Vajrayana Buddhism, are not interventionist gods independent of ourselves, but enlightened qualities that exist in the body’s energy channels, giving rise to the somatic experiences of joy and bliss.
I love that two separate religious cultures, an ocean and centuries apart, both discovered that the body houses the divine. It’s a worldview which feels like a healthy antidote to theologies which tell us that the body is sinful, and also to belief systems which limit the body to gross mechanisms. Enlightened energies are not found elsewhere, but inside us.
Seeing these depictions of innate, bodily energies got me thinking about healing and the sacredness of the body, and the limitations of the language of healing. The body houses the divine, but it is only a temporary shelter. We are more than the body.
In Western Buddhism, both the language of healing and psychotherapy are used to convey the benefits of meditation. With the introduction of Vajrayana in the nineteen seventies and eighties, teachers like Chögyum Trungpa seem to have found more common ground between dharma and Western psychology than dharma and conventional Abrahamic religions. This connection makes sense. Both Vajrayana and psychology work directly with consciousness and the sense of self-hood. In his work, Trungpa often uses the term “neurosis” to describe what might be more conventionally translated as “difficult emotions” or karmic patterns, the ego-centered obstacles that prevent us from realizing our true nature.
The first Western Buddhist practitioners were part of a larger counter-cultural movement that was questioning everything about white-dominant, middle-class U.S. society, including the way religion is practiced and has been historically used to harm and control people. Because of their (understandable) skepticism towards religion they largely related to dharma as a kind of psychotherapy, albeit a kind of psychotherapy which goes beyond pathology and into the realm of existential meaning and experiences of the sublime.
However akin Buddhism is to Western psychology, Vajrayana Buddhism is not merely therapy. It's a worldview and creative process meant to transform our daily, lived experience, integrating a greater, spacious awareness into all that we do. Rather than overcoming or minimizing hardships, we’re instructed to take difficulty, such as illness and death, onto the path.
When illness arises, this brings benefit; Whatever arises is a treasury of Bliss. When Death occurs, take it onto the path; The Lord of Death is a treasury of bliss. - Padampa Sangye, Lion of the Siddhas, trans. by David Molk
Considering death and illness as beneficial seems counter-intuitive, unless you view these experiences as opportunities for us to realize the indestructibility of Buddha-nature—which is innately vast, loving, and empty.
One of my first writing teachers, Chris Abani, is an Anglo-Nigerian poet and author who was imprisoned in Lagos as a young man for his political activism. He was badly beaten while incarcerated, and years later, his injuries continued to cause him pain. When he moved to the U.S., he was struck by the preoccupation Americans have with healing narratives—narratives which tell us over and over again that all will be restored to a previous state of well-being.
What most healing narratives don’t tell us is how to live happily and freely alongside irreparable pain and loss.
As someone who suffers from chronic pain and its emotional toll, I’ve found that my culture’s goals of healing can be so focused on restoring one to a previous state of well-being that it can actually worsen the experience around the pain. It’s hard enough to stop or limit the activities you previously enjoyed. Chronic pain is expensive to manage and treat. Then there are the practical challenges of experiencing pain while trying to survive: having a job, caring for children, running errands, taking care of daily life. When you live in a culture that values productivity and performance above everything else, having to slow down to manage pain—or even stop activity completely—implies that you are no longer useful, valuable, or worthy.
We can cause ourselves a lot of suffering by trying to forcefully restore a former state of health, rather than by relating to pain with loving-kindness. The Dzogchen and Bön teacher, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, explains that we should cradle our pain the way a mother cradles her whimpering child. Bringing this level of compassion and love to our “pain selves'“ is a liberatory act.
While writing this post, I was going through physical pain. My knee-jerk reaction is to respond to pain with impatience and irritation. It’s hard to write. I make more typos. My thoughts aren’t as clear. Pain makes me foggy and tired, requiring me to rest and withdraw from social activities. I often feel guilty for resting, because my conditioning has taught me that I’m most valuable when I’m working, active, and social. Again and again, chronic pain causes me to confront my own reactions, my own desires, my own expectations of how I think I ought to be in the world. But when we attend to pain with love and compassion, the emotional heaviness around the experience of pain lightens up. I can be content and in pain at the same time.
The narrative of healing as exclusively restorative is ultimately life-denying. It ignores the heartbreaking reality that nearly all of us will experience losses and injuries from which we cannot be completely restored, only transformed. I’ve witnessed this with the people closest to me.
My mother, K., was paralyzed from the waist-down for seven years at the end of her life. I’ve known very few people who value their independence and self-efficacy as much as she did. Being in a wheelchair was a physically miserable experience for her. She also had to endure the discrimination and social erasure faced by all disabled people.
Even though her doctors told her she would never walk again, she was determined to do so. In her life, she had made incredible advances as a poor, country, fat, queer woman born in the 1930’s. She loved the 1950’s self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking. This positive attitude saw her through hardships, including going to medical school as a thirty-five-year-old, where she was just one of three women in her class. As a child she often told me I could do anything I put my mind to.
K. hung a photograph of herself walking by her physical therapy equipment, as a way to motivate herself to walk again.
A few years into her paralysis, her determination to walk began to feel like an obstacle in accepting and adapting to her condition—it was immensely painful to bear witness to.
While positivity can perform miracles, it doesn’t always. At some point, positivity and healing-as-restoration causes us suffering because we feel like we can’t admit how much we hurt. Our society conditions us to believe that we’re failures if we don't constantly “rise above” or “push through” chronic pain. The alternative is that we can experience moments of pain as types of small deaths—a letting go of how we expect ourselves to usually feel and perform. When we let go, an attitude arises within us which is naturally caring and flexible. We can hold our pain with love. We can also know that whenever a death or a letting go occurs, a rebirth also occurs.
Rebirth is not restoration to a previous state. Every loss we experience is a transformation into a different person than we were before the loss. My mother had to accept her loss of ability in order to find happiness. Her former sense of self died and transformed. Just as when she died, my own sense of self died and transformed.
When you consider that physical and personal loss are inevitable to our existence, that there are capacities which we will lose and which cannot be restored, what is then asked of us is to take refuge in an awareness that exists beyond cycles beyond death and rebirth. The clarity and space of rigpa, or primordial awareness. In Western mystical traditions, I’ve seen rigpa roughly translated to as gnosis or the mind of god. In both traditions, this is considered as the most essential part of who we are.
Identifying with our true nature is, of course, much, much easier said than done. It requires confronting, honestly and alone, how much we hurt. This counters our physical instincts which tell us to move away from pain, not towards it. But when we hold pain with love, we are opening to our true nature, which is innately loving and easeful.
Through acquainting ourselves with the indestructibility and space of timeless awareness—again and again—we can learn to relate to our pain and loss with loving-kindness, and we find glimpses of what lies beyond our suffering. The body houses the divine, but it is only a temporary shelter. It is not all of us.
Sneaky Secular Dharma:
There are two writers whose works around pain have made their way into this post in one way or another.
I’ve been fascinated by the painting “The Body of the Dead Christ Lying in the Tomb” by Hans Holbein, ever since I watched Brian Bouldrey’s video essay. It’s a beautiful meditation on the grotesque, hope, hopelessness, witnessing, and the death of Bouldrey’s partner to AIDS in the early nineties.
Chris Abani’s fiction and poetry manages to be unflinching and sincere without losing a sense of wit. I’m forever grateful for his workshop and talk, many many years ago, on how to write from the wound without further wounding myself. I’d recommend starting out with his poem “Hanging in Egypt with Breyten Breytenbach.”
Lastly, as a palate cleanser, the IG account Healing from Healing is a blistering, hilarious take on the utter nonsense of the healing and transformation industries, while at the same time, maintaining that genuine healing and transformation are possible.
May all beings be free and happy! <3
Wonderful to read this Sarah! Serendipity was at work today when I noticed your titles post! So happy to have found you. I’ve been practicing Dzogchen for 35 years and love all the connections you are making here. Esp re the inner deities. I’m based in Sydney but currently in Tokyo for cancer treatment following a recent mastectomy. First came across Tibetan Buddhism via Chogam Trungpa’s books, then met Chogyal Namkhai Norbu and follow his teachings. Met Tenzin Wangyal once in Italy at the retreat center in v early days. Lovely to hear all the dharma references in your writing! Look forward to more!