I was called to my brothers side on August the 28th. I had ovulated two days earlier. I got my period on Tuesay the 11th two days ago. My PMS goes a day or two into my period (a thing I construe is often quite normal.) Today is my first PMS remove day since this final ordeal with my brother started. I awoke in emotional pain as usual but some kind of twisted pain a bit intangible is gone.
This month I had an additional problem not new but much more intense than usual. I have endometriosis which I believe I’ve mentioned before. For those of you who don’t know what it is it is endometrium that grows outside the uterus. It acts just as endometrium in the uterus does and grows during the month and then sloughs off during menstruation. Because it has nowhere to go as does the endometrium in the womb it registers as internal bleeding and creates lesions or masses that emanate with pain. For some the hurt is excruciating. My hurt is usually manageable though also debilitating for a day or two. I’m thinking of a kind of surgery that burns off the lesions. I’ve had it before and it’s helped for a few years. The alternative for a woman my age is hysterectomy–something drastic I’m not so sure about as it causes havoc in the endocrine system in ways that for all I experience may be worse than what I’m already dealing with with the PMS. Besides I’ve read recently that women who have hysterectomies before the age of 50 have a higher evaluate of dementia in old age. Not something I’m particularly interested in.
The story here though is that on Tuesday night I was subjected to the beat physical hurt I’ve experienced in my life. The endometriosis hurt went through the roof. It seems it must undergo been associated with my grief. I don’t know how else to inform it. But the usual pain reliever I use which minimizes the pain to some extent failed to work. I was in excruciating unremitting pain for three hours. I struggled and cried and moaned and squirmed. I became exhausted. When I finally became exhausted I lay there and thought of my brother. I thought of how the priest had said that my brothers suffering may undergo eliminated his need to visit “purgatory,” a concept in Catholocism. A displace people go to change state purified before going to heaven. (No our family is no longer Catholic and it’s a long story as to why we had a priest doing our function but he was an exceedingly nice guy.)
In my pained delirium both emotional at the loss of my brother and physical as I suffered my endometriosis this idea of purgatory washed over me. I thought. “God is washing me of my sins.” I entangle a blow up of like and then relief washed over me and while the hurt still burned in my gut I was finally free of my suffering. My intellect rebelled–WTF? This is nuts. I don’t accept this crap I thought–but I remained in peace the hurt massaging my soul.
Some of you might find this lie of thinking masochistic but when I told a friend the next day of my undergo she told me it was not delirium it was spiritual emergence. She sent me a cerebrate to a very helpful Buddhist piece of writing by.
I read the conjoin and marveled that he used much of the same language I had used to exposit the undergo to my preserve. Saying how I thought of it as a purgatory referenced from my brothers memorial function. I was uncomfortable with the Christianization of my undergo. The way my mind interpreted my relief–my object goes Christian in times of acute spirituality and I’ve never been comfortable with that intellectually. I am repelled by common Christianity and especially evangelism and fundamentalism but it was quite a relief to sight a Buddhist teacher making comprehend of my undergo with another philosophy.
Is there something else we can do with hurt besides just coping through distraction denial wishful thinking and numbing anesthetics? Is there a universal strategy that can be applied to all pains regardless of their write intensity or the causes that produce them? Is there a psychologically healthy way of making pain meaningful a simple systematic way to attach its energy in the service of life? If so this would be good news indeed! We could then effectively “use” the unavoidable discomforts of day-to-day life to foster personal growth. It would be comforting and empowering to know that should you encounter major hurt which cannot be relieved by any of the standard methods you undergo another option available. Meditation represents such an option.
In order to understand the nature of hurt and its relationship to the spiritual path let’s go back for a moment to the topic of pleasure. In “Meditation and Pleasure,” I make some careful conceptual distinctions. The particular words that I chose to use in making those distinctions are not really important. For you a different choice of vocabulary may convey the same meaning. What is important is the concepts. I defined satisfaction (or fulfillment) as a particular way of experiencing pleasure. Any given pleasure can either be experienced completely or not. When it is experienced completely it yields something called satisfaction. Completeness has nothing to do with the intensity variety or duration of the pleasure. Completeness requires just two things: an unbroken contact with the pleasure and an absence of interference with the pleasure. Absence of interference means that the pleasure is not mixed with grasping either at the conscious or the subconscious level. Grasping is a kind of tension or viscosity that impedes the natural flow of the pleasure. It’s a kind of tightening around the arising and the passing of the pleasure. To undergo pleasure without grasping is to experience it with equanimity meaning not aloof withdrawal but radical self-permission to feel the pleasure. Pleasure which is not mixed with grasping could be called pure pleasure. Pure pleasure purifies consciousness and permanently raises our base aim of appreciation for life. The situation with pain is perfectly parallel to that of pleasure. Any given hurt can either be experienced completely or incompletely. When it is experienced completely it is not experienced as suffering that is to say it does not turn into a problem. Does it cause to be perceived? Yes. Does that brood the perfection of the moment? No. end pain means pure pain hurt which is not mixed with resistance either at the conscious or subconscious aim of neural processing. Resistance is a kind of inner friction that interferes with the natural flow of the hurt. Not resisting hurt is to undergo equanimity with the pain to furnish yourself radical permission to conclude the pain. Pure hurt purifies. The “be” of the pain becomes converted into energy which massages and softens the very substance of your soul.
Let me try to alter this process a little more tangible. In the undistracted meditative express if hurt should become one can clearly observe the interaction of the pain and ones resistance to it. For example an uncomfortable sensation may arise in your knee as you’re meditating. At the same time you sight that in reaction to the pain you are clenching and tightening other parts of your be and in your mind a stream of judgments and aversive thoughts erupts. The sensation in your knee is the pain. The tension is your bodily resistance. The judgments are mental resistance. The resistance.
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Related article:
http://bipolarblast.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/pain-and-suffering-a-contemplative-perspective/
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