Sarah Court

Suffering comes in many forms. Sometimes it is emotional pain, sometimes physical, and sometimes your whole world literally comes crashing down around you (if you haven’t already, please donate to the Red Cross or another reputable relief organization working in Haiti, and re-count your blessings).

For the most part, we are fortunate enough to be sound in body and mind, and to be surrounded by a fair amount of creature comfort. It is easy in the midst of a crisis on Haiti’s scale to dismiss our individual sufferings as unimportant, and perhaps some of them are overblown, but as Daniel Stewart reminded me the other day in class, “It is not our feelings that are wrong, but our judgment of our feelings.”

I want to write about denial, because it strikes me as possessing a powerful, serpentine ability to wrap itself around any situation and squeeze the truth out of it. When a person undergoes a great tragedy on the scale of Haiti’s earthquake, the mind often enters a state of shock as a way to protect itself from the horror of its surroundings. In a less dramatic situation, denial can be our mind’s way of protecting us from a painful truth that we are not yet ready or able to deal with. We may convince ourselves that our partner’s excessive drinking isn’t a problem, or that our credit really isn’t that bad, or that the one that got away is still in love with us.

In my late teens and early twenties I grappled with an eating disorder, helped along by both a modeling career and a pretty fragile sense of self-worth. Eventually someone convinced me to go to a therapist, and at our first session he asked me what was going on with my eating. I gave some long-winded, run around answer about not having a choice because of work, and that I knew what I was doing, and how I had everything totally under control. I’ve never forgotten how he just looked at me and replied, “Wow. I should’ve given you a cane and a top hat to go with that tap dance you just did.” His brutal honestly was a great gift, because I knew he was right, and on some level I had been waiting for someone to call me out on what I was doing. It wasn’t the end of the struggle, but it was the start of my way out.

Like many coping mechanisms, denial works until it no longer works. As denial leaves the body, we feel the suffering we have been avoiding. As it loosens its grip on the mind and on the heart, and truth flows back in, we are flooded with feeling, just like the prickling sensation of blood flowing back into a limb that has fallen asleep.

We must be gentle in this process. We must commend our bravery, our willingness to look deeply and honestly at how we are in the world. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali tells us that future pain can be avoided, but the catch is that it’s not by trying to avoid it. Instead, as we slowly and steadily awaken to the truth of who we are and allow that truth to determine our future behavior, we will eventually and inevitably no longer need to go down that river in Egypt.  

 

YS II.16 heyam duhkham anagatam

Pain that has not yet come is avoidable.

(translation from The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Sri Swami Satchidananda)

YS II.16 heyam duhkham anagatam

Pain that has not yet come is avoidable.

(translation by Sri Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)

 

I’m reading a fascinating book called The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge (you may have found yourself on the receiving end of one of my extremely enthusiastic emails encouraging you to read it – if not, consider this your email!). It’s full of stories about all kinds of different physical or mental impairments (stroke, blindness, loss of a limb) and the often impossible-seeming breakthroughs, adaptations or transformations that have resulted as brain after brain has risen to the occasion and proven its innate plasticity. Simply put, our brains are not fixed and immutable, but constantly adaptable, plastic entities that can change from the inside out to overcome pretty much any situation.

There’s an entire chapter that blows apart our long-standing beliefs about pain. For years it was widely held in the scientific community that the experience of pain was a one-way street: you cut your finger, and your brain registers a sensation that you label as pain. This seems to be a highly provable fact, as anyone who's ever injured their body (who hasn't?) can attest.

But the truth is far more complicated. It turns out that pain pathway goes both to and from the brain, and that far from simply receiving messages from the body about pain, the brain can (and regularly does) produce pain signals as warning measures to guard against aggravating an injury. It predicts future pain, and in order to avoid it, tells us it's happening right now. Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran calls this “learned pain.”  

For the yogi, the meditator, or anyone wishing to deepen their awareness, this is a hugely relevant piece of information. If we expect an experience – physical, mental or emotional – to be a painful one, especially if it’s been painful in the past, rather than just finding some kind of numbing neutral, our brain will go one step further to tell us that we are currently in pain. We take our past and we project it onto our future, and it can leave us paralyzed, immobile, frozen with fear, and in pain that feels absolutely real. If an asana has caused us pain in the past, we may not only expect it to cause us pain, but actually replicate that pain sensation to stop the muscles from going deeper into the present moment experience. (Hanumanasana, anyone?)

From the point of view of the brain, this is a brilliant survival mechanism. And if you’re nursing a broken bone, a pulled muscle, or a broken heart, it may be crucial. But if this learned pain carries on once the break or pull has healed, it will keep us from expanding into our fullest potential in an asana, or at home under the covers instead of out in the world.

So how do we know which pain – learned or current – we’re feeling? At first, we may not. Broken bones and broken hearts both need time to mend, and that time period is going to vary for all of us. But the practice of becoming more aware, of spending more and more time in the present moment, holds the key to our ability to discern for ourselves what exactly we are feeling. We will begin to tease out the finer details of what we are experiencing within each moment, rather than lumping them all into one basket labeled ‘Pain.’ We will come to know and trust our more subtle instincts, and know when it is time to get off the couch, or to try that pose again. And in doing so, we will reeducate our brain on a synaptic level, weakening the circuits that no longer serve us and build new ones that are established in the truth of the present, instead of the pain of the past and the fear of the future.

 

“Neural circuits, once established, tend to become self-sustaining.” – The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge p. 242

Many of us spend most of our time trying in one way or another to avoid pain. This seemingly instinctive pain-avoiding reaction to life is called dvesha, and it is one of the 5 obstacles, or kleshas, that Patanjali lists in the Yoga Sutra. Interestingly, this aversion to discomfort, and our pain-avoiding habits that it dictates, is actually considered an obstacle to happiness.

Pain tells us that we are alive. It brings us out of hiding and makes us experience the immediate moment. How we react to pain, then, dictates how much more pain we create for ourselves. In a yoga pose, squeezing up the face, holding the breath, even grunting sends messages to the body and to the nervous system that suffering is taking place. Sometimes these are unavoidable, but sometimes they’re just adding drama to the situation. I took a class once with a student behind me making the most outrageous grunts, moans, and cries that you could imagine. Each new pose brought on a new series of noises. At first it was funny and I giggled along with the rest of the students, but after he kept yelling and moaning I started to get irritated and had to work hard to ignore it and focus on what I was doing. I can’t even imagine how distracting the sounds must have been for his own practice.

This isn’t a tract on silent practice, and Lord knows there have been and will be plenty of times when a pose makes me yell, but yoga practice is always an interesting window to our reaction to pain both on the mat and in our lives.

If we want transformation, if we want change, if we want to free ourselves from physical and mental discomfort, we have to go into the pain to get there. There is no quick-fix, late night TV infomercial $9.99 Oxy-clean solution.

So the question then becomes, how much do you want it? My teacher Manorama often uses the example of the smoker who is constantly telling other people “I want to quit smoking,” and yet continues to smoke. That person doesn’t really want to quit smoking yet; they want to want to quit smoking. And for us it is the same: until that desire for change gets into our every bone, we will resist it, even as we may claim otherwise. 

And so for most of us that means that we are given a particular lesson over and over again until we reach the point that we don’t want to have to go through it again. That lesson can play out as the same kind of romantic relationships, or the same kind of friendships, or the same kind of boss, or the same money troubles, or whatever our personal lesson is, until we finally have that aha moment of realizing that the one constant in all of these repeating situations is us. So it becomes part of the practice of our lives to make that change. (MJ RIP)

And change is uncomfortable – we’re programmed to want things to stay the same, even if that thing isn’t working! We don’t like things to be different, or even slightly uncomfortable, let alone to actually hurt. But until we can take an honest look at ourselves and recognize that this something is keeping us in some way small or unhappy, we will repeat the lesson over, and over, and over again.

So maybe this manifests as a pose that you hate, or that scares you. Maybe every time in class when the teacher calls for this pose, you find yourself having the same reaction, reinforcing the fear or the dislike. Maybe next time it happens you can catch yourself in the moment and turn it around. Decide that even though the pose scares you, you’re going to really try it instead of staying in your safe zone. Maybe it’s just going to a yoga class at all, or any other kind of physical activity that you associate with discomfort. What you will discover is that after a while, you can differentiate for yourself the kind of pain, the fire, that brings change, and purposefully step into that fire. In Sanskrit the word is tapas; it means hard work, and determination, and intentionally living with a degree of discipline that keeps us putting one foot in front of the other along our path.

 

YS II.8 duhkhanusayi dvesah

Aversion is that which follows identification with painful experiences.

(translation by Sri Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)

 

* from The Princess Bride (1987)