Front Row in Pain's Classroom

Greetings people. I've been bed-bound for the last 5 days, completely incapable of lifting the toilet seat, preparing lunch, or washing my hair. Talk about revelation. When kickboxing was over Monday night I noticed my legs tingling when I'd shift gears on my drive home. I went so far as opening my driver side door once I arrived but when I put one foot onto the black concrete, my back locked up on me. Despite being on heavy duty drugs right now, I'm writing because I don't want to forget what I've learned between Monday night and this moment.

Many of you know that pain is something I've been theoretically fascinated by/with for some time. My final paper in Hermeneutics with Dr. Marion Grau had to do with reading and interpreting pain. I read about emotional and physical pain on a regular basis, and I like to ask people currently experiencing pain about their world-view. I've always had this hunch that pain and pleasure--sensory data on the radical periphery for most of us--reveal something fundamental and primary about the human subject in particular and the world in general. This recent collision with pain of my own has me thinking even more deeply about the topic. In a nutshell: I'm allowing the discomfort and all its accompanying factors to teach me.

There is something distinctly separate between a) the human body and b) the thing that interprets the sensations/experience of the body though they originate from the same source. They do not always correspond, nor carry out the wish of the other. Everything I experienced on Monday night was of my own doing. I pushed it too hard in my kickboxing class. As a result my back spasmed and locked up for consequent days. Something watched this sequence of events and interpreted it as "wrong" and "needing correction." I can say with sheer honesty if someone had a gun up to my head on Monday night when my first spasm hit, I would have asked that person to pull the trigger as a way out of my back pain. No bullshit; it was that bad. It feels like an internal war--and I don't make small of the word "war" for any occasion. It's a war where one part of the self turns violently inward while the other part tries desperately to heal the violence being done inside. When I first tried to go to the bathroom on my own I instantly spasmed for 30 seconds and I swore that time I was going to relax into it instead of screaming (like I'd done the prior 10x). Without realizing it, I screamed, though I caught myself doing it and stopped. It didn't make much of a difference in my pain level to be honest, but I did prove to myself that I could mindful in the midst of acute pain. What is that part of the mind/body/self that can operate independently of or codependently with painful sensory phenomena in the mind/body/self?

One other thing I'm developing during this time of woundedness is a sense of how difficult, humiliating and HUMAN-izing it can be to constantly ask for help. The first two days I had to pee standing up and often things wouldn't go as I planned and I'd find myself needing someone to take a washcloth with water and soap to my urine-covered legs. Not sexy. On Tuesday my friend LeAnn had to take at least an hour and a half out of her work day to get my medications from Kaiser and to heat up a bowl of noodles so I didn't get sick taking meds on an empty stomach. Not dope. The list could go on forever: water bottle filling, changing clothes, applying deodorant, restacking pillows between my knees, bringing food and preparing food, putting reading material by the bed-side, clearing potential trip-up factors from the floor, etc. Experiencing this level of powerlessness re-minds me: we belong to each other. That's the lesson. This is what the periphery has shown me in great detail.

Whoever came up with the notion of rampant individualism as the key to freedom never experienced temporary or chronic paralysis. The ONLY reason I'm not starved, unshowered, completely immobilized and covered in my own shit right now is because there are loving people in my life who consider it their responsibility to care for me in tangible, concrete ways. I hope I never forget their kindness or how fucking hard this experience has been. If I can carry the wisdom of this time forward, I will be a better Chaplain, lover, and friend. May it be so.

Most special thanks to James and LeAnn.