Back Pain: Testing My Joy

It was a few days before my back surgery. I could stand for maybe 30 seconds before the pain hit. Maybe a minute. It would start in my hip and spread down through my thigh, down my calf, and into my foot. But it was breakfast time, and I was home alone, and I was hungry.

I made it to the kitchen. I really wanted some eggs. Scrambled would be fast, I thought. Standing at the stove, I can feel time running out, and the eggs are not cooking fast enough. “Come on!”, I actually said aloud. The pain is here. I get the eggs on a plate. The table isn’t far. I turn, walk a few feet, and it is too much. I can’t make it. I go down. The eggs don’t matter. The pain is all there is.

I am lying on the kitchen floor and I am screaming. It helps the pain to scream. I am screaming at the top of my lungs. My hip and my leg are consumed with ripping fire. If I can scream loud enough, I can match the pain, and I can almost bear it. Not that I have a choice.

And then in the middle of this agony, I realize, “Huh, you’re not actually unhappy”. Sure, I am in an insane amount of pain, but I am not unhappy. Rather, I have this odd sense of joy. Or rather, I still have my joy. Yes, I want this to be over, want to be out of the pain, but it is just pain. It is probably the most intense pain I have ever felt. I am thinking “God, this fucking hurts! But I am so alive! What a ride! Wow! Jesus, this is intense, I didn’t know I could feel this! FUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!”.

But I am not making up the stories I used to in these moments. I am not making up the story that I won’t have a job, or that I won’t have a family, or that I won’t be loved. I do not tell myself, “See. This proves it. Here you are, not good enough.” I do not go “woe is me.”

It is just a sensation. Well, not just a sensation. A big god dammed horrible sensation. But here’s the thing: The pain is independent of who I am. I am here to experience it and there is not meaning to it beyond just the pain. There is no meaning to it about who I am. The pain I used to create⎯the real suffering⎯was the pain of how I diminished myself. The deeper truth is that I was already feeling unworthy⎯the pain was already there: the stories of woe I made up arose out of my deepest core pain of believing I was nothing.

So in that moment on the kitchen floor, I felt like I had passed a test: Had I really transformed? Did I really believe and know my own perfection and the love that I am? Yes, my deep joy in life comes from feeling the love that I am, and nothing, not even this excruciating pain, can change that. Love and joy are independent of the landscape of my life, independent of the feelings I have in the moment. I can still have my joy when I am sad, afraid, or angry. Or happy.

The root of attachments: Attachments are not the cause but the result of our pain.

The root of all of our pain is not our attachments. Our attachments are a symptom of the root of our pain. The root of our pain is not knowing that we are love. When we don’t love ourselves, we attach ourselves to entities to create an illusion of being love. When we do not know that we are love, we ask everything around us to tell us that we are love. And then we have attached our hearts and our souls to something that has nothing to do with us, is on its own ride. This is a dangerous thing to do, because when it goes up, you go up, and when it goes down, you go down, and when it dies, you die too. So it may appear that the attachments are the cause of your pain, because it is such a poor way to manage your deeper pain of not feeling loveable. So don’t cut your attachments, for that is harsh, almost cruel to yourself. It is akin to yelling at a child who is crying to stop crying. The way out is to feel your attachments, fully embody your attachments, and see through to their roots. And begin to see the child who is crying down there on the other end of your attachments, and begin to love that child.