June 9, 2004

• Guilt and Shame;
  Anger and Resentment;
  Pain and Suffering

  What those three pairs have in common is that the second member of each
  pair proceeds from the first if we don’t let go of the first as soon as
  we feel it.  This blog was inspired by Ren in her response to my recent blog on sex,
  but I’m writing it for everyone including my family and myself.  I
  feel these are very important lessons, and I can use all the
  reinforcement I can get.  In this case–in any of these three
  cases–forgetting that I’m enlightened could be catastrophic.

  I will start with pain, one of my primary areas of expertise. 
  Pain, I have learned, is nothing but neural signals, electrical
  impulses carried along nerves and from one nerve ending to the next
  through a soup of chemical neurotransmitters.  Before I knew any
  of that, in early childhood, it just hurt.  One night in bed it
  hurt so much it was all I could think about.  I had my mind
  focused on it and my will, my strongest wishes, focused on a desire to
  feel good.  Suddenly, it did feel good.  As intense as the
  pain had been, that intense was my pleasure.

  I came to think of it as having a switch in my mind that could turn
  pain to pleasure.  Just as surely as dwelling on the pain, the
  negative response to the neural stimulus, would have led me to suffer
  in pain, so did switching it over to pleasure lead to suffering. 
  I want to say, “Don’t try it at home, kids.”  I came to crave
  intense sensation, and to be bored and discontented without that
  intensity.  I became addicted to the brain chemistry of
  pain.  There is a name for that:  masochism.

  Not until I was in my forties, reading Dying to Live by Tolly Burkan,
  did I learn that the pain switch has a third, neutral position. 
  By then, I’d become wary of that pleasure switch and also of the drugs
  that the medical profession had always made too readily available to me
  for the pain, and had stoically decided to just bear the pain, to
  suffer.  Tolly told about being in a pedestrian/vehicle collision, being
  thrown across an intersection, having numerous bones shattered, and
  spending months in traction.  Ken Keyes, Jr.
  visited him in the hospital and taught him to make his pain go away by
  focusing his mind on the sensation and not judging it, just feeling and
  acknowledging it as a sensation. 

  That is how I now handle my pain.  It took me a few years to get
  used to doing the technique immediately when I feel pain.  For a
  while, I continued to suffer, sometimes for days before I’d remember
  that it was unnecessary.  Pain is necessary.  It signals us
  to stop doing whatever it was that caused it.  People born without
  the capacity for it are in real danger.  Pain is an alarm signal
  alerting us to physical problems and allowing us to move out of harm’s
  way or move to heal what’s wrong. 

  “Pain is part of life; suffering is optional.”–The Buddha

  The mental sensation of anger is part of another alarm system, more
  mental/emotional than purely physical as pain is.  Anger is half
  of the fight-or-flight response to fear, which alerts us to
  danger.  If our instincts tell us the danger is more than we can
  handle, we flee.  If not, we fight.  “Civilization” has
  taught us to moderate those responses (for want of a better word,
  though I suppose “humanization” might be better because I think we
  started that process before we started living in cities).

  Anger comes in a flash.  If we respond to it by noting what it is,
  what brought it on, and then letting it go, it goes.  If we nurse
  it, hang onto it, it really isn’t anger any more.  It becomes
  resentment, just as pain morphs into suffering if we don’t acknowledge
  it and let it go.  If you’ve been angry over anything for any
  length of time, try looking at it in the light of fear.  What are
  you afraid of?  Is it rational?  What’s the best move to
  protect yourself from further danger or harm?

  Above all else, forgive the person, persons or force of nature that
  “made” you angry in the first place, even if it was yourself…
  especially yourself.  For the past year or so I’ve been hanging
  out in Narcotics Anonymous with a bunch of experts on pain, suffering,
  anger, resentment, guilt and shame.  They have shared a lot of
  their hard-earned wisdom with me.  One of the wisest bits is
  this:  “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping that the other
  guy dies.”  Yes, indeed.  Resentment hurts everyone who comes
  into contact with it, but the one it hurts most is the resentful
  one.  Let go of anger before it becomes resentment.  If the
  harm or danger that triggered it requires action, then act to safeguard
  yourself, and let it go.  Don’t swallow the poison.

  It really is poison in the most literal physical sense of the
  word.  The brain chemistry of pain, sorrow and resentment is
  toxic.  Tears are one way we have of excreting those toxins. 
  Weeping releases toxins, laughing produces chemical antidotes to them,
  and sleep helps restore healthy brain chemistry.  When something
  happens to upset you, react to it naturally:  cry it out, laugh at
  yourself or the situation, and get a good night’s sleep.  You’ll
  feel better in the morning.  But if you go to bed harboring a
  resentment, your sleep will be restless and you’ll feel like shit when
  you awaken.  Just let the shit go.

  Guilt is a higher octave of pain and anger.  It is a spiritual
  alarm system, putting us on notice that we’ve done something harmful or
  destructive to ourselves or others.  At least, that’s the way it’s
  supposed to work, the way it works if we’re not perverted by defective
  cultural programming.  Letting go of guilt may be a little more
  complicated than letting go of pain or anger, and it is also probably
  more important to do so.  If we hang onto guilt, it morphs into
  toxic shame.

  That phrase, “toxic shame”, I learned from John Bradshaw, author of Healing the Shame the Binds You, Rising Above Shame: Healing Family Wounds to Self Esteem, and Natural Shame, Sexuality, and Spirituality. 
  Dr. Bradshaw is a neuropsychologist.  He writes both popular books
  on self-esteem and technical texts for professionals on the
  biochemistry of psychology.  I love that man as much as it is
  humanly possible to love anyone that I have never met.  His books
  probably saved my life and certainly made it a lot happier.  Until
  he clued me in I used to wallow in my shame over the guilty secrets of
  my past.

  Since I have learned to recognize guilt for what it is: a signal to
  alter my behavior, I’m not just a happier person but a better one in
  terms of my interactions with other people and the universe.  Of
  the three alarm signals:  pain, anger and guilt; guilt may be the
  most challenging to transcend.  It was for me, at least. 

  It requires very little courage to confront physical pain, focus one’s
  mind on it without judgment, and let it go.  Facing the fear that
  lies behind anger often requires more courage.  Taking
  responsibility for relieving it, rather than casting blame and holding
  resentment, requires still more courage.  Feelings of shame, for
  many people, become the easy way out.  We castigate ourselves with
  them instead of doing what we know we must do to avoid incurring the
  guilt. 

  So, just as escaping pain requires avoiding the harmful stimulus and
  escaping anger requires dealing with fear, escaping shame requires that
  we stop doing whatever it was that
  brought us to shame in the first place, if in fact our feelings of
  guilt were appropriate.  That is the tricky part.  We often are tricked by moralistic dogmas
  into feeling guilt over things that we have been told
  are wrong, when in fact those things are not wrong at all.  For
  me, the quest to transcend my false and limiting beliefs is
  inextricable from the emotional healing of my shame programming.  I
  have had to examine everything I was ever taught about right and
  wrong.   I now depend on the Spirit of Truth to confirm or refute the validity of any teaching. 

  The Buddha talked specifically about pain as I quoted above.   He also spoke about beliefs:

  “Rely not on
  the teacher, but on the teaching.
  Rely not on the words of the
  teaching, but on the spirit of the words.
  Rely not on theory, but on
  experience.
  Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard
  it.
  Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for
  many generations.
  Do not believe anything because it is spoken and
  rumored by many.
  Do not believe in anything because it is written in
  your religious books.
  Do not believe in anything merely on the
  authority of your teachers and elders.
  But after observation and
  analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is
  conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it
  and live up to it.”
  —the Buddha, Kalama Sutra—

  
  PainSwitch update/extension:

  pipsqueak
  asked about “ongoing” pain.  Ongoing could mean pain that does not
  respond to the painswitch, that continues after one has done the
  focusing technique.  I have experienced that, and have had other
  people tell me of similar experiences.  “Ongoing” also could mean
  chronic pain that keeps coming back after you’ve gotten rid of it with
  the painswitch.  I experience that every day, and so do many
  people who use the technique.  In that second case, we just do the
  technique every time that chronic pain is triggered.  It becomes
  habitual, a conditioned response after a while.

  The other type of pain, the ones that do not seem to respond to the
  technique, have been–in every instance of which I’ve heard–”referred”
  pain.  That is pain that is perceived in a part of the body other
  than that in which it originates.  I have mentioned more than once
  in blogs here the referred pain from kidney stones that I had perceived
  in my hip.  Kidney stones can be felt anywhere in the
  pelvic/abdominal area.  In the case of referred pain, when using
  the painswitch does not relieve a pain it helps to know something about
  the more common types of referred pain and where they are commonly
  perceived.  Once you track down the source of the pain you can
  ease it and then take other action to heal the cause.

  Angina, the pain from insufficient blood flow to the heart muscle, can
  be perceived in the chest, back, abdomen, shoulder or arm.  If you
  have pain in any of those areas and it does not respond to the
  painswitch, try focusing your attention on the heart.  If that
  works, if the pain then eases, relax.  Tensing up is the worst
  thing one could do (other than running a marathon or having sex,
  perhaps) in a time of cardiac insufficiency.  DO NOT
  simply use the painswitch to ease the angina and go on with what you’re
  doing.  At such a time you then have a higher priority:  your
  heart.  Get it evaluated by a physician.  If you have chronic
  angina and already use something such as nitroglycerine for it, you
  might be able to eliminate the nitro by using relaxation techniques
  and focusing your attention and will on increasing circulation to your
  heart.  That works for me, for the person who taught the technique
  to me, and for many other people.

  Chronic pain such as that of arthritis or fibromyalgia keeps coming
  back regardless of what treatment is used for it.  (exception: 
  some forms of arthritis, for some people, respond to the
  cartilage-repairing qualities of glucosamine, chondroitin, MSM, etc.,
  and as the cartilage is repaired the pain disappears)   Analgesic
  drugs
  that act by interrupting the neurotransmitters have several
  disadvantages.  They blunt our awareness of all pain and can mask
  symptoms of some new development that needs attention.  If they
  are euphoriant as well as analgesic, they affect perception, judgement
  and behavior.  They are all, without exception, toxic to some
  extent and most of them are addictive.  The physicians who
  prescribe them seldom know all the facts about them, so you can’t rely
  on what they tell you.  They rely on the “detail men”
  employed by pharmaceutical companies to hand out samples and persuade
  physicians to prescribe their products.  Even if you have
  insurance that pays for them, everyone pays in one way or another in a
  society that is drug-dependant.

  I have not yet mentioned here the greatest advantage of the PainSwitch
  technique.  The same neural pathways that carry the alarm signals
  also carry subtler messages.  Once we have turned off the alarm,
  we may notice an urge to rub or warm the painful area, to lick the
  wound or change position to ease a painful joint.  The human
  animal has many beneficial instincts such as these, which culture has
  not encouraged us to develop, and which culture often has tried to
  extinguish.  The human bodymind has great powers of self-healing
  that we can develop and benefit from if we pay attention.

  

  On another subject entirely, Greyfox just alerted me by phone to a
  heart-rending and/or heartwarming bear story.  Since I have been
  writing about bears lately, I thought I’d share it.
   
   Together Again

  Honey and rice was the recipe for capturing errant cub

  
  

  
  

  (Published: June 8, 2004)

  A
  skinny brown bear cub that hid out for 15 days after its mother was
  killed on the Anchorage Hillside was captured early Monday in a
  homemade trap and reunited with its sibling at the Alaska Zoo.

  
  

  • 3:32 pm
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