Meditating Through Pain: Held by Grace

“We suffer in this life and how hard we pray, ‘Oh Lord, help me through this. I can’t make this alone. I don’t know how.’ We can all relate to the times that we’re so sad, so hurting. All we can know is the hurting. A little bit comes to us and we think, ‘Okay, there’s God. I’ve got to believe that.’ And then that goes away. We hurt too much. We all grow up so slowly. But slowly in the eyes of God is fast, fast, beautiful.” — Kathy

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” — Julian of Norwich

“Pain is never permanent.” — Teresa of Ávila

“I am in pain, but I sing the name of my Lord.” — Mirabai

There are days when the body simply doesn’t cooperate, and today is one of those days, although if I’m honest, most days feel this way now. Living with lupus, fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, and a migraine on and off for the last couple of months, along with an ankle that never fully healed from an injury last year, means that pain isn’t something that comes and goes for me. It’s just there, part of the day, whether I want it to be or not, and some days it feels like it takes over everything.

I still meditate, but not because it’s easy or because I feel good, and definitely not because I have any special ability to sit through pain. If anything, the truth feels like the opposite. If I’ve been able to stay with meditation through all of this over the years, it’s only by the Grace of God, because left to myself, I’d get up, distract myself, or do whatever I could to avoid what I’m feeling. There are times when I don’t want to be there at all, when my body hurts and my mind is loud and I question why I’m even trying, and somehow, I still end up staying.

Over the last 30 years, I’ve sat in meditation through migraines that made even the smallest light unbearable, through broken bones, through emotional pain that felt like it would take me out completely, and through losses that I didn’t think I’d survive. When my Teacher, Kathy, passed, it felt like something in me broke in a way that wasn’t going to come back together, and I didn’t know how I was going to keep going after that. Meditation didn’t suddenly make that pain better, and there were times it felt almost impossible to sit, but somehow I was still being brought back to it, even when I didn’t feel capable of showing up the way I thought I should.

My life is structured around meditation in a way that might not make sense to most people, because I’m in bed every night at 7 PM and up every morning at 3:30, and that isn’t about discipline in the way it might sound. It’s more that I know what happens if I don’t protect that time, because life fills it immediately, and pain has a way of taking over my attention, my thoughts, and my entire day if I let it. Meditation is the one place where that doesn’t fully happen, even when the pain is still there.

When I sit, the pain doesn’t go away, and sometimes it’s strong enough that it feels like the only thing in the room, pulling my attention over and over again no matter how many times I try to bring it back. There are times where I feel like I’m failing the entire time, where I can’t get still and I can’t get comfortable and I can’t get out of my own head, and nothing about it feels peaceful or spiritual or even helpful, and yet I’m still there, still trying, still asking for help in whatever way I can.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, something shifts, and it doesn’t feel connected to anything I did differently or figured out in that moment. There’s a softening that comes in, almost underneath everything else, and a little bit of space opens up around the pain so that it isn’t everything all at once. The pain is still there, but it doesn’t have the same hold, and sometimes that space is enough to breathe again.

There are also times when I feel lifted beyond the body and the intensity of what I’m feeling, even if it’s only for a short time, and those moments don’t feel like something I’ve created or earned. They feel given, and over time, because of those moments, I’ve come to see that pain can be lessened in meditation, sometimes a lot, even when nothing about the situation itself has changed. It’s not every time, and it’s not something I can control, but it’s enough to know that it’s real and enough to keep coming back.

It can feel like when you’re in pain, God is far away, but that hasn’t really been my experience. There are times when it feels like God is closest when the pain is at its worst. At the same time, those are the moments that bring me back the most, not because I’m strong, but because I don’t have anything else to hold onto, and something in me still turns in that direction.

What Kathy said about how we can only feel the hurting and then lose that sense of God again feels true to my experience, because it doesn’t try to fix the pain or make it sound like something it’s not. It describes what it actually feels like to be in it. Kathy always taught that we are not the body, we’re soul, but the body is where we sit and where the pain is, and that’s where this path actually plays out. There are times when all I can do is sit there and ask for help, even when it feels like nothing is changing, and then something shifts.

If you’re in pain, there’s nothing wrong with you because meditation feels hard, because it is hard, and there’s nothing clean or perfect about trying to sit when your body hurts and your mind won’t settle. I still have that experience at times, 30 years later, and I still question it, but I also know at this point that something is happening in meditation when I sit through my pain, even when I can’t feel it, because something has carried me this far and continues to meet me every time I sit down again.