Metabolizing Pain

Ruth King, in her wonderful book Mindful of Race, writes about the pain and fear that arises around issues of race. Whatever the color of our skin, whatever our racial identity, we all carry deep and unprocessed pain around our individual and collective experience of race. To protect ourselves from this pain we lash out, run out or numb out—King’s memorable take on flight, fight or freeze—our human response to that which feels overwhelming.

King also mentions another protective response she used to use. When walking by white people (King is black), she noticed that she always smiled, often without even being aware of it. Noticing this pattern, she looked deeper into what was happening inside her in the moment. She discovered that her smile came from her fear that if she didn’t smile she would be judged as ‘an angry black woman’ or be harmed in some way. Her smile was a way of managing some danger she instinctively felt.

This kind of automatic defensive response is sometimes called tend and befriend. It’s often associated with women, but it’s one of my most habitual responses to conflict and trauma. I figure if I am nice enough and kind enough and understanding enough, I will be safe and I won’t be attacked.

While all four of these are natural and necessary human survival strategies, none of them deal effectively with the source of the problem. They may allow us to move through a difficult situation, but they also add another layer onto the original problem. Lashing out, walking out, numbing out and ‘nicing’ out all leave the essential pain and conflict untouched. We then carry the unprocessed pain with us in ways that make us more likely to avoid it again next time a similar situation arises.

The poet Robert Bly used the image of a black bag to imagine the cost of all of these things we avoid. He said we are all given a black bag when we are young. When something happens that we don’t want to deal with, we simply put the experience in that bag. At first, it works pretty well. Put it in the black bag and it goes away. But over the years the black bag gets heavier and heavier as more and more gets stuffed into it. Eventually the weight of the bag gets to be so much that we can barely move. There is a cumulative cost of our avoidance strategies.

But there are other ways of meeting the pain and difficulty of our lives. King writes about the possibility of metabolizing pain—the possibility of facing our difficulties directly. This is the essential and paradoxical intention of Zen and mindfulness meditation. The great 9^th century Chinese Zen teacher Linji put it this way: Do nothing!

Linji’s Do nothing! is an invitation to stay right where we are. To feel what we are feeling and sensing without trying to escape into blame or running out or fading out or smiling until it all goes away. Metabolizing pain is possible when we stay with the pain, not the story of the pain, but the experience itself.

Though we rightly try to avoid pain and discomfort, the truth of life is that suffering is unavoidable. While this appears to be one of the problems of life, the Buddha referred to this inevitable pain as the first Noble Truth. The first step in becoming fully human is to stop trying to avoid what we don’t like.

King’s metabolizing pain points to the possibility of not just surviving but of being nourished by that which we have avoided. The black bag contains the life and energy we have avoided. Pain often feels like what separates us from each other. But the pain we feel, what we suffer in small and big ways, is what connects us to ourselves and to the world around us.

Whatever difficulty you are in, other people have experienced this before and even at the moment you are going through your difficulty, there are many other human beings in the world going through a very similar experience. When we can say This is how human beings sometimes feel, there can be a widening field of experience where it’s not so personal. This pain, this difficulty is not just a problem to be managed, but is an integral part of being human.

We often think about ‘growing up’, but like the trees, we also need to grow down—to send our roots deep into the dark soil of life. The difficulties we encounter are what lead us forward to be nourished by what is unseen and unknown. We can learn to stay with our pain without shutting down. Or, as we shut down, we can learn to come back again and again. In staying and returning, we can begin to discover in the pain itself some hidden and essential gift that has the possibility of transforming us and the world around us.