Pain: a shortcut to mindfulness

Due to a leg injury I ended up in a hospital. Before you express your sympathy let me tell you its been a super useful lesson with a perfect timing.

As it's usually the case with similar unexpected incidents this one too happened fast but has been so rich that I want to share its golden nugget with all of you.

Waiting in line of other patients in front of the medical Emergency room had an unexpected effect on my awareness. OK, let me put it dead simple: it was a real wake-up call.

During the few hours Is pent there I witnessed people being on the edge between life and death. Despite their alarming physical condition some of them didn’t seem to pay much attention to the level of risk their life has been exposed to.

I recalled a wise philosopher who said that our problems are the answers and therefore our first task is to find the question they are answering.

There was one guy who has apparently just experienced a heart attack. When asked to wait for two hours for his blood test results, he insisted on leaving the hospital immediately pointing out to his busy-ness and lack of time for any of this; totally blind to the fact that “this” is his life that he – having too much other work to do – clearly had no time to accept. It took the doctor a good half an hour to make him understand that “this” might as well be the last two hours of his life.

Another person has suffered a stroke. He was in his late seventy’s and told me that this is already his third stroke. He has performed a stressful job his whole life and the only question he had in mind was if it’d be better to take less medication or rather increase the doses of pills he was taking since the first stroke occurrence several years ago.

If our problems are answers, I wondered, what questions might these problems be answering? I found a few that could relate to all of us waiting there:

Where are the physical limits of me as a human being?

Do I see myself as a human being or rather a human doing?

How can I create more balance and what’s missing in my life?

What do I need to focus on right now?

I can’t say for the others, but…my leg injury seemed like a clear enough answer to me.

It forced me to slow down, quiet my mind and the many ongoing activities and return back to myself and into the present moment. The three hours I spent in the hospital served as an unsolicited fast track to mindfulness. I noticed that pain often does that. When our body suffers our mind has no choice but to come back to the present moment. Whether we like it or not we have to be with whatever is happening with us right now. Pain can be too intense to be ignored...

While examining my leg the doctor nearly fainted. It was around midnight, she was serving two shifts in a row and told me she is on her verge; there was a constant flow of new patients during the extreme summer heat and the hospital capacity has been utilized to its fullest. As the night progressed, the crowd didn't seem to be getting any smaller…

I won’t go into what question might that problem be an answer to.

I prefer to tell you that some 35 years ago Jon Kabat-Zinn came with a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program that helps people suffering a chronic illness and pain learn how to benefit from meditation and full presence. As he puts it:

Mindfulness refers to the awareness that emerges by paying attention, on purpose, non judgmentally to the present moment.

Of course, there are many ways to become more present. In no way I encourage you to hurt a limb or suffer a stroke to become more mindful and realize what's important in your life at a given moment.

I just wanted to share this story.

Fortunately, my leg recovered pretty quickly and this will therefore remain just another one of those minor episodes in my life. However, it served as a shortcut to my immediate return to mindfulness. I knew that mindfulness may reduce pain, but only now I understand it also works the other way round:

Pain can help us be more mindful.

That’s why I view this event as a golden nugget.

Moreover…without me asking any question my life has offered a rather intense answer ;)

OK, thanks, I got it!