vol. 5 AOS 9
Greetings,
I sustained three head injuries yesterday, each more painful than the one before it. The first two came as I was pruning a maple tree. Those whacks just made me feel stupid: I knew to get out of the way, but I miscalculated how to arrange myself on the ladder in relation to the branches as they dropped.
But it was the third one that gave me the goose egg on my forehead. I didn’t cry, but I did yell vulgarities in frustration.
I am still learning how to navigate my new living space, including the garage where I keep the garden implements. Nearby is a cabinet above where the tractor mower is parked; I was side stepping the mower but collided with the cabinets.
It was for me one of those sorts of collisions with reality where you suddenly collapse from solid state into chaos. So, I sat down for a moment. The moment felt like hours.
Eventually, I created a crude ice pack from a used Baggy and crammed it inside my trucker’s cap. I winced as the cold set in.
It’s been a while since I have let myself consider how much pain the past 18 months have caused me. Instead, I have just been moving forward, moving forward. What else can one do?
But, sitting there, I had to admit that I was in pain and I wasn’t going to be able to run from it. So I just sat there and hurt. I didn’t even feel stupid anymore. I just felt empty, cracked open, all my everything leaking out of my force field of momentum.
And I suddenly remembered a conversation I had years ago, during the height of the opioid epidemic, with Patrice Harris, MD, who was at the time the president-elect of the American Medical Association. I had told her I thought the analogue pain scales doctors had been using to assess pain as the so-called fifth vital sign were dumb since all pain is personal and there was no clinical validation of these dopey, crude drawings.
There was no differentiation between pure pain, which is acute and typically physical, and existential pain which is so many things, but in my observation seems to come from an abject and often sudden separation from something previously viewed as essential to one’s well-being.
With all the pressure the opioid industry was placing on doctors to “manage pain”, I believed it was too easy as a patient to parlay one’s discomfort into convincing physicians who were afraid of disciplinary action for not taking pain seriously, to write the scripts that would bypass any meaningful evaluation of the nature of the pain.
The day before yesterday — the day before I’d sustained my minor head injuries — I attended an online conference given by one of the growing number of hypnotherapists presenting their anecdotal data on the afterlife, based on common stories told by persons who have submitted to past-life regressive therapeutic hypnosis sessions. The theme was something akin to “Why do we set ourselves up for such painful lives when we reincarnate?”
That we have many lives and that we have a sort of governor, namely our soul, that is sending us to earth do to battle with our egos and hopefully to win, is not weird to me. Especially since I have in recent months decoupled the notion of a god sending us into earthly battle from that of a Source that we draw upon to consciously experience materiality. Sometimes materiality feels like battle.
What is weird to me is that given how patently obvious so much of our pain on earth is the reaction to perceived problems, and that the solutions are too often the ones manufactured by merchants who want to sell us something, that more of us do not see clearly how much of our pain is the outcome of being manipulated by outside forces.
That leads into a discussion about how, in a world where pain is so often manufactured as a way to manipulate us, we might start ranking people according to how much they have suffered. But who gets to set the standards on which pain is worse when so many of the causes of pain are phony, even if the resulting pain itself is real? It’s akin to the dopey analogue pain scale — too personal and individual to derive a coherent policy from it.
So, what is pain, then? Who is responsible fore alleviating it?
No one had manufactured my pain crisis for me. Just me and my klutziness.
I continued to sit there, ice water dripping down my neck, sunshine baking my head, and thought that the psychic, soul, and emotional pain of all the losses I have sustained recently but haven’t taken time to sit and feel had found a way to get my attention.
The pain I was actually feeling was real pain and it was a real hurt. And in that way, it was pure pain. That, strangely, was a comfort. At last, after all these months of just moving forward, I realized I miss things and people I can no longer have. I realized what I needed to do was be with my hurt, hear it in my heart.
And finally, I was able to cry.
Peace,
Whitney
Hi Whitney,
Aquarius moon here , sitting with my feelings in my detached way. As a retired RN and Certified Nurse Midwife, now a shamanic healer and student of astrology, I soooo felt your pain as you chronicled your experience and agree whole heartedly about the stupid pain scale. I am so glad to out of the business of healthcare and into the art of healing! Thank you for your life’s work and integrity. Enjoying your blog and podcast!
I am sending you bushels of love, dear Whitney, and I'm so glad you were able to give yourself the gift of tearful acknowledgment and I hope, relief. ❤️