What’s Your Limit?

At my favorite Thai restaurant there is a scale of five chili peppers to let the waiter know how hot you can stand to eat your Pad Thai. One of my friends is a “five” on the chili scale; I’m a “one.” We all have our limits. Another of my good friends cannot have a speck of anything peppery on her plate; she goes into extreme pain if she does. She also must stuff pieces of paper napkins in her ears if we go to a noisy restaurant. She is a highly sensitive person with the rare gift of synesthesia; she sees sounds she hears as color. Another of my friends smokes pot in the morning after she drops her son off to school, just to “take the edge off” so she can function for the rest of the day. We are all wired differently at birth and have different pain thresholds. So if someone asks me, “do you think I should go on meds for my depression?” I honestly say, I don’t know. There are techniques for dealing with physical and emotional pain and I tell people to work with those techniques first, before going on medication. Alternative health practices such as acupuncture and acupressure are also helpful. Then there are cases where people are so badly damaged from being the victims or the witness of extreme violence, that they need to dissociate. I highly recommend to these people, if they wish to work with self-help techniques, that they work with the support of a qualified therapist. If they are on medication they need to be monitored by their doctor.

In her book: When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron addresses how to work with emotional pain, using Buddhist techniques. She tells us that to end suffering, we need to approach our pain head-on when we would rather escape from it. She talks about the practice of “loving-kindness” where we approach painful situations with friendliness and curiosity. She refers to the space we’re in when we choose to not run away, as a place of groundlessness, where we are on the edge, nothing to hold on to, letting go into the unknown. With the continual practice of relaxing into the groundlessness of painful situations, we discover that love and truth within ourselves, which will always be there, no matter how chaotic our life circumstances are.

Many of us approach spirituality with the hope that we would get to a point of security, where we would fix our pain, where if we meditate enough we would let go of all our impurities and we’ll live happily ever after. Sorry, that’s not exactly how it is. In Buddhism they speak of impermanence to describe the nature of reality where change is inevitable. We will keep experiencing loss as long as we live. Being on the spiritual healing journey helps us to live with loss and its ensuing pain, the human condition. We learn how to be with pain and be happy anyway. How to love anyway, no matter how much pain we are in. One of my teachers uses the word “soften”. This is a magical word when you feel your heart hardening to pain, your body hardening, shutting down. Saying, “soften” is a key to opening into the painful situation and allowing your love to flow anyway.