A Meditation on Pain

Reading reports of grieving families of the JW Marriott Hotel bombing tragedy in Jakarta got me into thinking how these people are going to overcome the pain of such a sudden loss.

Everyone one of us has and will inevitably encounter the pain of losing someone dear to us in the course of our lives. Death is never easy to accept, especially one that comes so unexpectedly and in such tragic manner. How does one overcome such pain? How does one pick up the pieces again and carry on with one's life? What is Pain?

We all understand and to a certain extent know how to deal with physical pain. Pain is but nature's early warning system--informing us of some breakdown in certain parts of our body which require our immediate attention, before it could possibly become fatal.

Touch a hot piece of iron, and neuronic impulses coursing through our body's nervous system would engage in a transaction of signals between brain and hand that results in its instant recoil from the source of the heat. Such is the exquisite efficiency of our body's pain response network.

But pain, of the emotional kind is not as easily comprehended. Is there even a biological need to feel emotional pain? Is there a survival value to it, in the Darwinian sense? Why does emotional pain often seem so senseless?

Emotional pain could also be seen as a trigger to our mind for some kind of transforming action. To the widow of one of the Silverbird taxi drivers who was killed in the blast, the loss of her husband would plunge her into a deep emotional and financial crisis. She has to find a way to pull herself out from this maelstrom of distress.

What is she to do? She would perhaps need to pick up a new skill. She will definitely be stretched and challenged in ways that she never thought she would. She will have to rise above herself.

The more religious among us would rationalise the entire experience as something that is put on our path to test our faith and to make us learn lessons that will ultimately transform our souls. Pain then becomes the catalyst for emotional and spiritual transformation.

We encounter emotional pain whenever we lose the things we consider dear: Whether it is lovers breaking up, executives being laid-off or our new BMW being scratched, pain always result from us being yanked away from a more ideal state of existence. Something precious is severed from us. And we bleed the loss of our emotional limb.

Buddhists would clinically but correctly surmise that life is essentially painful and that pain comes from our attachment to the world--which is ultimately futile given the impermanent nature of things. Nothing lasts forever: it is dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics that entropy shall always increase and thus the universe would ultimately breakdown and decay. Salvation and bliss can only be attained if we transcend our desires and attachments to the transient world of things material.

Many a times people have come to me and asked me how does one overcome pain? Why is it so hard to get rid of the thorn lodged in one's heart? Once the wife of a friend who found him cheating on her called me over the phone, crying: "How do I get rid of the pain and hurt inside?"

For a moment, I did not have an answer. I am hopeless with crying women. All I could say was, let time heal the pain. If the material world is impermanent, hopefully, so is pain.

All wounds--be it physical or emotional--- need time to heal. Nature is self-healing if we let it do its job. We can aid or impede Nature in this task. The emotional support of friends, a kind word, a generous gesture--all these provide the suffering party with emotional balm for the healing process to begin.

Sometimes unwisely, our response to pain is to further impede this onset of healing. We rehash our painful experiences over and over again; we plunge into anger and wallow in self-pity; wounds are reopened and the bleeding continues.

At times the experience of pain could even make us question our fundamental beliefs including our faith in the Almighty, as Christian writer, C.S. Lewis observed in his heart-wrenching book A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife to cancer. (Their tender love story was made into a movie, Shadowlands, directed by Richard Attenborough, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger).

We could go on and on philosophizing about pain but nothing will take away the feeling of abject terror, and the utter sense of loneliness of one staring into an infinite abyss of despair. As Catholic monk Thomas Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain on overcoming the death of his father: In the end, one has to take the pain "like an animal".

We only hope that, in the paroxysm of pain, in the climax of catharsis, some transformation ultimately takes place, slowly easing one onto a path forward---a path one hopes would still provide some worthwhile glimmer of a hope, for us to resume this journey of life.

Last night, I watched the widow of the Silverbird taxi driver crying on TV: it was the wail of one whose soul has been emptied, it was the helpless cry of a wounded lamb in the dead of night.