Pain (self-injury)
I’ve heard it took 49 days for the Buddha to become awakened. It took me a heck of a lot longer than that, and I only touched it for an instant.
But I remember that instant. A flash, but not so dramatic. A flash without fanfare, so soft and subtle that it almost didn’t matter, and that meant everything.
I was with razor at wrist, huddled up in my hallway, like so many times before…in that hallway, another, a bathroom floor, a shower stall, a back corner of a crowded closet, an empty closet, in daylight, in darkness. Twenty times, fifty. A hundred. Two. So many countless times that they all blend together in mind-numbing familiarity. And then this one time something changed. Something and nothing and it was everything.
It came to me without words, sitting there on the floor. I already had words a plenty down there in my crowded little hell, words that chased each other through my mind, snarling and snapping slathering jaws, wearing tracks so deep in my brain that I didn’t even have to work at it anymore. The doubts, the recriminations, the reproaches and the accusations…all circled and spiraled and muttered and snarled faster and faster under the power of their own perpetual momentum.
And then I realized there was something beneath the words, less articulate but no less bitter. Angry and twisting and curling around over and into itself. A serpent gnawing forever at its own endless tail. Pain. But more than pain. The pain of pain. Something that seethed in tortured coils at the wretchedness, the misery, the injustice, the very agony of agony. It pushed outward, squeezed inward, twisted, writhed, thrashed. Seeking, aching, stalking, searching for any way, any means, any hope of escape.
Beneath that was something else. I touched it for just a moment, a startled moment of breathless realization. Beneath the thoughts spinning and ranting, beneath the black seething desperation was something fragile, delicate, a crystalline cobweb.
Pain.
Not the pain of pain, but pain itself. A peculiar and insubstantial foundation for the smothering, hot, brutal weight of the suffering layered above it.
Though describing it now I’d say I spoke these words, but really it was so much less substantial than speech, not even as weighty as a thought, barely the brush of an intention that I whispered to this place, “Hello pain.” And I realized it was the first time we’d ever really met.
With that barest breath of a whisper, the crystalline cobweb parted and for another moment there was only space. A great vastness in which the I who was me was only a dewdrop, a grain of sand, a speck, a pinpoint, smaller even than that.
The jabbering, slathering, spiraling thoughts, the circling, squeezing, seething darkness, the fragile, filmy, gossamer strands of the pain I’d never met all suddenly stretched out into the vastness, reaching as far as they wanted to go and still vastness stretched out beyond them.
An infinite breath drew them all in, their tightness, their heat, their frantic desperation and sighed back out the infinite vastness over, around, and through them.
Then the vastness retreated, slipped away, and I was back in the cobwebs and another whisper, “Hello pain,” this time with a touch of fondness, as if greeting an old friend.
Again I couldn’t linger, couldn’t make it solid and clasp it in my hands. Again it slipped away and I could feel my body, only then realizing I’d forgotten it in my wandering. I felt my breath come in, the coolness of the air, the fullness of my lungs, felt it flow away again. I felt the press of the metal blade on my skin, heard the mutterings of mutinous thoughts, saw the darkness of the pain of pain. I felt tightening in my gut, tensing in my legs, as if I could ward off the return of the pain if I just pushed at it hard enough.
And then my breath came in again and for a moment, a dewdrop, a pinprick of time, the vastness was there again, in the pause, the gap, the empty space before I was breathing out again. The pain returned, the tension, the pull to try just a little bit harder to get away, but this time it brought back also an invitation to touch back on the vastness, one more breath, one more time. An invitation to give up the hope of escape, to relax into the inevitability of pain.
Suddenly I laughed out loud.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!” I proclaimed to the walls. I dropped my hands to my sides, let the razor slip from my fingertips and smiled up at the empty ceiling. Never before so utterly and purely relieved.
