A month ago, the basic teachings on impermanence and the suffering of change hit me in high definition. I woke up with startling pain in my right knee. Just like that, I couldn’t walk.
The offhand diagnosis—being hands off and over the phone three days after my call for help—was arthritis caused by the degeneration of age. My cartilage had become brittle enough to tear; fluid was rushing into its cracks, swelling up. Cartilage does not heal itself like muscle, bone or blood. It's inert. Cartilage is the canary in the coal mine, the siren that screams: Alert! Here comes time, the tsunami that follows the earthquake of birth. Apparently that's why the doctor said since there was no cure, she would not sign me up for an X-ray.
I thought about friends and family members who’d had trouble with their knees, and sometimes needed to have them replaced. This really depressed me because their stories of cause and effect made my sudden failing seem unfair and pointless. I’d never had the elating moments they enjoyed, the high-energy joys they took in trade for destroying their knees. I wasn’t a daredevil skier or marathon biker or tennis competitor. Nobody has ever accused me of exercise. Why me?
My sudden limp, my having to manage stairs by putting both feet on each step like a child, my need to cling to banisters for dear life made my spirit throb as painfully as my knee. There are certain milestones in life devastating to pass because you wish you could somehow get around them. My first came during my 30th year at a rock concert in a college gym, when moments before the warm-up act, two teen-aged girls approached the row of folding chairs where I sat on the aisle, stopped, turned in and said with much politeness: “Excuse us, ma’am.” It took a decade to get over being old enough to be called “ma’am.” Who knows how long will it now take me to recover from the young man who, when I limped out of Office Depot last week burdened by a ream of paper and a shrink wrapped folding chair, chivalrously rushed over and said: “Let me help you get to your car with that.”
“Why thank you very much,” I said, much surprised and a little flattered. “Oh no need to thank me,” he replied in all sincerity as he took the chair from me. “I like to help old people.”
The Western medical doctor very obviously didn’t want anything to do with me since arthritis isn’t ta-da! curable, and I not so obviously didn’t want anything to do with her offhand offer of physical therapy because, ta da!, it offered not one helpful moment in my three year fight against chronic pain from my neck. PT’s mechanized, militaristic attack on my body turned out to be as brutally and expensively useless as the effort in Iraq or Vietnam, especially after simple and cheap hands-on alternative therapies like posture correction, massage and sacral-cranial touch worked perfectly. So I’ve gone back to acupuncture and taken up indoor swimming (free thanks to Medicare) and smeared on lots of trusty Traumeel cream and do flex stretches here at the computer. I am up and while not exactly running, I can walk without limping all the way.
As life would have it, direct perception is the focus of my weekly Dharma class and last week, the concept of pain came up. I say “concept” because I was immediately reminded of the 9th Karmapa’s very clear teaching in Ocean of Certainty about how to bring pain onto the path to liberation. He starts by asking if you take a knife and stick it into a wooden table, obviously displacing molecules, does the table feel pain? How is this different from sticking a knife into your skin to cut yourself? You feel “pain.” Well, what exactly is that pain? What precisely caused it? Where is it coming from and going to? Can you precisely pinpoint it? What exactly does it feel like? Is every beat as strong as the last or is there variety? People who do this questioning do report that it lessens the intensity of suffering. Evidently, we fixate on the initial shock and replay it over and over as though that’s what’s continuing to happen, when in fact the instant replay of our imagination is preventing the latest real time news from getting through. Pain is often created more by mind than neuro-transmitters.
Anyway, one of the class members brought up the fact that he had a permanent cramping in his foot. At first he was obsessively focused on it, as it was so painful and debilitating it overwhelmed everything in his life. But gradually he remembered the teachings and began the examination of where exactly the pain was emanating from, how often, etc. “And amazingly enough,” he said, “the pain got very manageable. I started to notice that it was itself energy, an energy calling for attention. So I started trying to channel it in a positive way and now even though my foot is still cramping, I don’t notice pain much and just go about my normal life.”
I thought about that the next day when I decided to walk to the bank. The route was flat—recommended —but long: 1½ miles each way. After three blocks I started to feel searing pain in my entire leg, a massive protest against this forward movement. I stopped at the next corner, turned around and told myself I should go back: this was a message that I was making matters worse. I was brought up to be very fearful so I wanted to go back to bed. But another voice kicked in from somewhere and told me to go on ahead, to stop being a wimp and start to fight through the pain. I heard that guy in the Dharma class say his pain was only the stirring of energy. The pain was just energy.
I don’t know how, but I found the courage to walk on. For the next two blocks I did the Tara mantra to work with my not inconsiderable fear. Two more blocks for the Mahakala mantra to remove obstacles (i.e. crippling arthritis)--a little touch of hope, and three or four blocks for Chenrezig, my standby for help with suffering. I made it to the bank and by the time I got back home, I had no pain. I felt like the old... whoops, make that original, me. Later, the Chinese acupuncturist said my pain came from fluid damming the flow of energy around my knee and the forceful circulation from all that walking had broken through its blockage. I had triumphed.
That was quick. The pain is back. So much for impermanence. I so badly want to bargain—I’ll do this if that pain goes away-- that last night I sunk to wondering whether I had been crippled because in moving to a smaller apartment I had to remove the Medicine Buddha thangkha that hung for 10 years over my bed. It’s now in a closet. Was Medicine Buddha mad at me and striking back? I worried. I took the thangkha out of the closet, then told myself: “this is stupid” and put it back. But just in case he did want appeasement--you can never be too careful, I said his mantra three times with my hands clasped in prayer.
This morning I focused on the Tibetan idea that physical ailments are simply manifestations of mind’s dis-ease. This meshes with the concept of pain as blocked energy and with my experience of ailments. My father, who never heard a word I said in any conversation, became hard of hearing before old age. One of my goddaughters was so stressed by her roles as survivor of a best friend, abandoned daughter, and parenting partner of a man who refuses to earn income she developed breast cancer and had to have her femaleness removed. Just as a woman I know who hates heterosexual men “solved that” by developing breast cancer and had hers amputated, making her at least in her mind no longer femininely attractive to them. I who used to stick my neck out way to far to help way too many people ended up with two herniated, useless disks that now prevent me from doing that.
So I have started to rethink this suddenly crippled knee. Something brittle tore, forcing fluid to flow through the cracks, building into a dam that is blocking the energy that would let me propel myself forward as freely and unselfconsciously as I’m used to. Oddly, this actually happened at a particularly painful moment of my life when for the first time, changed financial circumstances made me less flexible, constraining me from traveling abroad and spending my local way around town as freely as I have been used to. Since at my age there's little hope for fixing such brittle circumstances, I have been actively struggling to get the pain of reduced circumstances out of my mind. And in the midst of that suffering, I awoke with such startling physical pain in my knee, my body itself was reduced in scope. It could no longer go forward at will. Was that coincidence or what?
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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