When 'pain' becomes part of our identity

I have been doing some research this week about learning to deal with feelings of emotional pain. It seems to me to be very difficult to deal with pain in a 'mindful' way (letting it be, watching, accepting) because it is so overwhelming and seems to take over the mind and the body.

I came across this quote from Eckhart Tolle. It could apply to physical pain too:

"As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free from it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious." 'The Power of Now', E. Tolle (pg 140) 

In many ways I can completely see what Tolle is talking about here. It makes sense, I think, that we can be in danger of creating an identity out of that pain. It can become our way of defining ourselves and we can become attached to it - as something familiar. But would we really resist or sabotage attempts to heal the pain? This seems absurd! 

At the same time, there is something quite optimistic about this in that it is something that we have the power to change. And it is an interesting challenge about how much we are letting pain become who we are....

Hmm...the big question for me is - will quotes like this make dealing with pain any easier in practice? Let's see!

Turning towards instead of away from difficulties - The Case of the Annoying Customer Service Girl

One of the key learnings of mindfulness is turning towards rather than away from our reality - whether it be good or bad. So, for example, books on mindfulness often talk about 'pain'. If we are in pain - then be in pain. Be aware of the pain. Watch it. Perhaps it will shift in nature - sometimes it may be stronger, sometimes less painful. Rather than trying to distract ourselves from it, ignore it or get frustrated or angry - wishing things could be different, face it.

I was interested in how this idea of 'turning towards' reality could be applied to other aspects of life. And today I had a good opportunity to practice this learning point.

Every morning I go to the gym and recently there has been a new girl behind reception. So I arrive at 7.30 - slightly dozey and not up for speaking to anyone and I get greeted with. "Good morning!  How are you today?". Same every day. I don't know her. We have never had a conversation and I feel terrible for saying this but I find this level of niceness very annoying! Then she started to use my name too - 'How are you today Paula? Like something out of a text book customer service training manual. Ugh.

I pondered what to do. Should I say something? But then what would I say? She isn't doing anything wrong and if I did say something I would certainly offend her and make her feel uncomfortable around me and then I would feel bad so that didn't sound like a good idea either. Ducking into the gym without seeing her was also not an option.

So this morning on the way to the gym, I was thinking about this idea of turning towards reality and not fighting it or turning my back on it. I wondered what 'acceptance' would look like in this case. I realised that one way to accept my reality was to engage more with her rather than try and engage less.

So, I walked into the gym and immediately said, 'Hey, how are you? How was your Christmas? Did you have a break?' From this, we had our first actual normal conversation and it was quite nice! The issue for me was mainly that I find it annoying when people are overly nice as part of customer service. But it felt fine once I opened myself up to actually having a normal conversation with her and crossing over into more communication rather than trying to reduce the amount of words that we shared.

With mindfulness often comes insight and a new way of thinking about things. It was a funny bit of karma too as I had forgotten my gym card and the policy is that if you forget your card then you can't get in. Perhaps because of our nice chat, she let me in anyway. So - even if things are hard and we want to push them away, perhaps there is benefit in turning towards them and some good can even come of it!