Processing Pain

By freddielaraThoughts

Processing Pain

For those of u who knew him we lost a dear friend this past week, a friend who’s life was based on helping others achieving their own goals, who’s life was anchored in being of service to others seeing their own dreams come true. But this is an illness like no other and we lost him on this plane of existence just as he was getting his own dream off the ground. Because, my theory here is the same for feelings we would label “good” as it would have been were it to have been “bad”-namely that the body doesn’t know the difference. It just “feels” the intensity of it and doesn’t know how to process the heightened sensation of it. It yearns for homeostasis , a balance of sorts. It’s natural state is a place where things don’t get too intense, too often.

But we as actors have not chosen that path. We have chosen a career that in the work takes us constantly to new heights and places we’ve never been and in the business of doing it sometimes does the same. I myself have been Ill, because of this phenomena the past couple of weeks so I can’t say I have an answer, and this illness has been a direct result of this very thing.

I have a friend who would say to me “maybe u care too much” , and I know what he means. That maybe in the attachment of the thing itself I am creating the physical response of suffering in my body, in my psyche. And remember the Buddhist concept of attachment is broken down into two compartments-aversion (I will not think about this, I will not think about this -which of course means I’m thinking about this) and craving (the constant wanting of the thing itself).

So meditation, the zen mind, the emptying out daily of our aversions and cravings seems to me the only real prevention for attachment.

But how do we deal with attachments that we’ve built up for years? Whether an addiction , a resentment , a belief system or a bad relationship? It seems to me-the same way! Though it may mean taking an inventory, finding out how our behavior has been warped, identifying our character defects (or whatever u choose to call them), taking responsibility for when we’ve behaved this way and then making amends for this behavior, eventually we get back to our daily meditative practice.

For this is the place when we slow down enough to see this behavior for what it is. This is the place where our minds become still enough to process all the heightened sensations that come from playing all the different parts we have to play. This is the place we come to to release the pain of not having booked that part we’ve longed for for months, to identify the attachment and craving we didn’t realize we were holding on to so intently for that agent to call. This is the place we come back to when we do get that call telling us we booked our first major motion picture opposite a major film star and that we’ll be shooting next week.

Because our little bodies sometimes can’t tell the difference between “good” feelings and “bad” ones. Our bodies just need balance to be able to process this thing called life. And in the process surrendering how we think it all “should” look like, and in the process accepting how it actually is.

So I suppose what I’m really talking about here is reactivity vs response. If I’m out riding a bike and have a fall and break my leg I don’t sit there pondering what people will think of me, what it means about my skill for having had that fall, what the bigger picture of what it says about me or why God chose to do this to me. Conversely I don’t sit there doing nothing thinking it will just fix itself. I pick myself up, get to the dr and have that leg set. One is a reaction , the other a response. But what happens, at least to me, is that when pain hits, when circumstances hit the fan, as they are apt to do, and they do not look the way I think they should I begin to contemplate the meaning behind it all and what is says about me, or why life has done this to me instead of getting up and dealing with the discomfort at hand. I take up more time adding another layer of discomfort by reacting to the thing itself. And the only way I can do that is to stop the committee in my mind that is always trying to solve the puzzle and deal. And the best way to start that process is to breathe (meditation) and just be.

And so, maybe my friend would have been able to handle his success better had he known. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten Ill myself had I stopped all that chatter. But At least I know now , and you know that best way to process life and pain and joy and all that it has to bring us is just to breathe…and as the Buddha taught us the road to enlightenment- Breathe in, breathe out , breathe in , breathe out ..shhhh.