The Courage of Acceptance

Life inevitably brings us pain -- physical and mental illnesses,  accidents, the "acts of God" noted in our insurance policies -- that we have neither chosen nor wanted. We have no control over the fact of these kinds of events and realities in our lives.

But we're not out of control over how we react to, how we handle life's inevitable pain. Here is where choice begins: when we have gone through and can get beyond our very natural inclination to deny or be angry or give up. Elizabeth Kubler Ross's  On Death and Dying made way for revolutionary and still fresh understanding of how humans handle grief. Her writings have been instrumental in teaching me how to understand, accept and deal with the emotions that come with having chronic migraine pain. (You can read my posts about this, here, here, and here.)

Compassionate understanding and acceptance of our own initial, grieving reaction help get us to a point of energy from which we can make constructive choices about how we deal with the situation.

A person dear to me who suffers from depression recently told me that mornings are his worst times. He'd spent hours after awakening, unable to move under the great weight holding him down. He was

Photo by William Marsh

regularly late to work and losing motivation. One morning he realized if he decided to do one thing -- like feeding the cat or vacuuming the floor -- and made himself get up to do it without planning for or looking beyond that one activity, he could get out of the bed. Getting the one thing done encouraged him to decide on the next thing. One thing at a time, one step at a time, he has chosen a way to combat the depression that could be crippling him.

I imagine his inner monologue on that morning he made a change might have gone something like this: Ok, I'm depressed again. Yet another morning of pain and paralysis. Am I going to lie here feeling sorry for myself? I gotta do something.

And he gets up to vacuum the floor. Seems small, doesn't it? Insignificant, the mundane stuff of an uninteresting life. Yet I believe the creative and constructive actions we take in the face of great pain are the essence of courage, of hope, of believing in the light even while enveloped in the dark.

And it starts with something simple like, ok, I'm depressed again. Acceptance.


Thank you for reading my blog. You can comment below or email me at carold.marsh@gmail.com.

Reading Mariechild Together: Experience Treeness

January 10: I read this page in Diane Mariechild's book, "Open Mind -- Women's Daily Inspiration for Becoming Mindful" at two levels. One was at the level at which she and Sue Silvermarie (whose poem is at the top of the page) intend -- that of accepting the fact of our own death and allowing our acceptance to enhance our life.

I don't have anything to add to this except to quote from my sister, Joan, who is reading the book and with whom I consult regularly as a way to share what we learn, challenge one another or just commiserate. Here is what she wrote to me:

I believe that it is the responsibility of us all to make peace within ourselves so that in our dying we give that gift to our survivors.

The other way I read this page was in relation to living with chronic pain, which I sometimes regard as living a series of small, and sometimes large, deaths. For example, I had to leave my work at a non-profit that I founded and loved for seventeen years. That would qualify as a large death, and even as I went through it, I was aware of my grief and of allowing myself to work through a process which I then could apply to pain management and living with chronic pain. An example of a small death would be having to cancel an outing at the last minute due to a migraine.

As I accept such deaths with equanimity, I prepare for a peaceful ultimate death. May it be a gift to my survivors.

January 11: Mariechild takes quite a trip on this one page, from a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic saint, Theresa of Avila, to speaking of Goddess as the universal source of energy to meditating on treeness. I just love it.

When we live solely in our heads, life becomes stale. When we act from our source, our lives are fresh and abundant.

Despite emotional or physical pain, we can have abundantly fresh lives. And whatever we think of or however we name our source -- God, Goddess, Allah, Shiva, Mother Earth, Great Spirit, Jehovah -- we can make a conscious choice to live from that source and thus make our lives fresh. Whatever the difficult circumstances -- and whose life does not have difficult circumstances? -- we have a choice that brings us to our source.

The entry ends with another practice, that of imagining our treeness. Try it -- I will, too. And we can share thoughts about it in the Comment section (click on the envelope) below.

I would love to hear from you. Please use the Comment box below, or email me at carold.marsh@gmail.com. Thank you.

Reading Mariechild Together: See with a Double Eye

My sister, Joan Sparks, is an accomplished musician, so I think of her when I read M.C. Richards' words about "approaching life as an artistic process." I love to see the way Joan's grace in performance translates into grace in how she lives her life, equally, through challenge and success.

When I read Richards' words for myself, I think of the way I live to approach my pain as a not artistic, certainly, but spiritual process. I have written about this often enough in previous posts (if you use the list to the right of this text frame, you can click on labels to get to other posts), so that I don't feel it necessary to go into great detail. However, there are a few tried-and-true -- meaning, tried by me and true for me -- methods that I use almost without conscious thought, so practiced are they.

Before I get to these practices, I want to say that, although I write about the physical pain of my migraines, I have also learned to use these practices with emotional pain as well. I would love to hear your thoughts about how you find my practices applicable to other kinds of pain.

"Seeing with a double eye," is what Richards says. "Living in the question," is how Mariechild responds. Here are ways I use to see my pain with a double eye, to live into the question (or the reality) of physical and emotional pain.

1. There is something about Elizabeth Kubler Ross' Stages of Grief that helps me feel more normal about my reactions to pain.

2. I use meditation aids such as deep muscle relaxation, stretching, mantras, chants and attention to the breath to take me out of the tense-bodied initial reaction to pain and into a deeper place -- "deep looking," as Mariechild calls it. (Click on the "methods" label to the right.)

3. When relaxed in body I am better able to put the pain into perspective. Not that the pain ceases, but it somehow becomes less overwhelming, not so central. I am breathing more deeply and in a state of quiet non-thought.

I live into the reality of my pain with a double eye: the pain is there and I must accept that reality; yet  my spirit is also there and my desire for discovering what pain has to teach me is freed to explore. For me, this is what redeems the pain, and in some ways, my life.

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Use the Comments box below, to start a conversation. Thank you.

Accept and Bear Reality: Five Stages of Grief

One last post about Kubler-Ross' Five Stages of Grief before I return to my current series on Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.   My previous post discussed how I relate the theme of accepting and bearing reality to the Five Stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  But theory and discussion can be nothing short of maddening when we are in pain.  So, today I want to get to some practicalities of pain management in the context of the Five Stages, or the grief model. 

FIRST: There is no shame in bobbing around in the lake of emotions that accompany chronic pain.  We do not have to become worried and upset when currents of depression overtake us just as we were sure we were ready to quietly tread the calm water of acceptance.  But that is enough of the water metaphor.

Without shame and without worrying about what is wrong with me?, we understand and accept that the Five Stages are not fixed, but are fluid (hence the overwrought water image of the preceding paragraph).  I discussed this in an earlier post. 

SECOND: Shame, worry and low self-esteem being cast aside -- if only for the moment -- we are able to simply admit where we are Now.  We have studied and understood and felt some relief about the Five Stages; now they are helping us to listen to our emotions and thoughts without judgment:

"Ugh...so depressed today I don't want to get out of bed." **  "#^&% this pain." **  "Well, if I just skip my exercises/medications/diet this once, I should be okay.  I deserve some fun."  **  "Here is the pain, today.  Breathe deeply and relax."

THIRD: Having accepted our reality, we can turn to the pain management tools we have learned, and about which I have posted before (use the Labels list in the right-hand column, click on breathing, methods, meditation, relaxation and tools and you will be directed to these posts).  I have always found that pain management practices are more effective when I have accepted where I am in the moment.  Emotions like anger or depression, mental gymnastics like bargaining with life only distract me from the task at hand: to deal directly and honestly with both my emotional and physical pain.

To summarize: I find the Five Stages useful as a preparation for settling into pain management practices like deep breathing, meditation, deep muscle relaxation, and others.  Seeing our all-too-human tendencies to pop between stages as inevitable, understanding what each stage means for our pain, and thus being able to go beyond it gets us closer to accepting and bearing our reality.

Next post, back to the Eckhart Tolle Power of Now series.

I would love to hear from you.  Please use the Comment link below, or email me at carold.marsh@gmail.com.  Thank you.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' Five Stages of Grief and Pain Management

In my previous post, I discussed how Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' Five Stages of Grief might be applied to living with chronic pain.  Specifically -- and in conjunction with my current series on Eckhart Tolle and his book, The Power of Now -- how this model might be of use in helping us come to the point of accepting and bearing our reality.

The first step is to see the relevance of Kubler-Ross' teachings to living the life of chronic pain.  They help us name and acknowledge our natural emotions.  In this discussion of the Stages, you will notice that I am not giving examples of each one, but instead examining how they relate to my theme, accepting and bearing reality.

1. DENIAL: We all have times when we pretend the pain is not affecting us physically, mentally and emotionally, and spiritually as much as it is.  This leads us to keep working (as I did) long after we have lost our effectiveness; to act as if our mental faculties are not affected by the pain and thus to make poor decisions for ourselves and others; to die a small spiritual death because we have not understood the toll denial takes on our spirits.

2. ANGER: If we do not allow our anger to surface to our awareness in order to be dealt with, it's inevitably going to come out in other ways.  And thus cause us stress: "In terms of physical health, it doesn't matter if you tend to lash out in rage or repress your anger."  Without going into all of the ways that lashing out and repressing affect our health, let's just say that unless we are honest about our anger and willing to assess its affect on us, we are raising our stress levels and making our health -- and thus, our pain -- worse.

3. BARGAINING: For me, bargaining has affected my ability to accept and bear the reality of living with chronic pain by making it harder for me to keep to practices I know are good for me.  I say to myself: "I have been strict in my diet and so confined for the past months: I can just drink this glass of wine for once."  But the glass of wine does not really help me to feel better, and often enough there soon comes a migraine because of it.  It's the same with certain foods I know I should not eat: fresh, warm yeast bread, for example.  "Just this once," becomes a day in bed with the blindfold on.

4. DEPRESSION: One of the side effects of many medications is depression -- it also is reality for anyone living with chronic pain.  Compounding the difficulty is that other therapies for depression -- such as exercise, a regular sleep schedule, get out with friends -- are made problematic or even impossible by our chronic pain.  We lose perspective, we retreat, we have no ability to see the beauty or joy in life.  Even writing about it is depressing. 

5. ACCEPTANCE: It is important to honestly, and with just the appropriate amount of whining, admit that pain has taken a good deal away from us.  We have died many little deaths in our relationships, our inability to hold a career, and greatly restricted lives, even aside from the sheer physical misery of chronic pain.  To accept these hard truths as facts of our lives keeps us out of what I call "victim mode", which is its own small death in and of itself.  With acceptance, we regain control.  We can choose whether or not to wallow in self-pity.  We can learn how far we can go before we have stepped over the line between healthy honesty and unhealthy self-pity.

Okay, so this post is a quick assessment of what the Five Stages might look like for someone with chronic pain.  In my next post, I will take the discussion further into more constructive, practical tools.


I would love to hear from you.  Please use the Comment link below, or email me at carold.marsh@gmail.com  Thank you.





 

Chronic Pain and Kubler-Ross' Five Stages of Grief

In my previous post, I wrote my way into an idea for this post while discussing acknowledging and allowing our feelings.  The idea is to relate our feelings about chronic pain to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' Five Stages of Grief.  It has been explored before, here, here, and here, for example, but I found that I wanted more out of the discussions, so this is my attempt to add to what is already out there.

To begin, these are the Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

Kubler-Ross said that these stages are fluid:

"Also known as the ‘grief cycle’, it is important to bear in mind that Kübler-Ross did not intend this to be a rigid series of sequential or uniformly timed steps. It’s not a process as such, it’s a model or a framework. There is a subtle difference: a process implies something quite fixed and consistent; a model is less specific – more of a shape or guide." (from the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation website)

There is enough information available at the click of a mouse that I do not need to go into basics about the Grief Cycle.  Using the links in the paragraphs above will get you good, basic information if you want it.

So, what about this Grief Cycle vis-a-vis the life of chronic pain?  It's different than grieving the death of a loved one because death is its own closure.  Like all humans, I have grieved death of loved ones.  But, like fewer of us, I have also grieved the debilitating presence of pain as well as the life changes it causes.  So I am going to make a comparison, but I am in no way saying that one kind of grief is worse or more noteworthy than another.  I just want to explore the grief cycle and the concept of closure together, as a way to enter into a discussion about the Five Stages model and chronic pain.

There is no closure with chronic pain: we cycle through bad days and not-so-bad days and celebrate the occasional good day; we try new medications or alternative therapies that do not deliver as promised; we hope for cure and suffer the inevitable disappointment.  Chronic pain doesn't die, obviously.  Its sneaky, beady little eyes peek out from behind every bit of relief we might find, assessing the optimal moment to pop up and smack us upside the head yet one more time.

When a loved one dies, there comes a point at which we are able to take comfort in the knowledge that the knife-edge of our suffering will be blunted.  (Others often try to force or coerce us to this point with well-meaning but maddening phrases like, "you'll feel better after a while," but that is another topic.)  Although we will never forget, never lose that core of sorrow, the intensity of our grieving will change, becoming more and more bearable.

The question is, how do we use the Five Stages when what we are grieving is an endless cycle?  The pain does not naturally, over time, become more bearable.  (It strikes me as I write this that there are other instances of endless grief: the disappearance of a child and the MIA soldier, for example.  Frankly, I would rather have chronic pain, the hell of that sort of limbo being unimaginable to me.)

Interestingly enough, I come, unexpectedly yet quite organically, back to one of the discussion points in my current series on Eckhart Tolle and his book, The Power of Now. 

This endless cycle of pain has one redeeming feature: it affords us the opportunity to come to terms with it and thus to accept and bear the reality of our lives.  It teaches us that what we can control is our reaction to the pain. 

In my next post, I will go further and more practically -- meaning less theory and more tools -- into the uses of the Five Stages of Grief in helping us come to the point of accepting and bearing our reality.


I would love to hear from you.  Please use the Comment link below, or email me at carold.marsh@gmail.com.  Thank you.