Pain, St Francis and mindfulness

‘Pain is an invitation to a dialogue’ (Wittgenstein)

Just because Donald Trump might be a bad person, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have feelings, real feelings that get really hurt. One thing his hair tells us is that he is still a member of the entertainment community, and yet his own people reject him publicly at every turn, and that’s hurtful. And golly, the press certainly know how to inflict pain. Success, fame and power deliver a rarified form of suffering, and poor Donald is showing us just how to make it as painful as possible.

Here is the opening verse of AA Milne’s poem about another, rather similar psychopathic ruler, ‘Bad King John’. (800 years ago King John so antagonized the Westminster elite that he was made to sign Magna Carta, which is the foundation of all legal protection against the exercise of arbitrary power, both in the UK and the US.)

King John’s Christmas (AA Milne)

‘King John was not a good man —

He had his little ways.

And sometimes no one spoke to him

For days and days and days.

And men who came across him,

When walking in the town,

Gave him a supercilious stare,

Or passed with noses in the air —

And bad King John stood dumbly there,

Blushing beneath his crown.’

AA Milne’s ‘Bad King John’ shows us a child’s artless response to basically the same pain as Trump is dealing with in his own catastrophic way. So what is the art to be mastered here?

Pain is not something you can opt out of, or buy, inherit, succeed or luck your way free from. You may think you have sidestepped the pain of poverty, failure, sexual frustration, ill-health, loneliness… and yet pain keeps reappearing in fresh guises, even if, as it turns inward, it may be only half-glimpsed: profound boredom, existential despair, compulsive anxiety or dissatisfaction, moral discomfort… It is the bass-note of all our experience.

But the nature of pain is that it is not just an experience; it is your response to your experience. For example, I support a football club; I think about the team more than is probably healthy. However, whilst the novelist Julian Barnes, for example, observes that supporting a football team means ‘stupid love, howling despair and frantic self-loathing’, it doesn’t for me. I know that it’s a lot of nonsense. It’s theatre. Losing is part of the drama.

Now what I would like to be able to do is to transfer this attitude to the rest of my life – ‘to care and not to care’ (TS Eliot), to ‘hold on tightly, let go lightly’ as an old judo teacher of mine used to say. There’s no harm in creating a drama out of your life, like Jose Mourinho kicking a water-bottle on the touchline when his team give away a penalty in the dying minutes of a game. It’s natural and healthy. But mindfulness is a contacting of some deeper level of awareness that really isn’t that bothered, that finds the disasters and humiliations and pain of your life just as interesting as the pleasures and triumphs. Because losing is part of the drama.

There is a story about St Francis, the founder of the Franciscan Order, which makes the same point. He and another monk are travelling in winter and it’s coming to the evening, and Francis talks about the greatest joy as lying not in having the gift of prophesy, or preaching, or raising people from the dead and so on… 

"But if, when we shall arrive at Saint Mary of the Angels, all drenched with rain and trembling with cold, all covered with mud and exhausted from hunger; if, when we knock at the convent-gate, the porter should come angrily and ask us who we are; if, after we have told him, "We are two of the brethren", he should answer angrily… "These are but importunate rascals, I will deal with them as they deserve"; and taking a knotted stick, he seize us by the hood, throwing us on the ground, rolling us in the snow, and shall beat and wound us with the knots in the stick… here, finally, is perfect joy.’

You’re probably thinking that St Francis is on his own trip here. We can understand patience in the face of unpleasantness, but joy? That seems kind of aberrant, to put it mildly.

But the great medieval Tibetan hermit and poet, Milarepa, is similarly enthusiastic about things not really going his way. Well, he describes the ups and downs of life as ‘the greatest joy’ (in his lyric ‘Song of a Yogi’s Joy’ for example). The Buddha himself speaks of this freedom of the mind from being determined by circumstances, whether pleasant or painful. He says, in various different contexts, that he does not allow feeling, whether pleasant or painful, to have power over his mind.

My own experience is that sometimes I feel quite relaxed and cheerful when life leaves me knee deep in the bad chutney. Other times, not so much… Emotional pain, of which, like most people I have had my share, I have found, at least in recent years, much easier than what I’m going through now. It’s much easier, when you are in the midst of some public humiliation, for example, to practice mindfulness, to notice what is going on in a relaxed way, than when the body tightens against physical pain. And the fact is that you can kind of enjoy that sense of a big deep part of you just not getting caught up in what at a more superficial level you are finding very painful. It’s a sense of freedom, and a sense of being in touch with something larger.

Certainly I haven’t yet felt depressed at the way my life has been curtailed in so many ways. I don’t think, ‘Why me?’ (‘Why not me?’ is more to the point.) Also, certain old negative mental habits don’t have quite the same free run of my mind that they used to. They may start, but often they will simply not continue.

At the hospital I was asked if I ever felt upset or wept, and I said I did. However, I turned down their offer of counseling. I said quite firmly that being occasionally upset was a normal reaction to my condition that I was quite happy with.

After my radiotherapy finished at the end of January, such were the continuing side effects, that I had no mental energy for the next 3 months, and fell into an unreflective survival mode, a sort of stoic, but not really conscious determination to get through the ordeal, partly by just turning off my thinking. Severe anaemia was discovered in June. Also pneumonia, which went undiagnosed for a while. When I took iron pills and antibiotics in June I felt a lot better.