The Body's Bitter Cup

Spirit, Pain, and Truth

In the West, we have a dysfunctional relationship with pain. This is true even in the Latter-day Saint community, though, in our defense, we dip our toes into the Buddhist waters. We stand up in testimony meetings and profess how, through hardship, we’ve come to know Jesus and accessed his Atonement, even as we wander in and out of cognitive dissonance about the quantity of suffering God permits in the world. Buddhists never charge God for humanity’s pain. The burden of the world’s suffering is not God’s to relieve, but mankind’s. 

I mean no contempt for our culture’s mitigated appreciation for pain, but maybe you’ve noticed that the nature of suffering is cyclical, and difficulties are iterative. Pain that visits now revisits later and, in the end, stays longer. It is not a judgment upon us. It’s because, among other things, pain is a message. And frequently, it comes and goes unheeded. 

I have a messy story of self-healing following many years of chronic pain and disability that profoundly changed my life and the lives of my family members. It began with insomnia after my daughter was born. Not occasional insomnia. Sleeplessness was absolute, locking me out of any sleep for days at a time. I also couldn’t eat, suffering bouts of idiopathic hives so severe that just tasting a balanced meal was like taking my life into my hands. 

I won’t list my diagnoses, not because of personal privacy, but because there are too many, and ultimately, their recitation is both exhausting and uninformative, to me and anyone else reading. Suffice it to say that my suffering went on for a long time. It took a financial toll, costing precious savings. It took the remainder of my child-bearing years.

At the onset, we were living in Palo Alto, and my husband was doing his postdoc in neuroscience at Stanford University. We were marinating in a pool of talent and success, in the worldly way of speaking, and I was utterly drowning in helplessness and dysfunction. 

It wasn’t something people could fail to notice. I was ruined, without any apparent excuse for being that way. Some people we associated with were impatient, even disgusted. In hindsight, I don’t believe their revulsion was because they lacked compassion. They recoiled out of aversion to weakness, their own worst of all. 

One cannot know oneself, much less embody oneself, without witnessing the evidence of one’s own human frailty. I learned in Palo Alto among my hardworking and successful friends that achieving without embodiment is yet another mask to insulate oneself from the pain of integrating our weakness into our self-concept.

I certainly couldn’t witness my own frailty clear-eyed. I was desperate, casting about constantly for some external remedy. Doctors. Sleep specialists. Psychiatrists. Allergists. Nutritionists. 

Stanford Medical’s prescription included a meditation practice known as mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR. I gave it my best. I was determined to strengthen my brain and let it work its miracles on me. I had the time. Night after sleepless night. And I felt things—powerful things. But my practice did nothing to cure me. At last it came to me that meditation would only help me if I could do it all day long every day outside of the realities of life.

Buddhist Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche cautions Westerners about meditating to bliss out. All that calm, love, and compassion bull crap. Blissing out taught me to use meditation as an escape, to calm the messages my implicit mind was trying desperately to communicate to me, not listen to them, not know them. I thought I was practicing mindfulness. In fact, I was running from it. But truly knowing the mind is not as straightforward as watching your conscious headspace. The conscious mind is not everything. There’s also what we don’t know we don’t know. 

After a long while, I learned a new kind of meditation. A meditation connecting to my pain.

My first such meditation began in the familiar way of your typical MBSR but soon diverged. The narrator was like any guided meditation voice. Soft and serene. I’d thought the instruction to attend to the breath was about calming the mind. But I didn’t need to be calm. I needed to connect to my bodily brain. 

The brain is not a unified monolith of function. Brain regions can work at cross purposes and often do so, particularly when the stakes are highest. We have a thinking brain for the work of rationalizing, and we also have a nonthinking brain—the brain stem and the cerebellum—for events we experience in our bodies. The nonthinking brain’s language of choice is bodily sensation, including pain, but this bodily brain is also the brain that remembers how to ride a bicycle. You don’t think about how to ride a bike. You either do it or you don’t. 

During my first go-round with pain meditation, after connecting to my bodily hindbrain, the meditation guide instructed me to identify an emotion. Mine bubbled up rather quickly after a brief wait, but I wasn’t trying to remember. I wasn’t thinking with my prefrontal cortex. 

Implicit or subconscious memories are bodily memories stored in the nonthinking brain—the earlier-evolving primitive hindbrain. To the extent these memories are aversive, they are stored with stress hormones released during painful life events. And they often come with their own conclusions, never having passed into the rationalizing prefrontal cortex. Here’s another wrinkle: implicit memories are subconscious, yet they can drive behaviors, motoring us around against our intentions. 

You’ve been there, driving along down the road, when a driver cuts you off in traffic. Immediately, the brain releases a flood of stress hormones, and you are back in your primitive mind. It’s life and death, the hippocampus shuts down and inhibitory function stops, and suddenly, you are not an agent but a puppet—flailing, unhinged. 

When you ask for an implicit memory while meditating, you keep that bodily brain connection and let the memory come. The surprising part is that the memory does come when you remain connected to the emotion. Sometimes the memory is long forgotten, but I have always recognized the memories stored in my primitive brain.

Distinct from the primitive brain of the cerebellum is the prefrontal cortex, the brain of judgment, language, and executive function: the rational brain. We need all of our brain regions, but they may not be well integrated. The rational attention you give to the bodily sensations of the primitive hindbrain while meditating can build neural pathways running between regions. Psychiatrists call this neural integration, and it is a benchmark for thriving mental health. Evidence-based medicine has embraced this ancient integration, practiced by Buddhists for centuries, as a treatment for pain.

After bringing up an implicit memory, the rational brain plays a part in an implicit memory’s resolution, and this is an exercise in integrating the two brain regions. In my first pain meditation, my bodily brain brought me the emotion of guilt for my daughter’s physical disabilities. I had not realized that my bodily brain carried this emotion so heavily. Having made this neural connection with my hindbrain, my rational brain could intentionally confront that guilt, discern its value, and, finally, resolve it.

Stillness, awareness, emotion, memory. When I confronted the memory of my guilt and cast off my false belief in that guilt, I felt a palpable spiritual freedom.

I should explain that listening to the subconscious brain ought not be confused with listening to the Spirit. The Spirit speaks peace, but when the hindbrain speaks to us through emotional pain, there is no peace in the matter. It is a message enveloped in sensation—physical pain, emotional aversion, or compulsion. 

Here is a danger. The Spirit brings peace, and what we seek is peace. Why, then, can we not ease our pain by seeking the Spirit? Among my ancestors was a poor woman who, while settling the Idaho frontier, lost her husband. She couldn’t cope with this loss and spent her succeeding days buried in the scriptures, neglecting and even abandoning her children. I have every sympathy for my ancestor’s loss, but burying herself in the scriptures did not supply her with strength. I don’t even think she was really looking for answers. Was her behavior compulsive? Was she hiding from her pain because of fear, perhaps because of the unconscious, irrational reactivity of the hindbrain? It was not her intention, but gripping fear resists the influence of the Spirit. 

The Spirit, on the other hand, is always empowering. When it speaks, it changes everything. In my case, the Spirit, in its peaceful manner, directed me to this reckoning.

When I was perhaps at my lowest, my husband blessed me often. Sometimes nightly, as I lay gripped by nerve pain in my spine, wishing to die. The blessing counsel I received was always the same. Listen to your body. I needed time to realize that this message was not “respect the limits of your body,” but “find truth in your body.”

The Spirit might have come and resolved all of my painful memories without a confrontation with my primitive brain. But how often does the Spirit do work we can do ourselves? In Jeremiah 30:10, the Lord promises that in the last days, he will save his people from afar. In this distant way, the Lord has saved me, but he has also empowered me with a new way of knowing.

Connecting with the subconscious is mental work, but it is also spiritual, because it is a function of more perfect embodiment, inhabiting your body and being volitional about thought and action, yet the subconscious voice is not straightforward or trustworthy. The subconscious voice requires interpretation because it is outside the power of the rational prefrontal cortex. When the primitive brain is primed for alarm, as in the case of childhood abuse or neglect, the conclusions and meanings may become ever more threatening and ever more irrational. Thus, it’s crucial to listen to your body but not necessarily to believe its messages. 

We will never inherit the full gift of agency until we learn to integrate our rational and primitive brains. Until then, we are forever dual minded. Without knowing our subconscious motives, we can’t choose. We’re ping-pong balls—reactive, driven by fear, resentment, or any other implicit need. 

By meditatively integrating the rational and implicit brains, we gather our strength, becoming single-minded agents of action. 

When we listen to our pain, we are not ruminating or even identifying with it to give it power. It is an age-old Buddhist notion that pain is like a storm that rages and passes. We remain whole, no matter the weather. 

Just as I have learned to see that pain is not my enemy, I am also seeing that perfect health is not the prize. Health is a fine thing, but breaking the back of fear is quite another. At the heart of our human condition is this: a vault in our mind that we will not open. A graveyard of regrets unbearable to visit. The bodily brain housing those implicit memories is that vault, that graveyard. It is no exaggeration for me to say that opening my vault was terrible, though my life is not one of any extraordinary sinfulness. The pain, however, that was locked in my vault was never rational, and its grip upon me was a vise. Though I sometimes shrink, I have learned to trade the pain of a divided and blind mind for the bitter cup of self-knowledge.

Herein is a mystery—that Jesus conquered death through a portal of pain, and our mortal escape from suffering hinges upon a similar confrontation. Staring into the implicit memories bound by fear, loathing, rejection, doubt. Not suppressing, but acknowledging, and ultimately, relying upon the compassion that God’s universe provides in abundance. 

Compassion is a gift, but it takes many shapes. Sometimes the shape of compassion is a dagger. God created this sharp earth and gave us only skin for protection. To help a butterfly break its chrysalis is to condemn it to flightlessness and death. The struggle is its only escape. I don’t feel so very different. I will never outdistance my human condition by running, but I hope to transcend it. With pain as my tutor, I begin.

Taya Okerlund

is an author of several novels, connecting with her several brains and leaning into her aversions. Click here to follow her on Substack. She is a mom and dog lady. Of those who philosophize, She is an incorrigible hedgehog. 

Art by Denise Gasser (@denisegasserart)

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