When I read Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (2005) I was struck by how much her treatment of acceptance in the face of the ultimately unacceptable reminded me of the hard-boiled existentialism I had read too many years earlier.

Then, on the last page, she finally quotes Jean-Paul Sartre in a blinding finale, “There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free or not free.” We are free if we enter into each moment solely as the present. We are not free if each stimulous in the here and now just plays on a thousand strands of undigested history, so that what we are aware of is not the moment itself, but the revereration of all that has come before.

Put it another way, better we be attuned to the clapper than the sound of the bell. 'Cause if you can deconstruct the bell (know what is in response to the moment and what is just produced by old patterns) you stand a much better chance of experiencing the action of the clapper.

And no where is it truer than in dealing with chronic pain. We can either tell ourselves stories about it until we are blue in the face, e.g. catastrophising, or we can get down and dirty with the pain, and know it so well that we see it break apart into strands. Given the choice, I"ll stick with awareness.

Mike