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On Suffering September 21 2009

One of your big transitions when you get cancer is that you get a lot more suffering to deal with. Yes, the doctors help, but little aches and pains throughout your body happen, plus the big crisis bouts of pain from the tumors growing and what their intrusions are doing to the rest of your body.

Our normal bodily life is often free of pain, or if there is pain, it is localized, like going to the dentist for fixing a tooth ache.

Now with cancer my whole body feels pain sometimes. So I had better have a strong counter experience to help me deal with the pains by not being overwhelmed by them psychologically.

As a cancer sufferer also I spend my whole day and that part of the night that I cannot sleep trying to deal with the pains afflicting me in the moment?

I have my bodily pains.

I have also the psychological pains evoked by the physical, like grief at going from loved ones and this earth, like grief at the unlived life one would still like to live out there in the world, or at home with ones projects.

I have also the suffering of attitudes evoked by the cancer, like, why live on when there is so much suffering to experience each day?

Then there is the suffering of wanting to live on, to no give up yet on living daily a purposeful life.

I live now in a huge public building for retired folk. The average age is 70 years, the rental people say. I see them talking with each other, cleaning an outdoor little table they have next to their front door. In other words, not meaningful activities in any big sense that what they do with their energy is needed to help make a better world or a richer life for some people.

• There existence is now rendered meaningless and that is, must be, a terrible existential suffering.

I suspect the old lady above me who makes so much noise late at night sometimes talks just to not experience a deep innate anxiety that she is useless. Thus in the world even without cancer or some other disease a sickness is present because a daily suffering is present.

What is the corrective of reaching such a suffering state in old age?

Well, earlier, of course, we all fill our lives with meaningful activities. I have worked as a dreamwork psychologist helping people center their lives on who they really are and the values they can choose for themselves in living life. I have helped people get over the traumas of childhood. I have helped people become realistic in their relating so that they live a more fulfilling relational life.

The list goes on. Mostly I did not have that much suffering, or general anxiety, am I going to make it with my life, do significant things that use my values and abilities?

At times there were crises when the reality we all live in took a turn for the worse, like going bankrupt one time because of changes in the growth market in Norway and elsewhere. I was a good teacher and psychotherapist but when people don’t have the money you don’t get paid either. When the center you work at goes bankrupt you get a move on fast.

Yes, you better believe it that I did a hop, skip and jump to survive a difficult reality.

1. Cancer is like that. It definitely is a crisis and an energy loss.
2. Cancer is a loss of control in that you cannot say to yourself, now just stop suffering, Strephon.

Sure, you begin to depend on the doctors. If my medication is not working right in the night or in the day I phone for an immediate appointment with the doctor that day and usually he has a modified solution for me to make me more or less comfortable.

• But the doctor does not predict health again at my age. He does see me deteriorating and says where he can send me to a hospital doctor when things get worse.

The nature then of this sickness is to get worse, is for the organs to fail and thus the pain increase as the body cries out at the loss of itself.

What then do you, do I, does anybody have to counter this increase in pain at many levels?

On Suffering means here that whether we want to or not we are challenged to develop ways of handling increased suffering as a daily and nightly experience.

One big reason in reading this report or book is to let it affect you, because this report lets you know what you are in for most likely in suffering a cancer through even unto death.

The young new rabbi wants to visit me but for what? It’s part of his profession. Probably his message is that there is not just this life, Strephon, but the life to come, some sort of being with angels or ancestors or something. Look to present suffering as a passageway to a life in God where there is suffering no longer.

Yet what if you do not believe in such symbolic thinking?

• What if suffering is just suffering and must be endured as best you can because you are in a body?

Another type of strong suffering is the ‘looking out the window’ suffering. You see people going about their young lives and you remember experiences of when you were young and free in the body, and maybe in life itself.

One fellow in the distance comes home, gets out of his modern red car and goes into his house. Eventually the bedroom light goes out. Maybe he masturbates if he lives alone? The point is that he has a car and a house, and maybe a relationship or not that is to give him pleasure and companionship, and even get him out of his suffering, a distraction at times.

• How much of our daily time do we avoid the suffering we have, even if it is only mental?

Read books, watch programs on TV, have people over to socialize, have projects to do using the internet, learning new stuff to enhance ones job performance and make more money eventually.

See, these are life activities that give us a sense of purpose in life. We are doing things to further our existence and make it more powerful. We run in the early morning five days a week and sleep in two. We keep ourselves functioning as a pleasure body that feels well in itself. We date or relate to express that pleasure body with someone else we choose as significant.

Yet we avoid pain unless we are training as an athlete.

• In cancer you can’t avoid the pain. You can only have some of it alleviated. So you must deal with the pain in itself.

This is the nature of the game.

My Task

I try not to avoid the pain but to experience it directly, except when it seems too much and I need the medications the doctors provide.

I work with the pain, the suffering, what is evoked in me, through a psychological and spiritual process, even physical, like sticking with a diet that does not eat chocolate candy bars because of their sugar content.

I work with the pain. I write about the pain. I use words to describe the actual experiences for myself and others.

• I am now a pain body and that is what I must face.

When I get up from a chair I have to push myself up by grabbing on to something also.

In the old days I could sit on the meditation cushions and lead groups in spiritual centering. Those were indeed powerful times for us all in our groups in Norway, Berkeley, California, outside Quebec, Romania, and other centers.

Now just to get up out of a chair, or out of bed, takes effort that puts pressure on my chest and lungs that is uncomfortable. I also have a constant pain in my right back.

It’s not complaining as it is describing the condition. Of course old age is a modern thing for many people. Medicine and a far easier life has kept most of us living on into this decrepit old condition.

In former times they used to look to you as wise if you reached this age, and would consult you for perspective on daily life issues. Now you go to the internet or other info source. The old are not needed and so they suffer their pains without purpose to them, just as I am doing now, except I have my purposeful writing, which I enjoy tremendously, and not knowing what these words are going to be worth to others.

It is consciousness in action, in experience, as I am living it.

Lesson: prepare for old age by building purpose for your life in the later years. What is that for you? People retire but suddenly they find themselves almost useless and they learn to fill their time. It’s all therapy, to go on trips with each other, see the sights that you never had time to see while leading a working and a family life.

Yet now it’s different. You have time on your hands and diminished capacity to even do everyday things. I walk faster again, or almost normal, because maybe of the new homeopathy remedies. The doctor’s strong medications did not help this before. But what can I do with my walking? I drive Stefania places. Being very careful I can drive safely locally. Do I dare go on the freeway though? Probably not. That is fast driving requiring quick and emergency actions sometimes.

So prepare for diminished activity. It happens in old age, especially with cancer, at least as I know it now.

The slight pain is in my chest now. I took my cottage cheese and linseed oil, supposed to be a real cure against cancer. But just started it a few days  ago. Maybe it will take weeks to activate and still the tumor? Maybe it won’t work.

So many alternative people saying there are cures against cancer, but if so even, is it kind of too late for me?

Sadness, a deep sadness, and right now focused on what my dying will do to the relationship with Stefania. We have talked of this possibility of course, and that my earlier death is one of the prices to pay that we took on together.

No regrets? Well, few regrets when in reality. Yet certainly sadness and suffering.

One learns to process ones suffering at any stage in life, and I have helped a lot of people learn how to deal with their suffering in the earlier years.

Now my challenge is to deal with my Present Suffering. This is how I do it now, using what inner and outer resources that are available to me. This is what I have.

The Other, The Greater Source

Yet there is The Other, The Greater Source. Who knows how The Interventions can work here? I do my part, and if breakthroughs are still to be part of my life, then something will come through, even regarding the suffering, maybe especially regarding the suffering.

I remembered this morning after starting to write this on suffering that of course Stefania is suffering because of my cancer and what it means for the future. I went to her in bed as she was waking up. I remembered to give her my presence without causing her suffering. This is a task for me to stay active with every day.

Not to give unnecessary suffering but to give joy as I so can. I just wrote a personal letter to Stefania in a journal I had not used before.

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