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When Life Becomes Too Painful To Want To Go On Living

This is how I am beginning to feel this morning. I want to get through my day purposefully, but if I am being distracted by the tightness in my chest and being all alone because Stefania is at work, then I have a serious challenge in my day.

I have my writing to do. Let’s face it, folks, maybe this is too hard to read for most people? It is a story of pain and dealing with pain. It is not a story of success at the moment, of recovering from cancer, which one of my cancer books says is an epidemic in the world now.

Just like the medieval people had to keep dealing with the plague, which also gave them horrible deaths to deal with.

I took my medications but still feel the pain in my chest and back.

• So today right now I have to counter the pain with purpose, and that seems to be about my writing here about pain.

Pain contrasts with purpose in life.

What can I accomplish in my day that is positive and an expression of me?

• Will the cancer let me, or visit me with so much pain and distracting sadness that I cannot function in a purposeful way?

Is the moment approaching wherein I have to go into a hospital or hospice, which then means being cared for as I am dying? Just called Stefania to call city hall to get our marriage date settled as soon as possible.

It’s still touch and go, apparently.

Now I have worked with myself to be positive, so I must continue to do so. I read a little more in Grace and Grit and they just found more lumps in her breast. It’s hard to read and I can’t read all the mental verbage that Ken and Treya give themselves and each other, but at least I get something of their experiences and know then that mine are real.

Or, am I fooling myself? Is this the wrong material to read because it is similar to my situation and it does not, despite the cover title, give much of anything in the way of healing?

Healing cancer?

Where does that come from?

My hope is that the alternative is working despite my having such a large and aggressive tumor. I would like to see more signs besides the dramatic one of my being able to move twice as fast as before a day after taking the homeopathy.

So I live each moment as I can, wondering which way this cancer thing is going to go: a breakthrough to better health, at least for awhile? Or a crisis and decline into death, despite with the ego might want?

Keys About Dealing With Pain

The doctors can only do so much with your pain, though what they have done in my case has certainly helped me. Yet I still feel pain from the cancer.

Physical pain evokes psychological pain. You can start feeling profound grief, as if you were at your own funeral after you have died. It’s strange but real.

The trouble is, should you be dealing with grief and loss because the pain evokes it? Is this really part of a normal psychology?

In my case it seems better to oppose what my pain evokes with purposeful activity despite the pain, when I am able to do so.

One thing I have not done is use the computer to watch movies as a kind of distraction, knowing that my time is precious and I would have to just come back to myself. Maybe I should try this? What if I am still too mental, analyzing my state of being every day? Yet, I feel that I must indeed counter the feelings and emotions being evoked by the cancer at work in my and in my life.

The point is to alleviate the pain as you can, and with the help of the doctors. Yet where does that get you? The pain is a symptom of a malfunction of your body, which the cancer is.

I use the partial relief from pain to work on my Conscious Body, both because it is the creative joy I get for years from such activity, and because i could be helping in countering the growth of the cancer itself. But it hurts. It hurts right now.

In Grace and Grit Ken Wilber takes the Buddhist position that through meditation you work your mental into the position that you are not your pain. Well, in their book he never mentions the serious illness he got at the time. They also have a lot of anger associated to Treya’s pain from her breast cancer treatments.

It’s also a sad, sad story. They are coping with their situation but not so effectively because there seems no effective cancer treatment for them.

Thus pain is also the experience of nullification, the absence of positive solution to a problem. With cancer most of us must be suffering a profound defeat. This is spiritual and psychological pain. What can we do?

Nothing!

Well, almost nothing. I try and counter the negative thoughts and emotions by coming up with positive thoughts and actions in each day. It is work, believe me. The cancer seems to automatically give plenty of negative thoughts and emotions. It also takes from you physical and mental energy so that it is that much harder to counter it with positive thoughts and actions.

To help a cancer victim do positive things for them as you can. Keep adding the positives where you can. Don’t give up on a cancer patient and go negative yourself.

Yet then, what do you do with the negative feelings and thoughts evoked in you by being affected by a cancer carrier close to you? Big question!

Take your own cancer evocations and work with them, get to their causes, do positive things to counter the negativities of cancer.

Cancer Evokes Negativity

If you have read this book you will remember on my 75th birthday, as well as other times, how negatively narcissistic one acquaintance who held some power over me was. How insensitive she acted, and thus very, very strange. Yet it happened so very, very real. Another’s affliction can evoke ones own Dark Side.

• So be aware that someone else’s suffering may seem to make you do things that make them suffer even more.

Thus, in addition to the direct pain of the cancer active in ones body may come external pain from others’ behavior, including those closest to you at times.

Be ready for the Pain Body to be in full operation, whether you want it to or not.

There is no way to deal with pain but to deal with pain.

People try religion as well. It’s all for God’s purpose, they say. God will take care of you. Maybe in heaven, but still. God loves all his people.

Yeah, yeah, and who is cancer but Satan here to test your belief that God exists.

You know that cancer exists because you experience the pain of it existing in your body. Yet do you know that God exists because new and positive things come into your life? Or do you just have to believe on faith that God even knows you and cares for your welfare?

Or have the doctors taken over this function, using reason to discover how this universe works and how to make it better and easier on humans to live a positive and secure life with a minimum of pain?

Trust that you will get through the pain. The doctors can medicate you even more, if in fact they cannot cure you of your pain.

Trust that you will die when symptoms get bad enough to break down your body. In dying then you may have your last severe pains but then an end comes to it all.

One reason Ken Wilber called his book on his wife’s dying Healing, must be the peace she came to at the end when she gave up trying to fight her cancer and live on more. She had been a terrific student of trying to fight her cancer, doing so many exercises and treatments, but realized finally she had lost the battle.

Not just the battle against pain but the battle against her own vehicle for existence, her body, surviving cancer. She had lost the battle she realized and so gave in to her dying process. Ken carried her upstairs to their bedroom where she was at peace and people visited and experienced that peace in awe. It was indeed her last fair-well and she died, leaving Ken Wilber to live on with his medication controlled disease and all his writerly thoughts to put into books.

So of course I must go through something like this myself. I am in old age and so should be more accepting of dying now or soon.

Yet I find I am not. I am not fighting to live as to have good days for positive living, which includes my own writing purpose in the world, and includes relating to people through this blog and in my personal relationships, the most important is of course with Stefania. We have demonstrated these last six years that we have been real and transparent in love with each other, honest also.

Now yet, what do we have to do together?

Again, don’t let the pain and the cancer just take over. There are so many other parts to a day. While the whole thing feels incredibly sad, sill we share now much more than cancer and dying together.

Again, counter the cancer, the pain, and what it evokes. This is the purposeful method. Stefania and I have talked about this and will keep talking about what we can do. The last month or so has been one of having to move places to live, and that has taken a lot of Stefania’s time, even with the help of her friends.

So now maybe there will be more time for us to be present together and share our personal thoughts and feelings? I can think of many great subjects to go into that will carry forward in her own life.

For of course, Stefania, now 33, will someday face her own death. She may love again in a different way with a life companion, and that is part of living a fulfilling life as well, if it happens. And even that is not sure. All my past relationships have only been partially fulfilling because I was not able to be met at my level of awareness and values. Stefania has met me and I have met her at the levels that we truly are at in intelligence, awareness and values.

So at the latter part of my life I have for a few years anyway found my true companion, and now I know that true love exists through my own direct experiences with Stefania.

In pain now I remember the positives that have been real in my mixed life. I helped a lot of people heal and relate realistically with consciousness. I am glad of that. My work there was more than just professional. I believe in most of these people who have done significant work with me. They sometimes tell me how they remember me also.

I have created dreamwork books and an approach. I have contributed value to the world, struggling hard at times to do so.

I don’t live in a beautiful place. I did not establish myself early as a leading psychotherapist in Berkeley, California. In fact I gave that all up to move to Europe and start over at age 56. A foolhardy move, certainly. Had I stayed where hundreds knew me or about me, I would have had assured income and a nice place to live out my days. Yet it was not to be.

Is this choicemaking a pain for me?

Not really, it seems, because I have gained so much in doing trainings in Europe and living here more than 20 years now. I have trained and befriended some really appreciative people over here in Europe. Yet I did not develop security, as one might normally do to counter the difficulties and challenges of old age, now including cancer.

Yet it seems like I get much better social service and health support over here in the Netherlands than I would possibly get in California, but I am not knowledgeable enough to compare.

This is my life now, and I must live and die with it, it seems.

There is no ‘California, here I come now.’

Let’s just say I have to handle my pain body and help Stefania with it also. She helps me with mine, like just now calling to tell me nicely to get outside and take a walk for the fresh air. That’s adding positive to my day!

Today, despite some pain I can create another piece of good, realistic, informed writing.

My task as a writer is to develop perspective on life and its issues.

Hopefully this is why you are reading this report or book, so as to gain greater perspective for dealing with life’s issues, such as pain here, in your own existence.

I do feel better right now at the end of this writing, but I still feel warned by the symptoms I have to watch out and keep going, even expediting.

A date to get married at city hall disappeared today. It was for two weeks earlier than the 19 October because we were searching for an even earlier date, like as soon as possible. But the law says we have to petition the Justice Department and that takes a specialist to say I am in danger of dying soon because of my tumor and so need to marry as soon as possible. So we keep pressing for it but the obstacles like this just add to the sadness I feel. And Stefania is trying also.

The weaker you get the stronger you have to be.

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