fear and labor.

fear - tension - pain - fear - tension - pain - fear - tension - pain - fear - tension - pain - fear - tension - pain - fear - tension - pain - fear - tension - pain

i was walking out of the hospital behind a woman and two men. the woman walked slower and slower. the men turned around and looked at her, and she stopped. in a high choky voice she said, "it's too hard to just walk out!" and i could see her face was wet. i was walking past as the men went back to her, and she said with a weird terror in her voice, "it's like i'm leaving something behind here!" and the men said soothingly, "you're not, you're not."

in birth we have the fear-tension-pain cycle. stop me if you've heard me say this too many times in the last couple days. fear of pain: your whole body clenches against it. then you feel the pain.

how can we not be afraid?





in birth, we be not afraid because we are obliged to welcome the labor, the process. we are obliged because otherwise we could not survive it, except, of course, by high-tech means of escape from consciousness. if we have those, we can be afraid, and it doesn't really matter, that we know of: it seems normal.

but when we have no short-cuts across the process, we are forced to learn to be not afraid, and we find that pain is not the same as suffering.

pain is not the same as suffering.
one of the things about labor is that, when it's at its most intense, you can look in a woman's face and see the certainty that she is going to die. and if you have labored yourself, you might remember it, on a very primal level, the struggle to radically, radically let go, to recklessly allow the process to seize you and take you over and tear you asunder, you have to let go of even the personal feeling of a body. you aren't actually torn asunder, of course; but you are ready to be...





you escape suffering by transforming it. pain there may be, but it isn't the issue. letting go and opening up is the issue. remember, i'm talking about birth, here, and i am referencing a very practical, working activity: the hard labor of letting go and opening up.

it could be a metaphor for so many things we labor through: trauma. bereavement. disfigurement. grief. stigma. loss. subliminally, we cling to the idea that something must be gained, that when one door closes, another opens, and so on. but that's a hard yoga to put on somebody who's already suffering, here and now.





it's a harsh and dreadful thing to say, be not afraid.
how did jesus ever get away with it?

i think we have to fill that admonition, that prescription, with all the love it will hold: "good measure, pressed down, flowing over," as they say. we have to swing on hard-core full of love, to say that to someone. it's legitimate to say it, theoretically, because in fact one must be not afraid, in order to survive the hard labor and get to the next part. and we trust that the next part will be good, because we have no alternative. we certainly trust it can't be much worse.

so we expect that radiation will cure the cancer, and grieving will make us kinder people, and being assaulted has somehow made us braver, and after death there's peace, and one set of abilities is replaced by another, and offering up our physical pain will free ten souls from purgatory, and so on. our belief makes us be not afraid. our spirits stop twisting and writhing away from the pain. the pain is still there. but it's not all there is.





did the lady leave the hospital? she went to her car and they drove her home. did she leave something behind at the hospital? i guess so; you could hear the fear in her voice as she said it, but that's not the end of the story; there's always more, there has to be. and that's my prayer for today: transcend fear, transform pain, step forward. be not afraid. love hard. there's always more.