The Healing Power of Paradox
Part 1: Acceptance
As I sit with my beautiful, sick, sleeping child’s head in my lap, I’m struck by the obvious: we all want our pain to go away.
It’s as natural and universal as anything we experience in these animal bodies that are surely as much what we are as anything else.
The paradox here is also obvious and is the second of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: our desire for the world to be other than it is causes us to suffer more. At a body level, this means that when we tighten against pain—usually unconsciously—it almost always intensifies our pain. To be free from pain, we must start by accepting it; our resistance to reality (in Goenka’s deep rumble, “the world as it is… not as you would like it to be…”) prevents us from feeling free and at ease, both physically and emotionally. It locks our pain in place as we freeze around it.
This truth is the reason a practice like vipassana meditation, which focuses on cultivating a non-judging awareness, tends to improve physical pain conditions, even though that’s not the primary purpose of the practice.
I experienced this dramatically in my first 10-day vipassana sit. During the first four days of the retreat, all my usual physical aches and pains intensified, along with a deep dive into emotional distress—triggered partly by the woman seated behind me in the hall, who sniffed incessantly for hours at a time in a way that sucked me straight through my own family trauma into the total indifference of the world to the suffering of its creatures. I stuck to my resolve to be with the sensations—and also with the emotions and the narratives that arose along with them—without judgment. To welcome it all. As Tara Brach puts it, “this, too, belongs.”
What happened next surprised me: as I stayed with the sensations, they began to shift. Really pinpointing the central point of any sensation of tension or discomfort and welcoming it without judgment almost always led to a sudden, brief, twitch-like contraction, followed by a feeling of ease, warmth, and increased energy flow in that area. I could actually feel the acupoints and meridians in my body release and begin to pulse, one by one, following the movement of my non-judging mind.
The natural tendency is of course to grasp at the new, more pleasant sensation. But here the paradox catches us at our machinations: as we begin to anticipate the release, suddenly the process no longer works. Disappointment. And there we are, forced to confront our grasping and the way it distorts our experience… but also returns us to the necessity of non-judgment. There’s no fooling the master healer that is paradox.
As I’ve continued to explore this process over the years, I’ve discovered ever greater depth and nuance. Among other observations, this:
The power of deep and complete acceptance, at least within the realm of the body and its emotions, is linked to the power of command. Put more simply, as I listen better to my body, it listens better to me. The intelligence of surrender begets freedom to choose, in a way that no amount of grasping can do, however clever, committed or well intentioned.
Further, I realized that awareness is inherently healing. Our physical bodies long for the soothing touch of our compassionate heart-minds, and in many cases, that being-seen is all that’s necessary to create a shift.
These discoveries, while revolutionary for me at the time and very helpful in reducing my pain, only brought me part of the way to where I wanted to be. The practice helped, but it only helped so far.
What I discovered next took me much further down a healing path, and I’m excited to tell you more about it in my next post!