Is Chronic Pain the Ultimate Mindfulness trip?

Enforced presentism is a term coined by anthropologist Jane Guyer during the pandemic to discuss the experience of being dislocated from linear time, yet stuck in the present moment without recourse to imagine a future or romanticise the past. Events that disrupt our sense of justice, fairness, and hope rupture us from time. While many people identified with this type of rupture for the first time during the uncertainty of quarantine, those with chronic pain and incurable conditions were already intimate with this flavour of agonising temporality.

In moments of extreme pain, physical or psychological, we become stitched to the present moment. It becomes impossible not to be radically present. We can no longer count on a future. And our bright-minded, able-bodied pasts don’t feel like they belong to us anymore. Often the pain is so intense that there is no escape in any direction.

Often these days when I hear someone proselytising the ego-destroying effects of plant medicine/ psychedelics/ meditation, I give a weary sigh.  More and more I want to offer that most people don’t get the privilege of ordering their initiation off the menu.  Many people don’t have to pay hundreds of pounds to go on a boutique silent meditation retreat. Mindfulness isn’t some sterile, packaged experience of transcendence, or Costa Rican “shamanic plant ceremony”.

Those with chronic pain or illness, those with psychological anguish and PTSD, experience ego-destroying trips every day when they lie on the floor next to the toilet and try to pass through the needle’s eye of unbearable pain. When they decide to stay alive for just one more minute.

I think chronic pain (psychological and physical) stitches us to the white-hot present moment in a way that radically exceeds our ideas of good or bad medicine. There is no boat to bring you through the dark ocean of your anguished body…but your body itself. Storm and vessel are the same. Present and future drop away from that agonising 1/8th of a second that is the human instant.

People over many years of experiencing a spectrum of symptoms and physical break downs, I’ve come to believe that pain- even very intense pain - is manageable if you know it will end. But for those with incurable or terminal conditions, you don’t know if it will end. Instead, chronic pain becomes the uncanny syntax of a new grammar. One without nouns or pronouns. One without selves. It’s a language of verb, verb, verb. Now, now, now. You can only bear it one moment at a time. To project forward into a future of uncertainty is impossible.

I do think medication and non pharmacological treatments are helpful tools. Absolutely. But people not in chronic pain will never come close to the sheer drop-off, the cliff dive, of extended physical (and mental) illness that pain gives them. Pain can be the greatest mindfulness teacher, it is not a human being or sacred text or therapeutic model. It is the nausea, the tides of which have repeatedly washed away any contours of self that we thought were stable. The greatest psychedelic and mindfullness trips happen totally sober, stitched by the needle of own ailing bodies into the present moment again and again without recourse to memory or fantasy.

I want to offer you that not all people need to order our trauma, our psychedelic initiation, our “medicine” or mindfulness, off a bespoke menu. Many people are doing the work with their own glitchy bodies and immune systems. To live in your body right now in this deranged world, is psychedelic. To survive, moment to moment, in a sea of chronic pain, is a feral and hard meditation practice I wouldn’t willingly wish on anyone but is the embodied reality of your life. You who take the trips you don’t want to go on. The trips that don’t come in a cup or pill or a fancy retreat setting. The seasick-endless trips that take place in your bodies should be shown the recognition and respect that it deserves. This will allow the people in your lives to embrace the consequences of your predicament, and for you the ability to explain and craft a way of living.

If you suffer from a chronic condition and would like any help and advice please don't hesitate to contact us.