LEARNING TO BREAK FROM SUFFERING

My home town had a woeful description of any male perceived as a whiny loser:  "Poor sufferin' bastard". The adults of my youth were veterans of The Great Depression and World War II. They were all "victims" in the sense of today's culture of entitlement. But they accepted their lots in life and moved on.

Growing up under the tutelage of these masters of denial and perseverance had its downside. The margin of error for failure of any kind was very narrow. That look of unabashed shame in my parents' eyes when I was clumsy, got rejected in team sports or refused to play them was devastating. My older brother, five years ahead of me, excelled in sports and was a natural gangster, in the sense that he was always engaged with his male peers in groups.

The rejection I suffered for being "too sensitive" in my very early years caused me to withdraw. By today's metrics, I might have been assessed for autism or pediatric depression. I spent most waking hours alone. I seldom spoke. The only upside was that I later overcame my significant dyslexia by reading a lot. I also taught myself how to draw. The latter was given the kibosh by my parents when my aptitude for figure drawing and caricature offended their Catholic sensibilities. I eventually surrendered to being their poor sufferin' bastard child. 

Leading up to my university years, my father enlisted me as his apprentice in construction, one of his many talents. It was his way of reconnecting with me after years of mild alienation. He and I gutted and rebuilt a summer cottage on Cape Cod. My internal world remained a rather tortured one even as my outward, or social, personality matured into a fairly gregarious one by the time I was in university. I took friendships and crushes far too seriously, compared to my male peers, but I hid that from them.  

I came out as gay in 1970 at age 20, the year I graduated university. My social life collapsed. Every college friend told me to bugger off. My parents eventually became so violent that I left my family home for the first time with $500 in my bank account and a 1968 VW Beetle. I spent too many winter nights curled up in that car, crying myself to sleep, before I finally pushed through my self-pity with a reservoir of rage.

I loved, laughed and cried a lot as I matured over the following fifteen years. I had my first true romance with James, a composer and musician. I moved from being a failed dental school student to working as a secondary school teacher and then on to getting licensed as a registered nurse. I developed and left two more intense love relationships during that fifteen years. 

When I was 32, I broke off with a younger man to whom I had been sexually addicted for about four years. We had lived together with disastrous results. My grief over that break, like withdrawal from any substance, was as physically agonizing as it was emotionally devastating. I left behind a rent-control apartment I had worked years to obtain. I watched as the object of my addiction blissfully got on with being the promiscuous and popular young gay beauty he had always wished to be. I grappled with a suicidal depression for months. 

I became infected with HIV just after turning 34. My body reacted violently to the virus. I had a disabling flu-like illness which resembled acute hepatitis. As a nurse, I knew what it was. In fact, my medical caregivers knew less about it than I did. They kept insisting it was just a "bug" as it dragged on for weeks. There was nothing to be done in 1984. I knew I had the gay plague. 

All this is to say I have suffered, consciously and deeply, over too many years of my life. "Suffering", as I use it here, refers to the secondary existential agony that accompanies normal anger, sadness or even euphoria. Suffering is that deep part of the human consciousness which cannot simply be medicated back to a functional peace. Its agony surpasses bodily pain. It is nagging and unremitting. 

Some human beings are shaken out of this suffering by trauma or tragedy: The cancer patient in remission, for example, who suddenly becomes unburdened from a lifetime of suffering as a result of facing down death. Others find religion. The most desperate find alcohol, heroin or oxycontin. 

My earlier work with acutely ill schizophrenics, beginning when I was in my mid twenties, had been somewhat helpful in dealing with my own psychic pain. Working to help them to live with their suffering had helped me somewhat with my own. 

Bur knowing I was infected with HIV was a life-changer. The acceptance of that reality broke through my addictive grief over the object of my sexual addiction. And, in breaking through that grief, I was able to work out how sex and affection interplayed in my life. I began to understand what I needed from both, and how those needs were integrated within my life as a whole. That understanding broke huge cracks in the hardened shell of my habitual suffering.

I moved to Provincetown on Cape Cod when I was 36. It was the actualization of a wish I had developed as an adolescent when I first spent happy days and nights there. Shortly after my move, I met a former trapeze artist who introduced me to a Brazilian Buddhist leader in the community. I began chanting Buddhist sutra with the Buddhist group she hosted and tutored. I felt I belonged right from the start.

I had studied Buddhism in university. But this was different. I was suddenly living Buddhism in a place where I had always wanted to live. We were an open group with a daily commitment to our practice. We held open sutra rituals twice a day every day. The group grew. I grew with it. I was an integral part of a dynamic human group for the first time in my life. As I realized this, the habitual suffering within me melted. I learned to free my mind and my awareness of my body from the bonds of deep reflexive agony.

What did I do with this exhilarating sense of emotional freedom and human belonging? I did the Buddhist thing: I left it behind and moved to Manhattan in 1988 to work with dying AIDS patients and to study Buddhism with Japanese leaders. As I now see it, that move was my active declaration of independence from suffering. It was the beginning of a mindful life, based in keeping my consciousness free of suffering and open to whatever joy I can experience while doing good.

My subsequent terminal AIDS prognosis (1995) and cancer diagnosis (2002) did not shake my resolve to remain free from suffering beyond unavoidable physical pain. I was told I would die of AIDS within 6 months. I did not. I was told my cancer treatment could kill me. It did not. Throughout both crises, I remained in the moment. I took each day, each challenge, each torture as it came. I remained fully in those moments with my mind's eye aimed on a joyful future, in life or in death.

Some refer to liberation from suffering as "awakening". The thought of being fully awake when you are still beleaguered by suffering does not appeal. The joyful experience of wakeful consciousness occurs after the chains of suffering are broken either by accident or intentional seeking. The journey away from the chains of habitual suffering varies from person to person. Frankly, few attain true liberation from their suffering in this human experience.

Freedom from suffering is not an esoteric enlightenment. It does not entail becoming superhuman. It is simply a way of life. A way of being and becoming. You can see the awakened around you. Their eyes meet yours with a mutual understanding, often accompanied by a smile of acknowledgment. Once awake, you never fear loneliness. You are at peace with yourself.