Cococ¹: nahuatl [adj] afflicted, tormented, mistreated; stinging, pain, sorrow, grief, affliction; spicy, that burns the mouth.

What is pain? what experiences of pain exist? Three useful concepts to know related to pain are nociceptive, neuropathic, and nociplastic pain.

Nociceptive pain is telling us there’s something wrong in our bodies, neuropathic pain is sort of a malfunctioning in the pain signaling system and nociplastic pain arises from abnormal processing of pain signals without clear evidence of damage or recognised pathology. (Andy Clark, The Experience Machine)

Beyond these useful categories are our experiences of pain. 

Take a moment and breathe deeply. 

Do you feel any physical or emotional pain? Perhaps in a part of your body or maybe triggered by a painful memory? How do you perceive and experience pain?

When I was 9 years old I broke the radius bone of my right arm. My family shared a trampoline with some of the neighbors in the communal garden. I jumped two or three times from it towards the grass. I wanted to fly! I broke my arm on the last jump. Crack! I heard the sound of the bone breaking. I remember the moment vividly, or rather, like a bad dream that lingers through a day.

Fortunately, it was a simple fracture and the bone did not pierce the skin. My mother took me to the nearest clinic, the doctor put on a cast and told me to avoid playing or doing intense physical activity.

Around 4 weeks later, I was happy to see the doctor to have the cast removed, but being the restless child that I was, I ignored half of his instructions and this happened.

Or at least, this is how I pictured his description. The bone was misaligned and started to heal in the wrong position.

In order to fix this, three doctors needed to break the bone again with a manual procedure called closed reduction. They explained it as follows: one doctor would pull my hand in one direction, a second doctor would pull my upper arm in the opposite direction and a third doctor would break the bone again and put it in the right position. The doctors offered local anesthesia, but I refused to take it, as I was afraid of injections. Unwise.

While the three doctors adjusted the bone, the volume of pain rose to a level that I have never felt before. I think I nearly fainted. To that point, it was the most painful experience of my life and I still consider it one of the most painful. After they finished, the doctor put another cast and a month or so later I was fully healed. So, I was perhaps around 2 months with a cast and I had to learn how to write with my left hand, my handwriting was truly awful. In retrospective, this was also a lesson about patience.

Then, when I was 13 or 14 years old, I broke my left arm while training roller hockey at school. During the recovery time, I made the same mistakes of playing, jumping, and running while having a cast. The doctors had to do the same manual procedure of breaking my left arm, again. This time I accepted the anesthesia. Gerne.

So that’s two broken arms, times two.

At the age of 34, I broke my left arm again, this time due to a distraction. I was walking down a random street in Mexico City and I fell down by accident. This time I learned my lesson 🙂

Pain can be a useful teacher.

“Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread.” (Dogen, Genjo-koan)

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1. Diccionario de la lengua Nahuatl o Mexicana, Remi Simeon

My timer marks 20 minutes and rain starts falling. Temperature is at a pleasant 20° Celsius (68° F).

There are many thoughts that come to mind when I direct my attention to Running and Rain. Atl, the nahuatl word for water. I remember a walk with Tania, many years ago, where she invited me to notice the beauty of walking in the rain without having to worry about anything, embracing the rain and moment. The acronym RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) that I first learned from Tara Brach, arises in mindbody, too.

I notice the sound of rain and thunder as I run through a park full of tall standing and present trees. I become interested in the trees and search their names when I arrive home: Maples, Larch, Honey locust, Tuliptree, Ginko, Larch, Turkish Hazelnut and Silver Birch.

The beautiful sound of multiplicity of raindrops falling on endless leaves while birds sing their harmonious and soothing songs. I see a blackbird taking a bath in a fresh mini pond and a child at a distance jumping into a puddle of water. I loved to do that as a kid!

A memory of two weeks ago comes to mind, the Vollmond Ultramarathon I ran next to Tegeler See and the Havel, a lake and a river. The memory instantly brings my mind to a place of peace and ease.

Rain has been absent in Berlin for more than a month and I’m grateful for rain today.

As a child and as a teenager (and even as an adult) I sometimes wake up at night, look at the frames on the walls of my room and the images in the frames seem to change to different images.

Hypnopompia and hypnagogia are interesting terms in this context. But I won’t self diagnose.

This is a sketch of my childhood room, and the frames where the pictures changed.

Have you explored your dreams?

What happens when you inspect both intellectually and experientially the question: who am I?

I found this instruction very insightful: “Stop trying to understand all the whys and wherefores, they are only infinite stories” – Lama Lena (Yeshe Kaytup)

🙂

La vela que ilumina,
un rayo de luz emana,
¿a quién apunta?

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The candle that shines,
a beam of light emanates,
to whom does it point?

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Die Kerze, die leuchtet,
strahlt einen Lichtstrahl aus,
auf wen zeigt er?