a child coping with pain

Cysts grew in my large intestine. I have no idea when this began, but certainly by the age of seven or eight, I started to experience pain after eating. It was often intense and...eating being something that I did every day...the pain became my constant companion.

I would have surgery when I was 12 to remove the cysts, but the experience of five years of pain taught me about coping...in a way that can only be described as a mercy or even...a grace.

I am in bed and in pain and I can hear the clock ticking or my brother breathing. I long to sleep, but I cannot. I cannot sleep simply because I am tired. I must wait until I am exhausted, and that may require another three hours.

And this is how I began to have my open-eye experiences and my closed-eye experiences. 

The knob on the drawer...the bed post...the shoe in the corner. It did not matter. I only had to stare at something. The pain moved in slow waves from dull to agony to dull, but I had to be apart from it. I had to be detached. And staring turned into mist and I felt motion. It was motion that can only be described as inward. It was towards the bed post...between the wood grain...into the tiniest atoms...and finally into the tiny infinity of inner space. And I could stay there and let the hours pass in a moment. This was my open-eye experience.

At other times (I was usually sitting up), I was able to close my eyes and enter a similar state. The subtle difference here...and I will never forget it...was an experience of moving out. Out and out and out...into a large infinity...until I could again pass the hours easily and find the relief of sleep.

And then one day...

I was waiting for the tub to fill...sitting on the sink and staring into the mirror. I was not in pain at that moment, but my habit of staring and entering a special state was well-practiced by then and happened very easily. What I experienced was neither an inward nor an outward movement. At the moment of detachment, I experienced that reflection in the mirror.

I will never forget it and I can only say that there was a flip. The boy in the mirror was someone else. And who was "I"?  I was a being that loved that boy. I loved every nuance of his lips and eyebrows and hair. I loved him as an artist loves what he is painting...no matter what it is. And...I had a vocabulary and a depth and I was able to express my love in words that were completely beyond the abilities of that boy. 

And then it ended...easily and naturally...the boy came back and took a bath. But "he" never forgot.

I believe it was the soul staring into the mirror that day.