Bring Me Your Pain



Adalai licking taco eyes I sit beside a sunny window with a cool autumn breeze coming through a very weathered torn screen, I glance over to my hairless girl Dalai Lama who is busy attending to our old dog Taco who at the moment is fighting a bi-lateral eye infection.     I watch Dalai dutifully lick the morning gunk out of her friend’s eye as her own  body shakes and shivers.  I look on in fascination as Dal squints her eyes in what I anthropomorphize is a sign of detest.

So why exactly does this pup insist on licking the wounds of her hairless buddy?  What is that within us that transcends our own fear or distaste and allows us to help someone in need?  As the thought of helping our fellow man dances in my head I am reminded of Rod Sterling’s 1972 episode of Night Gallery, where Richard Thomas plays the son of a sin eater.  Based on a fabled welsh custom, a sin eater was a man that you could hire at the time of a loved one’s death to absolve — or rather absorb — all of the sins of the deceased through a ritualistic eating of bread (funeral biscuit) passed over or actually placed upon the chest of the corpse.  In the Night Gallery story, Richard Thomas plays a son who is tricked by his mother into eating a banquet of fine food in order to cleanse his own father who had been the town’s premiere sin eater during the plague.

There are actually many cultures and customs around the world and throughout time that have similar rituals which involve not only spiritual healing but physical magic as well.  It’s not so farfetched an idea when we look at our own customs that have propagated into contemporary mainstream practice.  I can still remember the Italian family feast after a three day whaling wake of my grandfather.  Though the fact that I was nursing an 18 month old toddler three feet from Grandpa’s open casket was probably more of a shock to my devout and distant family members who no doubt considered my public nursing an exhibition of sin eating.

From the promise of a sinless sole to the hope of physical healing by way of the litany of lucrative snake oil on the market today, we seem to be sold under the promise of salvation and the belief that someone can take away our pain.

The belief becomes deeply rooted when we find our self in a moment of bliss after a therapeutic massage, reiki session or pranic healing and are likely to conclude that the transfer of energy can and does occur between two sentient beings.  And while it may be that the client leaves feeling lighter than air, what about the road dust collected upon the medium of the miracle remedial?

Does Dalai believe she risks infection?  And if we believe in the perilless place we choose to put our self, like the poor reluctant son of the sin eater, do we still rise to the occasion and <spoiler> through bone chilling screams recite the prayers and choke down the food?

The capacity for compassion and self-sacrifice despite our own fears of taking on another person’s pain and suffering was also the plot of another sci-fi episode that seems forever burned into my hypothalmas TV database.  The original Trek episode, The Empath, featured a cruel experiment that was set up to test if a civilization of empathic healers were worthy of having their planet spared from destruction.  (So cool that you can actually watch these classics on-line however I should warn that the violence and specifically one of the torture scenes therein was banned in some countries on the first airing back in 1968.)

What I can recall from my first viewing are the deep eyes of Kathryn Hays who played the alien empath Gem.   Even before I had words or an understanding to describe the transfer of healing energy, I knew that my own body could feel even subtle vibrations from other people or places.

Of course it is the NOT SO SUBTLE vibrations that still rock my being which makes me wonder if my own body continues to serve as a lightening rod.  However, I suspect that my highly porous cellular membranes actually stockpile all of the toxic waste that I encounter rather than transmute the resulting inert energy back into the cosmos.

Along my path I spent years trying to learn how to build barricades around my aurora, or create windows for energy to flow through my being instead of becoming trapped like tacky strips against my sinew.  I burned sage smudges, washed my hands in sea salt, and carried a cadra of crystals to protect me from what felt like energy vampires lurking in the shadows.  But all of my mystical efforts were of course in vain in as much as I am no more able to change my nature as a sea sponge can change her digestive system.  By design, it would seem the sponge serves as an integral part of a much larger ecosystem and her actions help maintain the delicate balance needed to sustain not only her life but that of the coral reef as an entity.

Maybe because my grandmother read me Nurse Nancy before I went to bed when I slept on the pull out sofa in the sun parlor of her home,  I grew up with a notion that I was by name a healer.  Back in the day, our family pet was a neurotic Siamese cat that would claw and scratch at even family members with no warning or provocation.  Yet when Simon became ill with a large infected head wound, I was the only one who could get close to the terrified creature to provide first aid.  I remember using hot compresses to draw the infection out and holding my breath as the smell of the pus and blood was vile.  Yet, like Miss Dalai this morning, though my own body shaked and quivered, there was no question that I was going to help in her healing.  After all, it was what Nurse Nancy would have done.

Even though these days I can barely be still with my own body, there remains something that I have to offer other sentient beings.  One of my fellow seekers recently remarked “I invite people to bring me their pain,” and though my first thought was WHY would you ever want to do that!!!  I realized in my own way bidden or unbidden I do the same … and like the sea sponge I  offer all to “…bring your burning skin to my river once again”.

Leave a Reply