Turning Suffering Inside Out: A Zen Approach for Living with Physical and Emotional Pain

Darlene Cohen

oct 2002 · Shambhala Publications

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This “practical, down-to-earth, and very wise guide to awakening” offers a Zen-based approach to coping with physical, psychological, and spiritual pain (Jack Kornfield)
 
Darlene Cohen discovered the secret to finding happiness in the midst of debilitating pain. She shares her knowledge in her popular workshops and now in this book. Cohen, who has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for eighteen years, was hobbling painfully to her local Zen center one day, when she made a discovery that changed her life: if she focused on the foot that was in the air rather than the one that was hitting the pavement, her stamina increased enormously. It was the beginning of a completely different approach to the crippling pain that had beset her for so long. As she demonstrates here, this approach can be expanded to all types of pain: physical, psychological, and spiritual.

Cohen—a certified massage and movement therapist and Zen teacher—proposes a radically liberating alternative to the usual desperate search for pain relief: paradoxically, she says, release from suffering lies in paying closer attention to it. When we keep pain at bay, we keep pleasure at bay, too. The two are interdependent, and our ability to experience each is totally dependent on our understanding of the other.

“Enrich your life exponentially,” Cohen advises. If your pain is one of the ten things you are aware of, then it constitutes a tenth of your total awareness. Expand your awareness to a hundred things, however, and your pain is only a hundredth of your awareness. With stories, strategies, exercises, and an awareness born of long Zen practice, Cohen shows us how to tap into that enrichment—and how we can lead a satisfying and even joyful life in the very midst of pain.

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Darlene Cohen is a Zen teacher who counsels chronic pain clients and gives arthritis workshops, classes, lectures, and pain seminars in private practice and at medical facilities and meditation centers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Spokane, Washington, and Evanston, Illinois. She is author of Arthritis: Stop Suffering, Start Moving—Everyday Exercises for Body and Mind.