In 1989, I was a 31-year-old wife, mother and part-time singer/actress, living a seemingly normal life. One day, out of the blue, I began experiencing excruciating shooting, burning pain in the side of my face. Although this appeared to be random with no explanation (no recent dental work, traumatic accident or brain tumor), I was going through a very distressing time in my life and the entrapment within terrible pain was an apt metaphor for the helplessness I was feeling in my outer circumstances.
Eventually, I was with diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia, a chronic pain disorder that involves sudden attacks of severe facial pain. I began exploring everything conventional medicine could offer to ameliorate this condition, but each time was returned yet again into the grips of pain. Ultimately, it occurred to me that this was a mystery only I could solve – and so began my personal and then professional journey into the transformational healing arts, for myself, and for others.
Over these past thirty-some years, my life has been one of gradual expansion and thriving on so many levels – however, severe physical pain has continued to be a companion that I am regularly forced to respect.
While we all might wish pain would cease to exist, for now it seems to remain an inevitable part of the human journey – and may even become an unexpected pathway into a more expansive state of being. I share with you an experience where pain became my catalyst for transfiguration and new freedom.
A New Pain Episode, A New Challenge
It was 2023, and I had experienced a few challenging months. The neuralgia had suddenly ramped up – and up and up – shortly after the New Year. I resisted taking drugs for a while, but after many difficult nights of constantly interrupted sleep and days where I could barely eat or talk without triggering the knifing pain, I reluctantly gave in.
Starting up with the anti-convulsant drugs prescribed for the pain is a slippery slope. They have become less effective over the years, and the rebound of pain as the medication wears off is even more heightened. Going on the drugs means a gradual ramping up in dosage over weeks or months before the episode finally starts to wane. Only then can I slowly decrease the dosage over some weeks. Once the pain is less frequent and tolerable, they can finally be stopped completely.
When this new episode started, I had recently gone through that cycle, and was blessedly off the drugs, with much less daily pain. There had, however, been another very disturbing occurrence several times over the past months: sudden severe chest/shoulder/neck pain, which had sent me to the Emergency Room three separate times. Mysteriously, no abnormality was ever found, so I was sent home with an apologetic shrug. Over the next few weeks, the pain would slowly disappear.
It had been a couple of months since my last trip to the hospital. Throughout this period I remained hyper-aware of my whole body, attuned to whatever processes were taking place within it. Although the past few months had been difficult, part of me was looking to this as some kind of physiological transfiguration: a revolution or sea change at the most basic level of my cellular structure. And now it seemed as though a corner had been turned, and I was surfacing into a more stable physical experience.
Until one night.
During the evening, unprovoked, the trigeminal pain in my face had become slightly re-activated – but I went to bed without any great trepidation. Although my mind was alerted to the sudden upsurge, I consciously chose not to trigger any alarms and instead remain neutral to the sensations.
I settled myself into bed and closed my eyes, readying to sleep. I was vaguely aware of my husband, Dennis, coming out of the bathroom and climbing into his side of the bed. Just another normal, perfectly fine, night.
Until… the tingling began around my left jaw. I registered the awareness, still unperturbed, still somewhat distanced.
But then the stabbing pain suddenly, violently escalated up… the lightning jabs knifing across my cheek, the tensed explosions of pain like fireworks shooting not just across the left side of my face but throughout my entire body – which began writhing in full-on agony.
Gone was my distant neutrality: I was fully immersed into excruciating, unspeakable pain. Automatically I began opening my mouth to pant in the attempt to ease, to interrupt, to somehow survive the agony as animal-like sounds were pushed out of me – and then, when I felt I could take no more, suddenly everything instantly disappeared. Gone. Zero.
Still reeling from the emotional aftershock but giddy with relief, I resettled. A few minutes later, maybe one, maybe five, the telltale tingling once again began. The cycle: building, shooting, stabbing, writhing, gasping, panting, sounding, and then disappearing once again. Total absence of pain, total relief and rest. Until it started up, all over again.
For hours it continued.
Aware that my sounds were likely disturbing Dennis and finally unable to stay in bed any longer, I stood up to take myself somewhere private for whatever would happen next. Standing up, though, triggered the most extreme, blinding pain not just in the left side of my face, but into my eyes, my head, the whole front of my face, almost dropping me to my knees. I stood with tears pouring from my eyes and snot from my nose, alternately holding my breath and then puffing it out of my mouth, making death-rattle-like sounds as the pain absorbed every single molecule of my experience, consuming all of me.
And then, again, gone.
Shakily I grabbed my bathrobe, found my slippers, and made my way downstairs to my office and my meditation chair. Whatever this process was, there was no escaping it: no bypass, just its inevitable progression into the unknown. And indeed, all too soon, the familiar wave began to build and build and shatter me into fragments yet again.
As I continued to go through the endless repetition of these cycles, I realized that I was dying. Literally. Or maybe just figuratively, it didn’t really make a difference. Although the cycles of agony harkened to the contractions of giving birth, this was the blazing triumph of death’s infernal fire having its complete way with me. The annihilation of any sense of security or selfhood, within this physical body. The me I related to as Susan was being consumed.
Burning within the flames, I lived my death. Its face was my face. Fear and pain meshed absolutely, inexorably, no escape. Again and again the panting, the noises, the writhing as the death process continued. There was no sense of time, of space, of anything other than the endless cycles stripping me apart in torment.
But then somewhere, somehow, a shard of consciousness began to come forward. As the tides of fear would arise – of the pain, of the death – I began to perceive a tiny glimmer of something else. Of some kind of junction. A different possibility. A choice-point began coalescing into awareness.
Within the burning ravages of my experience, two paths came into view. There was the familiar descent into horrified fear and eternal helplessness – or, by a slight turn, the call of a different possibility, an alternate choice. To choose to know, even within this pain, the presence of light. Ephemeral, I felt the offering opening to me. One tiny instant at a time, I disengaged from fear within this death process, and turned toward light. Toward love. Bit by bit, every single speck, every atom and molecule of my experience, no matter how tormented, I deliberately delivered in dedication to light.
And so, still within the flames, I made this choice. Again and again. As the cycles of pain continued unrelenting, slowly my spirit began to rise beyond the pain, the fear, the sense of victimhood – beyond anything that could separate the knowing of my self as love and light. I saw how often in my past I had felt powerless, felt that things had been done ‘to’ me, felt fear and helplessness in the face of what seemed to be outside forces or influences, people, situations, experiences even within my own body: anything I had perceived as being imposed upon me, or beyond my control.
As I kept choosing light, kept choosing love, gradually all the history of abdication began to dissolve. To die, truly. Never had anything been done ‘to’ me. I was in full agreement with all the scenes and participants upon the stage of my entire life, lovingly enacted for my own higher purposes and evolution.
I was so much more than just this body! I felt my Beingness as vast, powerful – even as my physical self continued to be eaten away by pain and physical suffering. There was nothing anyone or anything could do to the true me that wasn’t completely within the fullness of my immense totality. I had a hand in every beautifully choreographed moment of my life in order to realize, to the marrow of my experience, that what I am is light; is love.
Staring fear in the face, staring death in the face, staring unspeakable pain in the face – and choosing to include it all in light, in love. Choosing not just once and having it be over, but choosing, with each cycle of pain, again and again and again and again and again… each new NOW moment requiring the conscious choice, requiring the conscious reaching, walking through the doorway into light, into love. No longer needing a happy ending, because there is no ending, just the ongoing choice, ever available, ever fresh, ever there, of light. Of love.
And so – the dying of fear, of victimhood, regret, resentment, eventually ran its course into the conscious birthing of a larger space felt as infinite light and a merging oneness of love. The expansion of what became a greater consciousness – of my Self – began to fully birth. The world no longer held any threats -everything in the world was within this light, was included in love.
What could ever harm me? Kill the body, no problem! Because I am not this body, this personality, this (her)story of me. I am light. I am love. All I know, all I experience, all I see, I choose to know within light, within love.
Finally, finally, in the early hours of dawn, I went back to bed. I lay there as the pain continued its cycles, although needing slightly less writhing, slightly less panting, before it would subside.
But then the tension in my chest, that scary pain that kept sending me to the emergency room, started a faint gathering. As my awareness registered the new sensations, I could feel the fear tickling up in me.
I know myself as light. I know myself as love. Focused on my chest now, I again chose to know light. To choose light over fear, love over panic. If this is my cross-over, fine. If this is my body’s transition, ok. It’s only a body and I am far more than just this body.
Unlike previous episodes, the chest tension must not have continued because suddenly it was 9:30 in the morning and I was waking up. Clearly, I had finally fallen asleep, was able to get some rest. Dennis was up, tiptoeing around. “I wanted to let you sleep. Did you have a lot of pain last night?” he innocently asked.
I closed my eyes. “Yes. I went through quite the process.”
Although physically wrung out, it was ok to get up. I ran a hot bath, removed my night clothes, gingerly stepped in. My body, which over the past months had become so thin, looked pale and delicate under the water. Ethereal. New. The nerves in my face were calm. My chest still felt slightly anxious, but holding stability. I know myself as light, I know myself as love. Right now. And now. And now. And now.
It seemed I had transited the dark night and emerged. The death had taken place, the transfiguration passed through. No longer just a parable, I had walked through the fire with total conscious immersion – and out of the ashes, was now reborn. This new be-coming completely unknown, a mystery – to be revealed as each new NOW moment brought the choice, once again. Walk through the door into light. Into love. Know myself as Light, as Love. This is who I AM.
The Self who dwells in the body
Is inviolable, forever.
Birthless, primordial,
It does not die when the body dies.
In the night of all beings, the wise man
Sees only the radiance of the Self.
(Bhagavad Gita, Stephen Mitchell translation)