I’ve been experiencing some back pain lately. And by lately, I mean the last few years. I’ve learned for the first time what “chronic” means. It’s not all the time, but flares up often. When I do something, suddenly—boom! Intense back pain that takes a month to calm down. And so I’ve been doing some physical therapy and going to the chiropractor and all of the things… slightly half-assed. I’m not Doing Nothing about it, which is what I thought I was doing before. Except I wasn’t really Doing Nothing, I was ignoring it, which is far from Doing Nothing, it’s an active denial and suppression of the root causes.
So now I’ve been checking in to see if I have TMS (Tension Myositis Syndrome). Most injuries take a few months to heal… if the pain goes beyond that it is likely caused by the brain creating pain sensations from perceived threats of stimulus… but there is no muscle injury, no bone broken… Nothing is Wrong.
Nothing is Wrong. And yet the brain creates pain to protect the body (it thinks) from perceived threats (certain body movements). I need to keep reminding my brain, Nothing is Wrong. There might be a lot of sensation, but Nothing is Wrong.
And my back pain is definitely healing. Partly a placebo effect of repeating a mantra of Nothing is Wrong… my brain and body (they are not two different things) start to believe it. And partly, or even mostly, it’s because it’s the truth. There is Nothing Wrong. Ever.
I feel like this is a key to all of our pain and anxiety and suffering. Back pain, or a break-up, or struggles with money. We constantly think something is wrong, or it shouldn’t be this way, or its corollary, it (or they, or I) should be X. If we were to truly understand that Nothing is Wrong, we could relax the fear, anxiety, stress, and perhaps enjoy things as they are, even when there is a lot of sensation. Enjoying them makes them better and already something shifts in our life. Some things won’t be so easily enjoyable, and that’s ok too. We can enjoy the not enjoying because it’s amazing, truly amazing, how we can feel intense disagreeable sensations. We get to re-safe ourselves in the midst of a lot of emotion and even physical pain. They will pass, guaranteed. We can hold ourselves, without judgement, just being with. We can love ourselves in it. Nothing is Wrong, truly, if we love ourselves fully.
Nothing is Wrong asks us to start to imagine the place Rumi alluded to in his poem:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.
-Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks in The Essential Rumi
A place where literally, Nothing is Wrong.
And how do we get there? We remind ourselves, we already live in this field. The field is love. Our soul can just lie down in it anytime. Feel the fullness of the field of Nothing is Wrong. Feel the fullness of the field of Nothing is Correct. One or the other, each, other, each other doesn’t make any sense. Actually, Nothing makes sense. In love, it doesn’t need to.
Follow up: Nothing is Wrong – The Sequel