Thorn

“Three different times I begged the Creator to take the thorn in my flesh away.  Each time they said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of the Creator can work through me. That is why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for my life. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 12

An accumulation of research is expanding our understanding of the pleasure pain paradoxes of the body/mind/brain. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for motivating us to seek out pleasure and avoid pain is the key physiological driver of this paradox.  When we hit on something pleasurable, food, sex, drugs, praise, we are bathed in a high of good feelings, ease, and happiness.  We naturally want more of this and will go after these good feelings with the behaviors that stimulate us in these ways. The problem with this system of pleasure seeking, though, is that it can backfire.  If times of pleasure are not balanced by times of pain and struggle, we can lose the fluidity to be with ourselves when we are not so positively charged.  It can become intolerable to contain in our bodies feelings of shame, failure, disappointment, and loss. 

If we pursue only the blissful, overtime we can start to need more and more frequent hits to feel the pleasure.  Science has showed that when we get big hits of the dopamine, the body/brain automatically seeks to rebalance the excess dopamine in the body by reducing our capacity to absorb and produce it.   Overtime, our capacity to absorb the hit is weakened.  This is the definition of addiction, and it arises organically out of the dopamine response.  Physiologically, we are not made to go only go in the direction of pleasure. We need some boredom, pain and challenge to balance out our organic systems. Without the rebalancing, we can start to become numb to feeling what in the past gave us pleasure which is why we start to need more dopamine - frequency and intensity - to feel the same level of good feelings. Some who view technology as “dopamine on steroids” fear that technology is exacerbating the addiction response throughout our society. Evidence of the increase in depression and anxiety among especially youth points to this. Withdrawal from the increasing dopamine hits – be it drugs, food, sex, money, or technology -  can make us sick. And require time and support through the withdrawal into balance something our society has not been very good at providing so far. 

But there is another way healthier way in which the body generates necessary dopamine, and this paradoxically is through pain.  Think of the initial pain we can feel when we start to exercise, out of breath, fatigued, muscles aching which in the moment is not pleasant.  However, if we continue to push through and extend exercise sessions little by little and overtime, the pain of exercising blossoms into pleasurable feelings of ease, inner peace, and even joy. The pain of exercise – or grief or working through intellectual and creative challenges including caregiving - prompts the release of dopamine into the system as a restoration.  Researchers have documented that when released in this way – when pain and pleasure mingle – the dopamine does not become addictive. 

Which makes me wonder if Paul’s “Thorn in the flesh” message about the necessity of pain in our lives as a companion to pleasure captured insights about the dopamine pleasure and pain response hundreds of years prior to our knowing scientifically about it?  (Surely the yoga sutras did as the sages wrote extensively about the obstacles of ‘pleasure seeking Rajas and pain avoiding Dvesha) we face on the spiritual path.) 

The ‘thorn’ as described in the Christian poetic is the reminder of all that we cannot control in our lives, all that makes our egos ‘weak’.  In surrendering this control to the Creator, the God, the Spirit beyond our small selves, we find that we are accompanied by God nonetheless in facing these many obstacles.  Because at a deeper level, as contemplatives in the wisdom traditions teach us, God, the creator is interwoven with the deepest parts of the Self beyond the surface level of the ego-consciousness. Without the ‘thorn’, the ego would have a hard time coming to believe that it is not in control of life.  This is the root source of our great suffering, isolation, and despair.  In weakness, persecutions, hardships, we paradoxically can experience how we are held nonetheless in love and transformed into love by the ‘one who loved us into being’.  Then there is not only the pain of facing our weaknesses, failures, and obstacles but the possibility of opening into the pleasure of love that sustains us and co-creates us in every trial and joy.

My prayer of the thorn:

Creator, help me to find you in my fear, my anxiety, all my impossibilities, you transforming me into love…love that can heal, cross bridges, enter into the slim gate of heaven on earth and beyond.