Battling Pain via Sensory Awareness

Once upon a time, I was a professional flutist. I still play and perform some, though the neuropathy pain in my hands and fingers prevent me from touching my flute for more than about thirty minutes in a given day [and I cannot do anything else with my hands that day because the burn becomes so excruciating that I can’t think or control my emotions]. At any rate, I became a lifetime member of the National Flute Association years ago and still receive their quarterly magazine. In the Winter 2020 issue of The Flutist Quarterly, I was astonished to find an article referring to pain control techniques from Darlene Cohen, a Zen master who assisted the terminally ill in managing pain.

The article is called “Mind Rich and Body Poor: Sensory Awareness for Flutists” by Andree Martin. The tag line says: “Learning how to respond to your surroundings with increased tactile awareness affects your playing ease and facility. A flute and Body Mapping teacher describes how.”

Flute Practice Practices

As I started reading the article, I almost flipped past it because the gist of it was the story of how this flute teacher realized that she was holding her flute much too tight. For non-musicians . . . the tighter you cling to your instrument, the more tense all your fingers are which significantly limits you from developing the serious finger speed needed to play flute at a high skill level. In my case, holding the flute too tight is like pressing my fingertips into a hot frying pan thanks to the chemo-induced neuropathy that pretty much governs every aspect of my life now.

Luckily, I had excellent training in college and already play with the least pressure necessary in order to achieve maximum speed on the zillions of quick runs and trills that characterize high-level flute music. When I was asked to play a concert after having cancer and getting chemo-induced neuropathy, I realized instantly how lucky I was to already have a feather-light grip on the instrument. I never could have done a concert, or relearned how to play the flute with neuropathy, if I used anything but the lightest of pressure in my fingers.

So, as I’m reading this article that starts out with a long intro on hand tension/grip, I’m thinking that it’s not particularly relevant for me and I’m going to skip to the next article. As I skimmed through the article, I noticed a reference to a Zen master I’ve read about in the past for pain management techniques, and suddenly I was reading the article much more intently to find out how this flute teacher thought to apply a pain management technique to release finger tension and stage fright.

Reducing Pain as an Element of Your Consciousness

The late Zen teacher Darlene Cohen was dedicated to helping the terminally ill deal with pain. She wrote about her own experiences with chronic pain in a 2002 “Tricycle” article called “The Practice of Nonpreference.”

“Overwhelmed by the power of pain,” she wrote, “I could do little else but surrender to the pure physicality of my existence. If, at any given moment, I was aware of ten different aspects of the present moment—say, the hum of the air conditioner, the thought of the laundry I had to do, my glasses sliding down my nose, and throbbing pain in my hips—that’s too much pain: it’s one object of awareness out of ten. But if, at that moment, I could become aware of a hundred aspects of the present moment—not only the ten things I noticed before but also more subtle aspects, like the shadow of the lamp against the wall, the brush of my hair against my ear, the pull of my clothes against my skin—then my pain was one among a hundred objects of consciousness, and it became a pain I could live with.”

How to Practice Expanding Awareness to Mediate Pain

The article author talks about using expanded awareness to overcome stage fright, but the questions she asks in the article are great ones to meditate on to overcome pain . . . “Can you expand your awareness right now? What do you notice? Your sit bones on the chair? The feeling of your feet on the floor? Your glasses resting on your nose, or your ribs moving as you breathe? Practice expanding awareness in every moment will allow it to happen naturally.”