Distinction: A Main Component of Health
When something becomes more clearly defined it signifies health. I came to this idea while reading “My Grandmother’s Hands.” The author mentions that he prefers clean pain over dirty pain and describes the differences between the two. Dirty pain is that deeper suffering that feels like immovable cement or molasses in the body. Clean pain is the type of pain that feels less intense and more manageable. I view the body differently than the author and think that specifying sensations as dirty or clean exaggerates the intensity of the experience and creates a more extreme polarity. Pain will occur more often and more intensely if we hold a root belief as the author suggests.
When I feel musculature on different people, some of it seems very distinct and supple, while some of it is adhesed and rigid. The tone of muscle combined with the quality of boundaries among tissue seems to define how much or what type of pain someone carries. The way we experience ourselves is highly correlated to these qualities. Distinction and relaxed engagement of tissue create a body that is at times pain-free, occasionally in pain, and has space for bursts of intensity. That is health. Your thoughts, feelings, and energies can also become distinct. Likely, over a lifetime, if you continue picking circumstances that more appropriately nourish you, everything becomes more and more distinct. That’s how dirty pain dissipates. That thing that isn’t apparent until it’s raw to the bone, becomes obvious sooner and can potentially go away altogether. For example, my mind and body do less extreme things when I choose to connect with a friend instead of playing a competitive game night. Competition kicks up my ambivalence. The next day my mind and body will do more extreme or pleasant things depending on what I did with my time and energy the night before. Hopefully, we end up making different choices contextually and existentially as time goes on because we slowly learn what serves us. Otherwise, life hurts consistently.
