{"id":209,"date":"2010-08-25T16:14:50","date_gmt":"2010-08-25T16:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/2010\/08\/25\/toothache-2\/"},"modified":"2010-08-25T16:14:50","modified_gmt":"2010-08-25T16:14:50","slug":"toothache-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/toothache-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Toothache"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/span>It started on our first day at the lake, a little sensitivity on a back molar as I bit into a piece of blueberry pie.\u00a0 I winced, took a sip of coffee, and passed my dessert over to Jack, who was happy to have it.\u00a0 We were thirty minutes from the nearest town, and three hours from my dad, the only dentist I\u2019ve ever had in my life. There wasn\u2019t much I could do, other than try to distract myself.\u00a0 For three days, I managed to feign bliss and good health. I walked and ran, swam, did yoga, participated in each evening\u2019s FGOS (family game of Scrabble), read books on the shore, savored every meal with my husband and our two sons.\u00a0 Except for when I had to actually chew.\u00a0 Suddenly, the simple pleasure of eating together had become a kind of torture.\u00a0 And then came the moment, midway through the week, when I just had to give up.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t fake it for even one more martyred minute.\u00a0 I was in pain whether I was eating or not.\u00a0 Lots of pain.\u00a0The blast-right-through-and-pretend-it-isn\u2019t-happening trick didn\u2019t work at all once my jaw swelled up and the tears began pricking at the backs of my eyelids.<\/p>\n

\u201cChronic physical pain is one of the harshest teachers you can have,\u201d\u00a0 writes Eckhert Tolle.\u00a0 Amen.\u00a0 Laying in bed, trying to take deep, calming breaths while my jaw throbbed and my temples ached and the pain pulsed in my head with every beat of my heart, I began to get a little panicky.\u00a0 How much worse could it get? I wondered.\u00a0 And what the heck was going on anyway?\u00a0 I, the dentist\u2019s daughter who\u2019d gone through life without so much as a real cavity, was not supposed to get some random, debilitating toothache. \u00a0 Especially not during the one precious week we all look forward to throughout the other fifty-one weeks of the year, our expensive, idyllic, end-of-summer retreat on a gorgeous lake in Maine.<\/p>\n

Steve and Henry and Jack commiserated.\u00a0 They brought me mint tea, ice cream, and hot washcloths for my brow. Word went out around the campfire, so to speak, and before long, friends in nearby cabins were offering antibiotics and painkillers, acupressure treatments and goldenseal.\u00a0 I walked up the road, called my dad on my cell phone, and read the words on the proffered bottles to him.\u00a0 \u201cTake the antibiotics,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cTake the painkillers.\u201d<\/p>\n

I spent the rest of the week in a haze of pain and woozy stupor. \u00a0Time slowed down, and I told myself that wasn’t such a bad thing. \u00a0I read a book that I don\u2019t remember reading, sat on the porch, slept in the sun, and spent a lot of time curled up in bed, listening to the sounds of kids playing on the beach and boats whizzing by.<\/p>\n

For a few weeks now, I\u2019ve been repeating a meditation by Adyashanti that strikes me as radical, simple, and incredibly challenging: \u201cAllow everything to be exactly as it is.\u201d\u00a0 Sometimes, sitting cross-legged on my pillow, after a nice long yoga practice, I can actually do it.\u00a0 Having used my body, calmed my mind, gotten back in touch with my own center, it is possible for me to sit in stillness, to breathe, and to allow everything to be exactly as it is.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve been humbled here by an unexpected sock to the jaw.\u00a0 We\u2019re back at home now, and there are lots of things that I ought to be doing. \u00a0Instead, I\u2019ve been to see my dad three times.\u00a0 He opened a back molar, found a crack in the tooth, put in a bonded filling. The pain, however, isn\u2019t going away. \u00a0 X-rays don\u2019t show a thing, but the throbbing in my jawbone is real, the jolt when I chew is real, the desperation at 4 am, when the pain extends from ear to chin, is real.\u00a0 I type these words with a couple of cotton rolls stuffed between my upper and lower teeth, to keep them from touching each other.<\/p>\n

The pain lesson was not on my to-do list for this week.\u00a0 But here I am, the student who\u2019s just been dragged in by her ear and shown to her seat in the classroom.\u00a0 \u201cResistance is futile\u201d is the theme for the day. \u00a0Getting on with my life — cleaning the house, doing the back-to-school shopping, exercising — isn’t an option.<\/p>\n

And so I remind myself to accept what is.\u00a0 Instead of fighting the pain, I am trying to bring all those years of yoga practice into this moment.\u00a0 How hard it is, to truly surrender.\u00a0 But that\u2019s what I\u2019m up to today.\u00a0 Giving in. In the grand scheme of things, one sore jaw isn\u2019t much, and yet it can so easily seem to be everything.\u00a0 (Certainly trying to avoid it, and then fighting it, has taken up most of my attention and energy for the last week.)\u00a0 I\u2019ve concluded that it\u2019s time for a different tack.\u00a0 Time to bring some acceptance into my nonacceptance, and to see what happens when I allow everything to be exactly as it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It started on our first day at the lake, a little sensitivity on a back molar as I bit into a piece of blueberry pie.\u00a0 I winced, took a sip of coffee, and passed my dessert over to Jack, who was happy to have it.\u00a0 We were thirty minutes from the nearest town, and three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,40,43,14,16],"tags":[57,61,404,479],"class_list":{"0":"post-209","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-acceptance","8":"category-mindfulness","9":"category-practice","10":"category-soul-work","11":"category-yoga","12":"tag-acceptance-2","13":"tag-adyashanti","14":"tag-surrender","15":"tag-yoga-2","16":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}