Opening to the Sufferings of the World

Like being torn to pieces, then put back together again

In my late 20s, I found a therapist who understood why, after honing cognitive skills to the level of a PhD, I would seek help to get out of my head and deal with the emotional cost of so much learning — someone who would not laugh when I announced in awkward amazement one day that I had just discovered my abdomen.

It was while learning to unthink and unsee and unlearn that I went through a period when I felt that I had no skin.

It came on slowly, a byproduct of meditations, workshops, therapy, solitary hikes, and exercises to get past over-thinking everything. Along the way, as I dissolved some of the barriers between me and life, I lost for a while the protections those barriers provided.

During this period, there were days when I was so hypersensitive that I could hardly bear to go outside. Walking down the street put me in acute distress because I had changed from feeling very little to now feeling everything, and all at once.

In every person I encountered, their pain became my pain. Every person’s struggle, suffering, worry, slid inside me like a sharpened blade, and stayed there. I didn’t just see or know where they suffered, it became mine, I felt it inside me. If someone had a pain in the lower back, I felt a pain in the lower back. When someone limped, I limped out of organic empathy. Someone’s tight shoulder muscle was as contagious to me as…