The Five Year Trek

On a regular weekday, after I just began my Ph.D. at UMD, I was learning to use an instrument that would eventually become a big part of my research. I had to handle a tiny sample holder containing 4 mg of a sample with a pair of tweezers and place it on top of a thin disk, which was a part of a $5000 delicate sample carrier sitting on top of a mass balance. It was the first time I attempted to perform experiments that directly impacted my research. Quite naturally, my at-the-time fidgety hands dropped the lid inside the mass balance and required careful extraction using a pair of tweezers with the steady hands of a research colleague.

Zero

In hindsight, this episode triggered a series of changes in the following years - some so tiny that I never thought it would create a big difference in the outcomes. At the moment when I dropped the lid, I vividly remember that just a flash of a moment ago, I had envisioned the future scene, including the emotions on my future face.

The reality I was facing was separated only fractionally in time and space from the dream that my mind steered me through.

Quite often, guilt and shame have a way of quickly filling the emptiness created in the stillness of such an event. Surprisingly, none of those managed to exist in that space for me, and the incident did not bother my advisor as he calmly, yet in a slight worry, assigned the experienced researcher to the rescue of the equipment. What shifted in me, were two things - one, the curiosity to understand how that all happened within a dreaming moment, and two, the urge to become steadier and not recreate the incident.

During that time, I was adjusting to the process of physical therapy to recover from a knee injury, which I suffered while playing football (soccer) about a year ago. The injury had become chronic and reduced my left thigh to a circumference that was about 2.5 inches smaller than the healthy right thigh (Yes, I regularly measured the circumference of my thighs during my recovery). This, according to the diagnosis, reduced the disk spaces in my lower spine and thereby affected my mobility. The chronic knee (and back) injury forced me to abstain from undertaking any physically challenging tasks. My movement included only short walks assisted by a knee brace, frequent switches between sitting and standing to avoid prolonged strain and sleeping only on the back on a mattress of a particular thickness and comfort.

The lid incident created a butterfly effect as the curiosity to understand and the urge to change rippled through almost every aspect of my existence. However, I could hardly imagine then how long it would take to literally get back on my two feet.

The Body

First, I had to start with taking care of my knee and lower back to reduce pain while doing regular activities. I cannot even begin to describe the disarray of healthcare in the U.S I faced as I went from painkiller to painkiller for about a year until I finally got some sense of direction in India in August of 2016. The diagnosis was that I suffered multiple tendon and ligament partial tears and degeneration of lumbar disc. Surgery was not recommended but I started off with physical therapy.

I started two/three day a week physical therapy at the health center of Texas A&M University and then transitioned to University of Maryland in 2017. The progress was slow. Being a PhD student puts you in a status which hangs in between a full-time faculty and a full-time student. But I was fortunate to get references from the health center at UMD to a physical therapist near UMD.

This is where I believe I recovered the most, in a way I had never imagined before. I started thrice a week and transitioned to twice a week after some progress. This therapist was a Doctor of Physical Therapy and began initially with making me understand how my body is reacting physically to chronic pain.

The first test was how much I can contract my left thigh - I could not even feel that I could contract my thigh. I had lost every bit of feeling there. He explained to me that my body has reached a state of survival and has stiffened in a weird way, referred as atrophy. So, he started first with electrical stimulation of muscles, especially around the lower back and cold treatment of the knee after minor stretching exercises.

He had instructed to follow cold treatment of the knee and hot treatment for the back after every day physical therapy. On days when I didn’t have the physical therapy scheduled, I judiciously was found on a yoga mat at 6 pm doing the stretching exercises given by this therapist and my doctor in India. The prescribed exercises involved holding for 20 s in a particular stance that attempted to activate the muscles and gain strength. After about 10 type of exercises and 30 minutes, followed the 15 minute cold treatment of the knee with the legs bent at 90 degrees at the hip and the knee, and lying flat on the back on an electric heating pad. This was the moment when I stared at the ceiling lying on my bed and patiently observed.

Naturally, I was critically low on vitamin-D and vitamin-B12 and upon recommendations from the doctors, I convinced myself to try natural sources. Vitamin-D was easy to manage by sticking to at least 15-30 minute exposure to the sun, but naturally replenishing vitamin B-12 required courage to cook salmon or the most dreaded liver soup. A dear friend and roommate of mine joined me, given his low vitamin situation too, in sharing the suffering caused while consuming the liver soup. The shared suffering made the soup nourish us for longer. I clearly remember estimating the number of days we would have to continue vitamin replenishment by considering the initial values the lab measured for both of us, the final recommended value, the absorption rate in an average human, and the average loss of B-12.

Memories are often created when the experiences are shared, and not necessarily spoken. But in hindsight, switching to salmon earlier would have been better for the memories.

The routine of exercising and resting after work and collecting vitamins from natural sources had replaced sports (football, swimming, racquetball, or jogging). What these exercises were doing was essentially imposing a discipline, something which I cherished being active in sports since childhood. In those times when I rested in and after relatively calmer exercises than active sports, I started to see something surfacing - the working of my mind.

The Mind

The extent of activity going on in the mind is, without a doubt, beyond comprehension. Some activity is visible immediately, such as a momentary thought that influences an action. But the mind gives out a convoluted, encrypted output easy enough to understand, but the difficult part if to identify the source of those outputs.

I knew somewhere below the convoluted outputs that the uneasiness of the hands that shivered during the experiments had a ‘mindful’ source, or possibly a predictor/enabler of the dreams. Thinking again and again about the lid-dropping incident, it made me come face-to-face with the goofy creature in my mind that was an enabler of day dreams. It was a unruly child that perhaps missed laughing over someone’s fault, or missed trickery of the childhood. This unruly child was having fun while on the exterior, my conscience was confused with the turn of events.

Being disciplined or not-disciplined both give birth to either a god or a devil - the former (god) goes by many names such as happiness or pleasure and the latter (devil) called pain or regret. But the difficult question was whether the mind can choose to create one or the other and to what extent.

Imposing discipline via physical therapy exposed the unruly child’s thoughts and patterns that were beneath the immediate surface of my mind. Perhaps, I started to think that my expression, bodily pain was partially influenced by this part of the mind. If this was the case, it meant that I would need to make peace with this unruly child and alleviate physical uneasiness. Of course, the first experiment was trying to easy the hands to do experiments. What this meant was to consciously pay attention to every moment my hands became uneasy, identify the source, confront the thoughts that initiated the uneasiness, acknowledge that I no longer need to hold those thoughts in my hands, let go and restart from where I left.

This was a continuous process, a continuous feedback loop that was motivated my curiosity to understand working of my mind and the urge to be better at what I do. I did not have any words for this process back then, but later acknowledged this as the process of meditation. Of course there are various classification of meditation in different religions - some giving importance to an object (external or internal) of meditation and some giving more importance to the daily activities of life. Broadly, they all agree that the ultimate goal is to ‘be with the flow of consciousness’.

As discipline was demanded by my research and physical therapy, the process of understanding the mind started to become a cherishing experience. During the daily cold treatment of the knee and heat treatment of the back, I started to notice that stiffness in my back and pain in my knee bubbled onto the surface. It seemed like the pain bubbled out of these places as I let the mind do its work during my time of patient observation.

It seems that the mind is involved in a continuous optimization process to finding local or global minima of pain/please and maxima of pleasure/pain. Usually, they both co-exist.

My mind was working towards the same goal that I had - to alleviate pain, to be free. Often riddled with the question, “to be or not to be?”. But it seemed that everything was condensing in a pattern that I could follow to gain strength.

The Mind and The Body

The challenges imposed by the Ph.D. studies, the physical therapy, slowly made it clear that the source of the thoughts, feelings, and emotions is sometimes held together by the physical body, not necessarily directly in the brain. For example, the fidgety hands held a great amount of uneasiness that the mind carried with it. The challenge started with first decoupling the uneasiness from the hands so that I could do the experiments I needed to do - a fun challenge for the mind. It took a while, but slowly, the mind was able to let go of the uneasiness from the hands.

I realized what my mind and the body both like to do together,

• Challenge
• Learn from the experience
• Give kindness
• Soak in the nature outdoors

This is what they needed to learn,

• Receive kindness
• Forgive the uneasiness
• Let-go of the uneasiness
• Rest from time to time

The mind and the body started to work together to gain strength. A. Very. Long. Process. It started with muscle activation physical therapy, then some 20 s long exercises, then a slow 5 minute cycling/stair-master, then a 10 minute walk outdoors, then a 10 minute hike, then a swim, a walk with 5 pound ankle weight, 10 pound ankle weight, a longer hike, then carrying my bag to the campus without pain, carrying my bag during an international travel without pain, a hike with a heavier bag, and then finally a 2.5-day backpacking trip after 5 years.

Painless is the last adjective for this journey. Pain was present while healing and also while accepting the new challenges.