It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow,
if you have been touched by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain,
mine or your own,
without moving to hide it,
fade it,
or fix it.
Every life has pain. It is in the pain that we often find the deepest parts of our soul and yet as humans we are afraid of pain–emotional and physical. We try to convince ourselves that we should be going around the pain. Avoiding pain. Not being willing to sit with pain.
It is impossible to be with another person’s pain if we are not able to be with our own. Our pain is often the window to deep wisdom about ourselves. In that same way, when we are able to be with someone else’s pain–simply BE with it, we can also learn how to observe a reaction and how our impulse is to remove the pain by fixing it or fading it.
I believe that we must move into the shadows of ourselves. We rarely are willing to look at the dark spaces to find out more about who we are. Dipping into that intimate parts of ourselves that we often hide. But to show up in life full, we have to be willing to go into the vastness of the mysteries within us. Learning to be fully with ourselves, another and the world is the work of the soul.
When we learn to be with our pain, we call back parts of ourselves we have attempted time and time again to leave behind, we are to once again find that wholeness. We are able to leave behind the idea of ‘perfection’ that often holds us back from a life of fullness and deep compassion for others.
Be with your pain and be willing to listen to the whisperings of your soul.
We will be exploring this on the mat this week and looking at the inner parts of us that back away from our sorrow, and search for the wisdom that comes from the pain.