The fear of pain, the fear of not being able to bear it is mostly stored in our brain.
Our head keeps us trapped in pain. If we avoid or run away from pain, we keep the pain inside, the more we control the more we suffer. Pain has always a purpose; it is the pain that drives us and tells us what we need to change. The impossible ideal of perfection is the source and the cause of our deepest anguish and sadness. We are not in ultimate control. All living creatures experience losses and we are powerless over our losses.
Grief is natural in life.
We all feel from time to time out of control, inadequate, uncertain, tense, struggling, in conflict, breaking down, falling to our knees, failing, torn apart, defeated and crying out in deep sorrow. But if we abandon the demands for perfection and go through the rage the hurt and don’t give up heart, we start accepting and healing through the hurt.
The heart breaks open when honesty humility acceptance and compassion comes in.
“No one is as whole as he who has a broken heart” (Rabbi Moshe Leib).
Only those who know darkness can truly appreciate light.
To experience sadness, anger, utter despair, howls of pain doesn’t demonstrate deficit of spirituality but rather the ultimate spirituality.
Spirituality is not certain, clear, clean, distinct, good or bad. “The sanctity of a temple is that it is a place which men go to weep in common” (M. de Unamuno).
The sacred is revealed to us in the experience of pain and admission of failure.
“Our defects acknowledged, instead of repelling God, draw him to us. The person realizes that those things by which he feels unlovable are exactly what he has to offer God to attract him.”(R. Simon)
When Rabbi Riziner was imprisoned, he wept. He was asked: “why do not accept this affliction as intended in love?” He answered; “when God sends bitterness, we ought to feel it.”
When we stop fighting the vulnerability and give into the truth of being how we are right now, we feel clean light and very alive. We can use our troubles, our losses and our grief, to heal and dis-cover the unique human experience the particular kind of person we are and meant to be-come. Failures can become successes suffering joy and imperfections the source of our longing and inspiration for the never ending growth.
We feel in pain, but we are not as helpless and overwhelmed as we were when we were children. In the present we can get up and try again, we can see the same old story in a different way and choose to write a new one and be as a whole as we possibly can.
If you want to help somebody with their pain, don’t take their pain away, help them to feel it.
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