Use Your Pain: Find the Gifts of Suffering
“It is one thing to empty. It is an even deeper thing to be emptied. Pain does this. It empties us, if we allow it to.”
We all have known suffering. Some people share their daily woes. They complain, telling us more than we want to hear about their aches and their hardships. We listen, and we may offer some sympathetic or empathetic response. Most of the time we wish they would simply have said they were “Fine.”
As a culture, we really don’t talk about pain. It’s uncomfortable. We are not a society that delves into the depths. We don’t know how to share another person’s suffering, or even how to handle our own pain. If we can’t fix it, we don’t know how to respond. So, like many of our difficult emotions, we’d rather just shove it aside through denial, or stuff it deep inside through repression.
But pain is a big reality. We don’t have to look far to see it is everywhere–deep, ineffable, unfathomable, pain. All life has suffering. When we deny it, avoid it, or stuff it, we may gain temporary ease, but the pain will only deepen and in many different ways, it will haunt us.
Facing the darkness, admitting the pain, feeling the emotion, allowing the pain to be pain, is never easy. It requires courage, because the only way out is through. Our challenge is to enter in. There is no way to let go of pain without first taking it in. It is what it is.
The Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa offered a powerful image of dealing with pain when he said: “We must embrace pain and burn it as a fuel for our journey.”
To help us understand this, Miyazawa used the following image: We pick up our pain as we would a bundle of sticks for a fireplace, we necessarily embrace these sticks as we move across the room to the fireplace; then we thrust them into the fire, getting rid of them, letting go of them; finally we are warmed and delighted by their sacrificial gift to us in the form of fire and heat and warmth and energy.
This is the manner is which we must deal with our pain. If we can do so, we can find these gifts:
1. Pain helps us to understand other people in pain. When a person has suffered deeply, even once, and owned that suffering, they never forget. They become able to recognize the pain of others. Pain opens our heart. We learn compassion.
2. Pain helps us to understand pleasure. We realize and appreciate the simple things. After serious illness we appreciate our breath. After loss, we have a renewed sense of what is important. Pain sensitizes us to what is truly beautiful in life.
3. Pain expands us. We find our strength. We discover endurance and resiliency. We realize we can survive vulnerability. There is a strength learned from suffering that cannot be learned any other way. Pain provides energy and fuels us as we move forward on our journey.
When faced with suffering, we must respond with heart, with courage. We must let go of resistance. We yield. We recognize our challenge and we name it. We see it for what it is. We feel it…as deeply as we can. We sacrifice (make sacred). We sit with it.
Then, we can let it go.
Pain is a great, but difficult teacher. Faced courageously, we learn, we expand, and we deepen. We touch our Soul.