"Suffering" ~ © 2002 Rita Loyd
Showing posts with label suffering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label suffering. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
"Inviting Our Suffering Onto the Dance Floor"
This is the second of a two part series on suffering written by Robert Augustus Masters. He is a psychologist that underwent a hospitalization for an intense psychological crisis.
So where do we go from here?
From here to here.
It’s all the same moment, already perishing and yet never-ending, already shattered and yet still whole, ever inviting us to step out of our minds and into what we never left but dreamt we did. Now, and ever now. A dance we know by heart, even as we play wallflower or get engaged to our crutches.
To know without thinking, to see without eyes, to fly without wings, to die without leaving, to love without expecting -- such are the primordial yet everfresh chords weaving through our living chambers, perhaps muted, perhaps unheard, but nevertheless still here, like wildblue sky behind a sea of clouds.
Everything is the dancefloor.
But we may not yet have the legs nor the ripeness for it, or at least for certain zones or levels of it. More quality time in spiritual bootcamp’s obstacle courses may be needed. If we’re not ready for a particular step but assume that we should be, self-castigation may arise, nailing us with guilt implants. Better to learn to recognize what we actually are ready for, and to not hold ourselves back from or above it, just because we think it’s not sufficiently spiritual or befitting for us.
Fixating on or trying to go toward “the Light” -- an ascent that’s generally more ass than sense -- may only further endarken us, estranging us from that in us which is subterranean, malignant, wretched, or otherwise unwanted. What we won’t dance with, what we refuse intimacy with, what we’re so ambitious to shed, is precisely the dance-partner we need (or at least need to approach), drawing out of us the very aversion, tension, and pain that’s crying for illumination and love.
Take loneliness (which usually gets left all alone on the dancefloor): Become more sensitive to it, noticing its desperation, its craving for release from itself, its commitment to and investment in playing wallflower. Notice its pull to get away from those sensations that characterize it. Fleeing, feeding, filling, emptying, sexing -- anything to provide some relief. But what if we were to just sit there, sit with our loneliness, not doing a damn thing other than give it our undivided attention? We might then see that in our loneliness -- and especially in our dramatization of it -- we are closed off to what we really ache for: love.
And we might also see that our loneliness is a frightened, neglected child that has grown accustomed to being treated as a problem. A painfully troubled softness that we harden and distort by treating as an inconvenience. The more it cries, the more we push it away. The more it contracts, the more we isolate it. But instead we could turn off the TV and sit with our loneliness, letting it settle and rest in our lap, listening to it with an opening heart and curious mind, noticing its shape and breath, its bodily terminals, its tones, its textures, its shifts.
And shift it does, as we continue to give it undivided, compassionate attention, slowly perhaps, but surely, like an abused child entering the steady, well-grounded presence of genuine love and kindness. We can thus hold our loneliness and let it melt in warm-armed embrace, holding it close but not so close that it cannot breathe freely. Letting go of our desire to be elsewhere, we let our loneliness pervade us. Consciously. Letting the desperation go, letting the compulsion to seek go, letting the ambition to let go -- a spiritual “should” that’s so easy to should-er -- also go.
Then our loneliness is not a rejected child, a loser, a misfit, a bog of neediness, but rather a vulnerable fullness warming us, a tender ticket to our depths, a far from dysfunctional catalyst for remembering What-Really-Matters.
And so we sit, our loneliness transmuting into aloneness -- we may still be physically alone, but we are nonetheless palpably connected, especially at the heart, with so many others. Alone we are then, alone enough to be vividly and impactfully together with the raw Wonder of Life, and yet also together enough to appreciate and savor our solitude, realizing that only when we are truly capable of enjoying being alone are we capable of really being in relationship.
We could do worse than to date our loneliness.
The unwanted in us need not be put behind the driving wheel, but only within reach of our heart. The unwanted in us need not be swallowed whole, but rather only liberated from whatever’s nonbeneficial or obsolete about its viewpoint, without necessarily robbing it of its passion, its vitality, its basic presence, until it’s no longer an “it,” but only reclaimed us.
We need not empty ourselves of our undesired elements; we need not eroticize ourselves into a position where we can or “have to” sexually discharge the sensations of our desperation; we need not colonize our dread with lesser fears; we need not convert our rage into aggression, nor our helplessness into depression, nor our shame into guilt. Our darkness asks not to be kept in the shadows, nor to be given mere licence, but to be met face to face, belly to belly, in a manner as vital as it is wakeful.
Full-blooded contact.
The distance between us and our suffering is the distance between us and God. A gap made of and populated by fear.
The above doesn’t mean, however, that we should just jump into our suffering. What is called for, at least initially, is to take a closer look at our relationship -- and attachment -- to our suffering. At first, we may simply be committed, however unconsciously, to distracting ourselves from our suffering (or the feeling of our suffering), attaching or addicting ourselves to whatever most potently or pleasurably distracts us. Seeing this with unclouded eyes gets us started. Our condition may remain the same for a while -- and it may well need to, according to our degree of ripeness -- but our commitment to it is, however slightly, undermined.
Our struggle may then deepen -- as we observe ourselves trying to get away from our suffering, we begin to realize that such efforts only reinforce and amplify it. Our suffering intensifies until we find a superior distraction or a more powerful numbing agent, or until we shift from avoiding our suffering to deliberately facing it. Deliberately.
This is where healing begins.
When we no longer ostracize or condemn our suffering, but invite it onto the dancefloor with us, we are on track, however stumbling or sloppy our steps may be. Then we are relating to our suffering; we are apart from yet not cut off from it. Then it’s no longer just another unpretty face, but something we can communicate with, touch, penetrate, gaze into, bring closer.
As we move onto the dancefloor with our suffering, we begin to recognize in it many fractured or distorted countenances, the long-ago yet nonetheless still present faces of our distressed or injured selves. As our heart breaks -- that is, breaks free of its “protective” encasing -- the faces are no longer broken, no longer held in poisonously framed cameo.
However slightly, we are now broken enough to be whole (and empty enough to be open), making more and more room in ourselves for our pain. And, eventually, others’ pain. The dance continues, and we notice we are stumbling less, and that an appealing warmth is slowly arising. A quiet happiness suffused with a growing ease, softly pulsing and so, so spacious. So much room, so much love. And such rich intimations of a love beyond love. Dancing with our suffering allows a sobering joy to bloom. Flowers of love, flowers of disappointment, flowers of death, flowers of no-big-deal arrival. Compassion, and a deeper compassion.
But sometimes it’s hell.
Sometimes the suffering is just too much. The key at such times is not to force yourself onto the dancefloor (and nor to deny yourself pain relief), but to simply keep a spark of faith alive, the faith not only that this too will pass, but also that the dance you have begun will continue. Doubt your doubt. And remember not only that Life outlives you, but that you are Life. And more. When you first experience keeping your heart open in hell, know that it will happen again. Don’t worry about when.
And also know that every time you deliberately dance with your suffering you are, bit by bit, breathing strength and dignity and integrity into your capacity to bear the unbearable. Hell can be grace, too. In fact, when we’re in hell and we don’t forget God, then we’re not in hell. Real joy is not an alternative to suffering, but rather the full flowering of our unconditional acceptance of suffering -- which renders our suffering so transparent to Being that we begin to realize, right down to our toes, that maybe it’s really true that there is only God.
Such acceptance is an act not of submission, but of surrender.
In submission we collapse our boundaries; in surrender we expand them.
In submission, we deaden ourselves; in surrender, we die into a deeper Life. In surrender we may lose face, but we do not lose touch. Submission flattens the ego; surrender outdances it.
Surrender is the unarmored heart enlarged through radical acceptance of its aching, its longing, its naked yearning, its Homesickness. Submission is passive, but surrender is dynamic. Submission shrinks us, but surrender, sooner or later, makes us the right size for What-Really-Matters.
One size fits all.
Stretching for God. Stretching until we birth a deeper self, stretching until inside and outside are lovers, stretching until there’s no self to birth. Stretching beyond imagination, all stretchmarks left in the dust. Stretching a little bit here, a little bit there, stretching beyond any need for applause, no longer reducing God to Santa Claus. Letting our suffering stretch us, extend us, show us where we are refusing to look, or are only looking superficially. Appreciating the chance to investigate where we’re being hooked. Appreciating how it all works.
We don’t graduate until we’ve learned the lessons by heart. Otherwise, we wouldn’t sufficiently appreciate God, wouldn’t be sufficiently prepared for realizing who and what we actually are. We get only the very best schooling, each of us with our own unique curriculum. Be careful not to dismiss this as mere metaphor; it is, and it is also something more.
If we won’t dance with our suffering and the pain around which it is constellated, then we are likely to become enslaved to the search to end it, to somehow be rid of its symptoms, to so thoroughly distract ourselves from it that it seems to no longer exist to any significantly troublesome degree.
But being relieved of the sensations of our suffering no more frees us than does masturbation. All our pain, all our hurt, all our woundedness in its primary form exists, in part, to alert us to our condition, to remind us of what we are actually up to, to clarify the dramatics in which we are encapsulated.
Suffering can both obstruct and catalyze our needed purification. It all depends on how we use it. We perhaps best ripen in the presence of awakened, unconditioned love; our suffering, if well used, makes more of us available to that presence. We just have to get out on the damned dancefloor with whatever potential partners are eyeing us from the places where we’d rather not look. Especially those who keep showing up day after day, night after night, their presence snaring our attention, reeling in our “I.” Forget your breath mints and your allegiance to your distancing strategies -- go to these partners, strike up a conversation, get them out on the floor, invite them closer.
Do what is needed to continue the dance, including pausing. At times effort is called for, and at other times effortlessness needs to take the floor. Sometimes we dance, sometimes we are danced, sometimes we get stuck, freezing in our own headlights, and other times we flow, converting frozen yesterday into fluid now. As we move from the periphery to the heartland of our pain, we start to encounter what exists both prior to and beyond all our suffering. And again it is so obvious that God is not elsewhere, that God is not an alternative reality.
Everything is the dancefloor.
Everything that seems to be other than us -- whether outer or inner -- is our dance-partner, asking for more than just tolerance. So we pick this one or that one, but do we remember also to look for and dance with our preference-making capacity? And do we inquire into who -- or what -- is doing the choosing? We’ll explore these questions shortly, but for now let’s close this chapter by returning once more to the dancefloor, turning the spotlight on an unpopular, particularly common yet uncommonly rewarding partner -- disappointment.
From here to here.
It’s all the same moment, already perishing and yet never-ending, already shattered and yet still whole, ever inviting us to step out of our minds and into what we never left but dreamt we did. Now, and ever now. A dance we know by heart, even as we play wallflower or get engaged to our crutches.
To know without thinking, to see without eyes, to fly without wings, to die without leaving, to love without expecting -- such are the primordial yet everfresh chords weaving through our living chambers, perhaps muted, perhaps unheard, but nevertheless still here, like wildblue sky behind a sea of clouds.
Everything is the dancefloor.
But we may not yet have the legs nor the ripeness for it, or at least for certain zones or levels of it. More quality time in spiritual bootcamp’s obstacle courses may be needed. If we’re not ready for a particular step but assume that we should be, self-castigation may arise, nailing us with guilt implants. Better to learn to recognize what we actually are ready for, and to not hold ourselves back from or above it, just because we think it’s not sufficiently spiritual or befitting for us.
Fixating on or trying to go toward “the Light” -- an ascent that’s generally more ass than sense -- may only further endarken us, estranging us from that in us which is subterranean, malignant, wretched, or otherwise unwanted. What we won’t dance with, what we refuse intimacy with, what we’re so ambitious to shed, is precisely the dance-partner we need (or at least need to approach), drawing out of us the very aversion, tension, and pain that’s crying for illumination and love.
Take loneliness (which usually gets left all alone on the dancefloor): Become more sensitive to it, noticing its desperation, its craving for release from itself, its commitment to and investment in playing wallflower. Notice its pull to get away from those sensations that characterize it. Fleeing, feeding, filling, emptying, sexing -- anything to provide some relief. But what if we were to just sit there, sit with our loneliness, not doing a damn thing other than give it our undivided attention? We might then see that in our loneliness -- and especially in our dramatization of it -- we are closed off to what we really ache for: love.
And we might also see that our loneliness is a frightened, neglected child that has grown accustomed to being treated as a problem. A painfully troubled softness that we harden and distort by treating as an inconvenience. The more it cries, the more we push it away. The more it contracts, the more we isolate it. But instead we could turn off the TV and sit with our loneliness, letting it settle and rest in our lap, listening to it with an opening heart and curious mind, noticing its shape and breath, its bodily terminals, its tones, its textures, its shifts.
And shift it does, as we continue to give it undivided, compassionate attention, slowly perhaps, but surely, like an abused child entering the steady, well-grounded presence of genuine love and kindness. We can thus hold our loneliness and let it melt in warm-armed embrace, holding it close but not so close that it cannot breathe freely. Letting go of our desire to be elsewhere, we let our loneliness pervade us. Consciously. Letting the desperation go, letting the compulsion to seek go, letting the ambition to let go -- a spiritual “should” that’s so easy to should-er -- also go.
Then our loneliness is not a rejected child, a loser, a misfit, a bog of neediness, but rather a vulnerable fullness warming us, a tender ticket to our depths, a far from dysfunctional catalyst for remembering What-Really-Matters.
And so we sit, our loneliness transmuting into aloneness -- we may still be physically alone, but we are nonetheless palpably connected, especially at the heart, with so many others. Alone we are then, alone enough to be vividly and impactfully together with the raw Wonder of Life, and yet also together enough to appreciate and savor our solitude, realizing that only when we are truly capable of enjoying being alone are we capable of really being in relationship.
We could do worse than to date our loneliness.
The unwanted in us need not be put behind the driving wheel, but only within reach of our heart. The unwanted in us need not be swallowed whole, but rather only liberated from whatever’s nonbeneficial or obsolete about its viewpoint, without necessarily robbing it of its passion, its vitality, its basic presence, until it’s no longer an “it,” but only reclaimed us.
We need not empty ourselves of our undesired elements; we need not eroticize ourselves into a position where we can or “have to” sexually discharge the sensations of our desperation; we need not colonize our dread with lesser fears; we need not convert our rage into aggression, nor our helplessness into depression, nor our shame into guilt. Our darkness asks not to be kept in the shadows, nor to be given mere licence, but to be met face to face, belly to belly, in a manner as vital as it is wakeful.
Full-blooded contact.
The distance between us and our suffering is the distance between us and God. A gap made of and populated by fear.
The above doesn’t mean, however, that we should just jump into our suffering. What is called for, at least initially, is to take a closer look at our relationship -- and attachment -- to our suffering. At first, we may simply be committed, however unconsciously, to distracting ourselves from our suffering (or the feeling of our suffering), attaching or addicting ourselves to whatever most potently or pleasurably distracts us. Seeing this with unclouded eyes gets us started. Our condition may remain the same for a while -- and it may well need to, according to our degree of ripeness -- but our commitment to it is, however slightly, undermined.
Our struggle may then deepen -- as we observe ourselves trying to get away from our suffering, we begin to realize that such efforts only reinforce and amplify it. Our suffering intensifies until we find a superior distraction or a more powerful numbing agent, or until we shift from avoiding our suffering to deliberately facing it. Deliberately.
This is where healing begins.
When we no longer ostracize or condemn our suffering, but invite it onto the dancefloor with us, we are on track, however stumbling or sloppy our steps may be. Then we are relating to our suffering; we are apart from yet not cut off from it. Then it’s no longer just another unpretty face, but something we can communicate with, touch, penetrate, gaze into, bring closer.
As we move onto the dancefloor with our suffering, we begin to recognize in it many fractured or distorted countenances, the long-ago yet nonetheless still present faces of our distressed or injured selves. As our heart breaks -- that is, breaks free of its “protective” encasing -- the faces are no longer broken, no longer held in poisonously framed cameo.
However slightly, we are now broken enough to be whole (and empty enough to be open), making more and more room in ourselves for our pain. And, eventually, others’ pain. The dance continues, and we notice we are stumbling less, and that an appealing warmth is slowly arising. A quiet happiness suffused with a growing ease, softly pulsing and so, so spacious. So much room, so much love. And such rich intimations of a love beyond love. Dancing with our suffering allows a sobering joy to bloom. Flowers of love, flowers of disappointment, flowers of death, flowers of no-big-deal arrival. Compassion, and a deeper compassion.
But sometimes it’s hell.
Sometimes the suffering is just too much. The key at such times is not to force yourself onto the dancefloor (and nor to deny yourself pain relief), but to simply keep a spark of faith alive, the faith not only that this too will pass, but also that the dance you have begun will continue. Doubt your doubt. And remember not only that Life outlives you, but that you are Life. And more. When you first experience keeping your heart open in hell, know that it will happen again. Don’t worry about when.
And also know that every time you deliberately dance with your suffering you are, bit by bit, breathing strength and dignity and integrity into your capacity to bear the unbearable. Hell can be grace, too. In fact, when we’re in hell and we don’t forget God, then we’re not in hell. Real joy is not an alternative to suffering, but rather the full flowering of our unconditional acceptance of suffering -- which renders our suffering so transparent to Being that we begin to realize, right down to our toes, that maybe it’s really true that there is only God.
Such acceptance is an act not of submission, but of surrender.
In submission we collapse our boundaries; in surrender we expand them.
In submission, we deaden ourselves; in surrender, we die into a deeper Life. In surrender we may lose face, but we do not lose touch. Submission flattens the ego; surrender outdances it.
Surrender is the unarmored heart enlarged through radical acceptance of its aching, its longing, its naked yearning, its Homesickness. Submission is passive, but surrender is dynamic. Submission shrinks us, but surrender, sooner or later, makes us the right size for What-Really-Matters.
One size fits all.
Stretching for God. Stretching until we birth a deeper self, stretching until inside and outside are lovers, stretching until there’s no self to birth. Stretching beyond imagination, all stretchmarks left in the dust. Stretching a little bit here, a little bit there, stretching beyond any need for applause, no longer reducing God to Santa Claus. Letting our suffering stretch us, extend us, show us where we are refusing to look, or are only looking superficially. Appreciating the chance to investigate where we’re being hooked. Appreciating how it all works.
We don’t graduate until we’ve learned the lessons by heart. Otherwise, we wouldn’t sufficiently appreciate God, wouldn’t be sufficiently prepared for realizing who and what we actually are. We get only the very best schooling, each of us with our own unique curriculum. Be careful not to dismiss this as mere metaphor; it is, and it is also something more.
If we won’t dance with our suffering and the pain around which it is constellated, then we are likely to become enslaved to the search to end it, to somehow be rid of its symptoms, to so thoroughly distract ourselves from it that it seems to no longer exist to any significantly troublesome degree.
But being relieved of the sensations of our suffering no more frees us than does masturbation. All our pain, all our hurt, all our woundedness in its primary form exists, in part, to alert us to our condition, to remind us of what we are actually up to, to clarify the dramatics in which we are encapsulated.
Suffering can both obstruct and catalyze our needed purification. It all depends on how we use it. We perhaps best ripen in the presence of awakened, unconditioned love; our suffering, if well used, makes more of us available to that presence. We just have to get out on the damned dancefloor with whatever potential partners are eyeing us from the places where we’d rather not look. Especially those who keep showing up day after day, night after night, their presence snaring our attention, reeling in our “I.” Forget your breath mints and your allegiance to your distancing strategies -- go to these partners, strike up a conversation, get them out on the floor, invite them closer.
Do what is needed to continue the dance, including pausing. At times effort is called for, and at other times effortlessness needs to take the floor. Sometimes we dance, sometimes we are danced, sometimes we get stuck, freezing in our own headlights, and other times we flow, converting frozen yesterday into fluid now. As we move from the periphery to the heartland of our pain, we start to encounter what exists both prior to and beyond all our suffering. And again it is so obvious that God is not elsewhere, that God is not an alternative reality.
Everything is the dancefloor.
Everything that seems to be other than us -- whether outer or inner -- is our dance-partner, asking for more than just tolerance. So we pick this one or that one, but do we remember also to look for and dance with our preference-making capacity? And do we inquire into who -- or what -- is doing the choosing? We’ll explore these questions shortly, but for now let’s close this chapter by returning once more to the dancefloor, turning the spotlight on an unpopular, particularly common yet uncommonly rewarding partner -- disappointment.
Lonely are the flowers of disappointment
Who picks them, loves them, cradles their scent?
Who sees their beauty, their shy petalling?
In our grief, our ordinary daily unsung grief
We break in so many tiny ways
Not seeing beneath the debris
Bits of upstart green, minute pulsing surges
Making subtle quicksand out of our too solid ground
So many buddings, emerald lips moistly aquiver
Some become flowers of hope, some flowers of disappointment
We become seduced by the flowers of hope
Drugged by nostalgia for the future
And we turn away from the flowers of disappointment
Not letting their fragrance reach far enough
Yet it is that fragrance that reminds us
Of a deeper land, where entrapping dreams must shatter
A land where What-Really-Matters cannot help but matter
Disappointment, unrejected, embraces me
Its touch is cool, softly crystalline, sweetly sobering
Is it what I want?
That’s the wrong question.
Disappointment’s gift is rooted not in questions
But in something closer to home
Than answers
Disappointment bleeds into the warped frames of our dreams
Interrupting our intoxication, disrobing our trance
The torn fabric is not something to repair
But to see with undreaming eyes
Eyes for which
Disappointment is not disappointing
Who sees their beauty, their shy petalling?
In our grief, our ordinary daily unsung grief
We break in so many tiny ways
Not seeing beneath the debris
Bits of upstart green, minute pulsing surges
Making subtle quicksand out of our too solid ground
So many buddings, emerald lips moistly aquiver
Some become flowers of hope, some flowers of disappointment
We become seduced by the flowers of hope
Drugged by nostalgia for the future
And we turn away from the flowers of disappointment
Not letting their fragrance reach far enough
Yet it is that fragrance that reminds us
Of a deeper land, where entrapping dreams must shatter
A land where What-Really-Matters cannot help but matter
Disappointment, unrejected, embraces me
Its touch is cool, softly crystalline, sweetly sobering
Is it what I want?
That’s the wrong question.
Disappointment’s gift is rooted not in questions
But in something closer to home
Than answers
Disappointment bleeds into the warped frames of our dreams
Interrupting our intoxication, disrobing our trance
The torn fabric is not something to repair
But to see with undreaming eyes
Eyes for which
Disappointment is not disappointing
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
"Pain versus Suffering"
I know that many of you didn't know what I was ranting about in my Are You Suffering post. A very sweet anonymous reader sent me some articles that explained what I was talking about in a much better fashion, so I though I would share them with you. There are two articles, so the second one, I will share tomorrow.
The articles are written by Robert Augustus Masters. He is a psychologist that underwent a hospitalization for an intense psychological crisis.
Though pain and suffering are often thought of as being much the same, they differ greatly from each other.
Pain is fundamentally just unpleasant sensation. Suffering, on the other hand, is something we are doing with our pain. Pain comes, often inescapably so, with life. It often also is, especially in its awakening or alerting capacity, necessary. Suffering, however, is far less necessary than we might think.
When we cannot sufficiently distract or distance ourselves from our pain, we generally turn it into suffering. How? By overdramatizing our pain. We make an unpleasantly gripping story out of it, a tale in which our hurt “I” all but automatically assumes the throne of self. I hurt, therefore I am -- this is suffering’s core credo.
In so doing, we are simply identifying with our pain, overpersonalizing it.
Where pain is consciously felt hurt, suffering is the manipulation of that hurt into drama, wherein we’re likely so busy acting out -- and being literally occupied by -- our hurt role that we’ve little or no motivation to stand apart from it.
In the myopic theatrics of suffering, pain itself mostly just stagnates, like an unwanted exhibit in an art gallery. It is not really touched. As the centerpiece and supposed raison d’être of suffering, pain is kept from any genuine healing. We may feel close to our pain when we are busy suffering, but it is not the kind of closeness that heals. It is, in fact, an unwelcome proximity, through which we generally just reinforce our suffering, if only because of our sheer desperation to be elsewhere (like in some kind of fantasized immunity from pain, or similar dreamland of our suffering-centered “I”).
The degree to which we turn our pain into suffering is the degree to which we obstruct our own healing.
When we’re busy suffering, we are all but bereft of healthy detachment. We’re then removed from the naked reality of our pain -- for our attention is generally more on our storyline than on the raw, nonconceptual sense of our pain -- but not removed in a way that permits us to focus more clearly on what is actually going on.
As such, suffering is unhealthy separation from our pain. Suffering is pain that’s gone to mind, pain that’s doing time in mental cells, mental hells.
The more intimate we are with our pain, the less we suffer.
To work effectively with our suffering, we need both to stand apart from its script and to cease distancing ourselves from our pain. Suffering may seem to keep us near to our pain, but it actually keeps us from getting as close to our pain as we need to, if we are live a more liberated life.
Suffering houses pain, but keeps it in the dark. When we turn on the lights, the dramatics of suffering become significantly transparent. Then the uncensored facticity of our pain gets our full attention, particularly at the level where it is but unpleasant sensation. Then we can enter our pain with care, clarity, and suitable precision, getting to know it from the inside -- its fluxing weave and interplay of shape, color, temperature, texture, directionality, intensity, pressure, location, layering, and so on.
Often when we say we’re in pain, we’re not really in our pain, but rather are only closer to it than we’d like. In fact, we’re outside it.
It is in the conscious and caring entry into our pain that we begin to find some real freedom from our pain. The hurt may remain, but our relationship to that hurt will have changed to the point where it’s no longer such a problem to us, and in fact may even become a doorway into
What Really Matters.
The healing of pain is found in pain itself.
As we become more intimate with our pain, we find that we are less troubled by it. Suffering is, among other things, a refusal to develop any intimacy with our pain. In fact, suffering only jails our pain.But the cage door is open, already open, if we just turn around, away from the screens upon which our suffering projects its stories. Then we begin to awaken, to shed more and more of the entrapping dreams we habitually animate. Awareness upstages suffering, dissolving its grip on us, taking us to the heart, the core, the epicenter, of our pain.
And there, in that place of hurt, we meet not more hurt, but more us. More healing, more peace, more sacred welcome.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Are You Suffering?
Okay, I need to air a pet peeve of mine because it has been bugging me more and more as I’ve been looking at unfamiliar blogs. Please do not take offense, as it is not directed at one person, but it shows how the words we use can make subtle differences in the way in which we view and approach others. There are many phrases that mental health professionals and non-professionals use that I do not think are very helpful or are condescending, but I’ll admit to using them too with other professionals because there is instantaneous understanding. However, the phrase I am referring to does not help in that manner.
The phrase is “suffering from.” In very rare cases, do I think that this is an appropriate term to use. But, I really understand people using it and I know that it is old language and comes from the medical model. However, I’d like you maybe to think about the words that you choose. I’ve been reading things like “Those suffering from borderline personality disorder,” “I suffer from bipolar disorder, and “My patient suffers from depression.” Oh, that is like nails on a chalk board to me.
My problem with it is that is seems to automatically set up roles for a victim role, that the person is always suffering and is a victim of the illness. Which to me, would also imply that therapist subtly views the client as a victim and herself as the one to rescue the victim from the illness. Yes, there is a power differential in a client/therapist relationship, but it is not one that most call attention to at this level. It is usually a team effort. To me, it comes across as a bit condescending and it also makes me feel a bit defeated by my illness. My illness does not define me should be the primary focus of who I am. It is simply one of my characteristics.
Whose business is it to say that “I am suffering from depression.” Yes, I am a person diagnosed with a major depressive disorder which, at times, is excruciating. However, I may be managing, may be struggling, may be coping or may be in a really deep depression and in great pain. To me those are much more accurate and descriptive phrases. They also make me feel more like a person instead of the focus being on my illness.
Do we tell people that they are suffering from diabetes, from heart disease, from a broken leg, or a sprain ankle? What kind of subtle message do we send. You are a victim of your illness. Everyone who has this illness must, feel as if they are suffering. I don’t know maybe I just get lost in the semantics of it all.
The phrase is “suffering from.” In very rare cases, do I think that this is an appropriate term to use. But, I really understand people using it and I know that it is old language and comes from the medical model. However, I’d like you maybe to think about the words that you choose. I’ve been reading things like “Those suffering from borderline personality disorder,” “I suffer from bipolar disorder, and “My patient suffers from depression.” Oh, that is like nails on a chalk board to me.
My problem with it is that is seems to automatically set up roles for a victim role, that the person is always suffering and is a victim of the illness. Which to me, would also imply that therapist subtly views the client as a victim and herself as the one to rescue the victim from the illness. Yes, there is a power differential in a client/therapist relationship, but it is not one that most call attention to at this level. It is usually a team effort. To me, it comes across as a bit condescending and it also makes me feel a bit defeated by my illness. My illness does not define me should be the primary focus of who I am. It is simply one of my characteristics.
Whose business is it to say that “I am suffering from depression.” Yes, I am a person diagnosed with a major depressive disorder which, at times, is excruciating. However, I may be managing, may be struggling, may be coping or may be in a really deep depression and in great pain. To me those are much more accurate and descriptive phrases. They also make me feel more like a person instead of the focus being on my illness.
Do we tell people that they are suffering from diabetes, from heart disease, from a broken leg, or a sprain ankle? What kind of subtle message do we send. You are a victim of your illness. Everyone who has this illness must, feel as if they are suffering. I don’t know maybe I just get lost in the semantics of it all.
But, please do not refer to me as suffering from major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. I am a person who has been diagnosed with major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder which is very difficult for me to manage, but I actually have a great life except for the symptoms from my illnesses. Just changing a few words can make all the difference in the way someone feels or views themself.
Thanks for reading my vent…time to get off my soapbox. Next?
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