Deeply rooted pain causes great suffering in our life. And the intensity by which we experience pain varies from person to person. However, it is not a competition. We don’t have to argue over the fact that we all experience pain. Pain is our human heritage. Although our pain feels worst to us as it colors everything in life. Yet, as much as pain is a pain, it can also be the impetus for self-discovery. So let’s get to know this irritating, but useful old friend.
Physical pain awakens us to the possibility of danger or a need to heal. While few of us like pain, it serves a vital function. Some people have a rare genetic disorder, CIP, that prevents people from feeling pain. People with CIP may also have difficulty regulating their temperature and sweating. On a physical level pain is instrumental. However, it is our tendency to demonize pain and treat the discomfort rather than the cause. This is also true of psycho/emotional pain. We are averse to looking in to our pain because it is… well, painful. But this keeps us from understanding what the pain is telling us.
Deeply personal psychological pain often come from a wounding event. This wound amplifies into suffering when we try to deny, change, or get rid of it. If we don’t know it we never learn to work with it. While some pain is universal and all humans experience it, some feels as though we were wounded personally. There is often a sense of embarrassment to this kind of wounding as though it had made us strange, or less than others. And so we bury these feelings deep in the darkness of our heart. However, wounds that are not seen sometimes do not heal. In fact, unseen wounds can fester. The area around the hidden wound becomes painful as we infect places in our being and areas in our life where the wound is associated. The inflamed area around our wound becomes painful to the touch. In time, we begin to anticipate that pain and learn to avoid the people, places and things that we might bump into. Shadows in the past, beget blockages in the mind, that beget limitations in life. Our life becomes less than it might be because of these unseen influences. How often have we overreacted to circumstances without knowing why? How often did we operate on auto pilot as though following an unseen script? How often have we sidestepped an important event? How often have we missed a kiss or failed to raise our hand? How much of our life has been dedicated to onanistic meandering rather than meaningful relationships?
There is nothing wrong with fantasies until they take the place of actual engagement in life. Fantasies allow us to journey into edgy realms with no real investment. By imagining pleasures of the flesh, we have no actual skin in the game. (Yes, bad pun intended.) We can live out fantasies at will in apparent safety. However, as they serve an important creative function, it may be that fantasizing only supports the solitude that allows wounds to fester. Sometimes we analogously recreate the actual wounding we are otherwise unable to look at directly. People may act out abuse sexually by entering a “play space” that is an active dissociation of their primary personality. The “play-space” is a safe space people can act out being unsafe. And whether this is working through their deep wounds or reinforcing them is unclear.
From a meditation point of view, a method for deep healing would be to gently encourage the wounded areas to come into the light of awareness before we act them out. It may be too painful to experience some wounds directly, but we can prepare a ground of acceptance for them to appear, as they will. And when they or their proxies (such as avoidance, addiction or other types of suffering) arrive, we can open to them and allow them to be in our unbiased, non-judgemental space. If nothing else, by simply allowing the manifestation of our pain to be as it is can be profoundly healing. Sometimes, as we approach the event horizon of our wound our impulse is to pull away. The method for working with that is to just gently learn to stay. Stay with the pain. Just be there. And if we pull away, so be it. If it pulls away, so be it. Recovery is a long slow road. Sometimes, rather than pulling away, we might lunge toward the pain throwing our heart on it’s altar. This act of egotism is not helpful. Other times, as soon as we feel the trigger of our pain, we try and fix it. This is a common mistake, for how can we fix something we haven’t seen? That said, we don’t have to dig to the origin of the wound. We don’t need to know why or who in order to actually heal. With meditation we look at what is there now. When we talk about bringing darkness into the light, we are not extinguishing anything, we are not vanquishing anything, we are not changing anything. We are simply inviting the wounded being to reveal itself as it is. In Meditation theory, awareness is light and ignorance is darkness. But thjis does not correspond to :”good” and “evil”. Both darkness and light are symbiotic parts to the universe as well as our own nature. While darkness serves it purpose, sometimes things are brewing there that are affecting 0our lives on the surface. Sometimes things have run their course in the darkness and are ready for birth into our awareness. Darkness is were things incubate, or fester. And light is where they are able to manifest or heal. However, light is a graded process. Sometimes it is less direct than other times. We allow what we allow, as we allow it. Each session in our meditation we may know ourselves a little more deeply.
The present moment rests between the past and the future. Specifically, how we could protect ourselves from this situation or how we can enact laws to protect our community in the future. Or, going deeply into the causes and conditions of what happened to us might lie in the past. Either of these examples might be helpful, but they are more the province of therapy. Meditation looks at what is happening now. That is what we mean by the light. Many of us were wounded so deeply in the past that there is little possibility of contacting the source of that suffering. But we can feel their effect right now if we remain conscious. And as we become more and more conscious of that which lies within us, we become more and more whole.
I have a prayer that I wrote for myself:
May the wounds of my past never be seen as weakness
For they are proof of my strength
And the tools of my compassion
The pictures accompanying this post are by Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist who lived through great personal trauma and incorporated her journey in art.
wow… that picture is genuinely creepy. Well done.