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Today's
Meditation:
I've felt a lot of pain in my life, both physical and
emotional, and probably spiritual, too. My first
reaction to pain, of course, is to want it to go away and
leave me be, followed very closely by the fear that this
new pain won't go away, and that I'll have to suffer from
it forever.
For most of my life, I saw pain as a very negative thing,
though there's always been that part of me that's
recognized that pain also provides us with learning.
Sometimes it was learning that I really couldn't jump from
a second-story landing without hurting myself, and
sometimes it was learning which words really hurt other
people, and why I shouldn't use them ever again.
Pain tends to be a symptom of something that's very wrong,
and pain is a good indicator of what may be wrong in our
hearts and our bodies.
And once we know what's wrong, we can work at fixing
it. When I broke a bone in my ankle, the doctor put
the ankle in a cast and kept it immobilized so that it
could heal. When I felt the pain of a good friend
dying, that pain taught me an awful lot about having
regrets about not having told that friend just how much I
appreciated her, and just how much she meant to me.
My pain is a force that keeps me learning, and the more we
learn, the less pain is needed-- so the less pain we end
up feeling.
Do you see pain as a teacher? As Elisabeth points
out below, feeling pain can be one of our greatest
blessings in life, even though we probably see it as a
curse when we're feeling it. Of course, we're not
talking here about chronic pain that even doctors can't
figure out, but we're talking about the kind of pain that
helps us to learn more about life, more about what to
avoid in the future, more about love and compassion and
taking care of ourselves.
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