I honestly have to admit that I have never really had a good idea about what to do with pain. Most of the time, I think I just attempted to avoid it. Avoidance has really been my most favorite coping mechanism. Just side step that shit and let it pass you by. I mean, it doesn’t work because hard stuff is part of life, and that shit just skips over and comes right back around...always.
But in the moment, avoidance feels like you dodged a bullet so it is self reinforcing...the fact that it isn’t? Well, that usually comes later so it is easy to kid yourself into believing that this time, perhaps, you might be able to avoid a confrontation or deal with the pain.
So what else to do with pain? Avoiding really is pretty short sighted in the final analysis. I think this question has perplexed me more often than I would like to admit...
Truth? I have no idea what to do with pain. Seems like I am always missing the mark. I either over indulge in the pains of life, wallowing in them, creating this awful storyline to support feeling worse about something that perhaps need not be so mired in hurt. Or I think I attempt to just skip over it as if that were actually a thing. In either extreme, I can see that I am not well equipped to really deal with pain. Yours or mine. Mostly I just want it to be gone...NOW!
But pain is something that I have had to lean into, that has been the most effective strategy in dealing with it for me. It feels so unsafe to be pinned behind pain’s intensely sharp spear, and to then make the decision to move toward it, not away. But what I have realized, I think, (what I know and feel is always shifting and changing so I am never completely sure I am making any progress...) is that leaning into the sharp, angular tips of life’s painful spears means that I come to know it better. And in knowing it better, somehow my capacity for all of life’s others wonders increases.
If I avoid, shrinking away from the opportunity to come to know my feelings, my pain, my sorrow and my loss better, more intimately, I am granted a new experience of myself and in so doing ushered into a new relationship with all the things that sit on the other side of life’s ledger from pain.
It is coming to know pain better that I have also come to know joy better also. It is through my willingness to allow pain its rightful place in my life, that I have kind of taken one step toward releasing all that wounds me and hurts me. In some sort of weird way, the fastest and most efficient way to release pain, is to move closer to it. And somehow, in ways I do not understand, in this willingness to become intimately familiar with things I would prefer to NEVER know, I expand my capacity for all of life’s wonder, experiences and immense pleasures.
So what I am learning, reluctantly, slowly, with a great deal of fear, dread and feelings to the contrary, is that the best and most efficient way to deal with pain, is to grant it its rightful and honored place in my life. Pain teaches us where our boundaries are, and in my most recent experience, where they aren’t.
The pain comes to show me where I need to make adjustments in relationships, in myself and in my life. Pain is and has been my greatest teacher. I move at the speed of pain. What I think I am just coming to realize is that pain is always going to have differing speeds and I really do have the skills to adjust myself to keep up. I think I am developing an adaptive pain meter, like my car’s cruise control adapts to differing traffic patterns. I mean I want to be going 85 miles per hour, but my car knows that we must slow down because the traffic conditions do not allow me to do that safely...
So too in my life, there appears to be an adaptive pain control. I really do have the ability to adjust myself accordingly to the pain I am currently presented with, what must be managed in my default setting where I believe the only thing to do with pain is to attempt to avoid it at all costs, or flee it.
So I begin there today with the pain I currently have in my life. I have a way to turn it up or down today, what I do not have the ability to do is avoid it or pretend it isn’t there. It is here and while I am feeling quite unsure of what to do with it...I do know that sitting with it, without doing anything else, is actually a very useful tool in living with the pain of life that comes for us all.
Again...still.
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