Pain Is Your Teacher

The power of turning toward your experience is phenomenal, especially when it is something that you don’t like. In order to be willing to take this healing step, you need to understand that the challenges of your life are for you. One of the ways that I describe this is to imagine a fierce lion, one that represents everything that you hate and fear. It has been chasing you your entire life. At moments it gets so close that you can feel its breath on the back of your legs. The closer it gets, the faster you run. If you are lucky, there will be a time when you can’t run anymore because you are just too tired. As you fall to the ground, ready to be devoured, the lion screeches to a halt, and you find yourself face to face with your pain. The lion opens its mouth and rather than eating you, you see on its tongue a gift that it has been trying to bring to you for many years. Your pain has waited your entire life for you to be present for it. It always comes bearing gifts, but you have to turn and look in order to discover these gifts.

The pain in your life, whether it is physical, mental, or emotional, is not comfortable but it is trustable and ultimately benevolent. It isn’t here because you have done something wrong or because Life is against you. It is here because pain is your teacher. As author and spiritual teacher, Stephen Levine, once said to me, “Pain grabs your attention!”  If you change your relationship to it from one of resistance to one of curiosity, it becomes a doorway into the healing you long for.

I ran away from my pain, including fear, sadness, loneliness, and despair, for a good deal of my life and it only made it worse. I was such a bundle of pain in my twenties that I didn’t want to live anymore and tried to kill myself three times. Since I couldn’t seem to live with my pain, but I also couldn’t seem to get away from it, I asked myself this question: What is this pain all about?  In just a matter of months, my first teacher came into my life who taught me one of the core skills of awakening – In the seeing is the movement.  In other words, when you can give yourself your own undivided attention during uncomfortable times in your life, that simple ‘seeing’ and willingness to be fully present for what you are experiencing allows the bound up energy to begin to move.

The wonderful Tibetan Lama and founder of Naropa University, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, goes to the heart of what we are exploring here when he says:

If there were no confusion, there would be no wisdom….
Chaos is workable…not regressive.
Respect whatever happens, chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.
Respect the upsurge of energy that is emotions, no matter what form.  Nothing is rejected as bad or grasped as good.
We grapple only because we feel they will overwhelm the basic posture we have deemed ourselves to be.
Go towards the emotion, then there is no resistance.  Let yourself be in the emotion, go through it, give-in to it, experience it.  Then there is rhythm.
Transmutation involves going through such fear.