Kindle Notes & Highlights
The more intimate we are with our pain, the less we suffer.
Before reaching for your favorite fix, simply ask yourself what you’re actually feeling besides your urge to thus reach. Then turn toward that feeling, giving it your undivided attention and staying with it, allowing yourself to fully feel it—as though it’s a distraught child you love and are holding. By doing so, you increase the likelihood that you won’t distract yourself from your pain, including through any addictive behavior.
Initially just say to yourself, under your breath, “Pain,” “Pain is here,” or “I’m in pain.” Doing this may sound very simple, but it’s not so easy to do only this. You may be tempted to quickly shift from naming it to pumping energy and attention into its storyline. By getting absorbed in that, you unwittingly turn your pain into suffering.
You can describe your pain not only according to its qualities—shape, intensity, texture, movement, color, density—but also, if possible, its position in the pantheon of pain categories: physical pain, frustration, hurt, shame, anger, numbness, worry, anxiety, depression, and so on.
Sense your pain, bring it into focus, and name its presenting qualities, but if it remains amorphous or otherwise descriptively elusive, just saying “pain” or “I’m hurting” is enough. Then note as best you can how it’s manifesting physically, mentally, emotionally. Naming and describing your pain marks the beginning of cultivating intimacy with it. It may still feel horrible, but at least you’re not so identified with it, not so lost in it. Darkness may still be enwrapping and contracting you, but there’s some light, some flickering of recognition. Pay closer attention and that flickering will
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Another sort of upwardly moving pain is that of emotional hurt getting stuck in our high chest and throat, its expression suppressed. There may be something important to say, but our throat and jaw are clamped or constricted enough to block it.
Saying that pain hurts or doesn’t feel good is a starter, but using these simple terms is much like trying to make intimate contact with another through touch while wearing thick, stiff gloves. We need to take the gloves off and let ourselves really feel what’s there—literally get more in touch with it—while giving our language as much poetic license as we need.
The less abstract our descriptions of our pain are, the closer we get to it.
Though some colors are almost universally associated with certain states—such as red and black with anger, or gray with depression—pain’s colors and color palette are, in general, uniquely cast for each individual.
We can literally turn red not only with anger but also with shame. However, redness is usually not as strongly associated with shame, because shame moves not upward and outward like anger, but downward and inward. Our redness fades; it gets muddied by this interior, sinking pull so that much of what we sense is an amorphous, shady blending or overlapping of
Lightening the density of our pain not only by consciously entering it but also by accessing compassion for ourselves and others in similar positions can make our pain’s intensity more manageable.
To emerge from our pain, we have to enter it. To do otherwise is to suffer. And emerging from our pain, we will sooner or later have to reenter it.
Eventually, not turning away from our pain becomes a practice we’ve taken to heart. We no longer turn away from our turning away—this being akin to the capacity to be comfortable with our discomfort. In such uncommon inclusion, we open ourselves to what truly matters, regardless of its painful
dimensions, grateful for the capacity to work with difficult conditions, grat...
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Pain can be grace—perhaps a fiery or fierce grace, but grace nonetheless—if we don’t allow it to become suffering.
Directly facing and getting to know our pain from the inside helps us make wise use of it—and eventually to find freedom through our pain.
Pain isn’t blocking our path. It’s part of our path.
When we reach the core of our pain, we discover that our pain is no longer just pain. Though it may still hurt, it doesn’t hold sway over us. Its voice is no longer our voice. We’re neither looking through its eyes nor fleeing it. We’ve stopped giving in to it, and we’ve also stopped fighting it.
This collective PTSD has been transmitted—biochemically, emotionally, and psychologically—from generation to generation, with little or no awareness that this has happened.
Shadow unseen and unacknowledged keeps us divided, fragmented, mired in toxic us-versus-them dynamics.
Fear. The American psyche is riddled with fear. This shows up not just as heightened everyday anxiety but also as normalized paranoia, a widespread affinity for conspiracy theories, an unquestioned pull to the “security” of fundamentalism, an excessive attachment to weaponry, and an exaggerated aversion to “outsiders” (not just foreigners but also non-Caucasian immigrants, blacks, socialists, non-Christians, and, ironically, Native Americans).
Until a significant number of Americans face their fear (both personal and collective) and get to the root of it, the “Home of the Brave” will continue to be a fear-driven land.
Cut through any tendency to dehumanize others. As much as you don’t like the behavior of those under the spell of collective shadow, don’t completely cast them out of your heart, including when you’re taking strong stands against what they’re doing. We’re all in this together, whether sleeping or awake, numb or feeling, out of touch or in touch, lost or found.
