There have been times I desperately wanted to keep my pain. It helped me, protected me, said good things about me that I didn’t want to lose.
I believed that my goodness was expressed through what I opposed. That if I was against something bad, that meant I was good. I thought hating certain (bad) things could bring me peace and acceptance. So I hated them. (Only bad things, of course!) I feared and avoided and argued and took righteous positions in my mind…
Until I was in so much pain I literally wanted to die. When I protected my pain so I could avoid it, life eventually became pain …and perpetual avoidance.
I remember the day I stood still in my kitchen and I couldn’t move. Every move I thought to make was too painful to make, too fraught with danger. I couldn’t even lean on anything. So I stood there. For a LONG time. So long there was no denying: my pain had run out of ways to help me.
At that point I was ready to let go of my pain and open my mind to something else. And when I got still, when I let go of my story and really looked at what I was thinking and believing, I found that my pain is only ever the result of believing a thought. That before I have a thought and believe it, the world has no pain in it. That the universe prior to my thoughts is safe and kind and loving. Always.
Pain still comes. But now I know that when it does, it’s a signal that I’m just believing something painful onto the world, something I can’t even confirm to be true.
All my pain is confusion. Holding onto it served a purpose for a while (at the time, it seemed to help) but it never can again. Because I can no longer believe the lie that pain can bring me anything but more pain.