The Pain of Being Here
El dolor de estar aquí
A student describes being caught in a cycle of pain, fear, and chasing peace, and asks why the present moment itself feels so painful.
The Pain of Being Here
A student describes being caught in a cycle of pain, fear, and chasing peace, and asks why the present moment itself feels so painful.
The fear is driving me to chase something, because I can't sit with the pain that is present. But why do I have so much pain in the now, when I'm not dwelling on the past or the future? The now feels painful, and then I don't like it, and then I start fearing it, so I'm trying to chase something. And the chase is just too much. I run out, I run out, I'm going mad. Then I seek peace, and peace means trying to get out of my mind to be in the now. And then the now is painful.
There are many valuable practices and techniques for addressing pain in the now, therapy being one of them. But the way to resolve it is through the pain: through the fear, into the pain, through the pain.
You ask why. There are ways to explain it generally. Karma is one way to wrap it up very simply. Another is just the nature of being human.
What I can say is that it's not a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing special about you that's missing. Just being human is painful. It's painful because evolutionarily we grew into having a very loving heart, in a world that contains all kinds of pain. The pain is practically infinite, but our heart can hold it all. We just haven't learned how.
Welcoming the pain
I would say: welcome the pain, and learn to let it open you up. Consider that it's something pushing to come through, something that is valuable and beautiful. It is love. It's our love. It's love itself.
We can't have it both ways. We can't reach out with our loving heart, open and vulnerable, and also have life go our way. There is a surrendering to the open heart.
Sitting with the pain is a way of connecting with that.
Yes, and it's learning to be with ourselves at the level of being human. There's an aspect that is personal growth: being able to be tender and loving with ourselves. And there's another aspect, which is to realize and recognize that there is a love holding us.
What we truly are
That's where only non-dual language can point to it more accurately, because there isn't really a love holding us, there isn't an "I" and a "love." But to put it in words: there is something vaster than what we take ourselves to be, which is what we truly are, which is loving, and which is always this way. It is the nature of this reality.
When we start to glimpse it this way, to know this non-intellectually, all of the pains of life become a kind of playground. It becomes a joy to live, even in the deepest pains and fears. I'm describing something that is palpable now, and it's not personal to me. Everything is Buddha nature. In Christianity it's called the kingdom of heaven. It's described as "you enter the kingdom," but if the kingdom is here and now, I think a more accurate language is: you realize that this is the kingdom. You realize something that already is, something you have overlooked. It's not missing.
Being lost as a beginning
I appreciate the pointing in that direction. It really helps, because quite often I feel so lost.
We first need to be lost and confused, because otherwise we are in the conviction of our beliefs, our false beliefs. But when those start to fall, we become lost and confused. Dante's Divine Comedy starts with the line: "Midway through my life I found myself in a dark forest." It's the beginning of awakening.