Pain's Lessons For Us

My favorite author at the moment, Richard Rohr, writes on "holding the pain". He says, "It is spiritually wise to stay with your pain--whatever it is--until you've learned its lessons.  We tend to want to fix it, make it go away or even try to understand it.

Holding our pain is one of the rare moments when we are open to change because our hearts are truly open and broken, splayed for all to see.  It's in this moment that God is able to teach us and we can receive it, if only because we don't have the energy to fight defensively for our sense of self.  The ego is too tired to wrestle and surrenders itself.  Our relationship with the holy deepens.

Pain's lesson for us only comes when we simply hold it, with equanimity and a spacious mind, until it has taught us its lesson.  Trying to understand our pain is like trying to understand a lecture before the professor has uttered a word.  Our pain will teach us in its own time, and if we will hold it gently, without judgement, it will draw us to a deeper place with God.