“You change your relationship to the pain by opening up to it and paying attention to it. You ‘put out the welcome mat.’ Not because you’re masochistic, but because the pain is there. So you need to understand the nature of the experience and the possibilities for, as the doctors might put it, ’learning to live with it,’ or, as the Buddhists might put it, ’liberation from the suffering.’ If you distinguish between pain and suffering, change is possible.”
~~Jon Kabat-Zinn, “At Home in Our Bodies”
Such a radical idea. . . saying, “here I am, come join me.” Leaning in to that which makes us feel uncomfortable. . .
The fear of losing someone. the fear of a particular diagnosis. the fear of a difficult conversation. . .
The pain of saying goodbye. The physical pain that comes from illness. The psychological pain that comes when we are betrayed. . .
When you think about it, some of the things that mindfulness asks us to do go totally against what is innate in us. Think about a one-celled organism. If you poke at it, it will try to move away. There is some threat there, despite not having what you or I would think of as an ego.
But this is the point of mindfulness, isn’t it? To get ourselves off of automatic pilot, to free ourselves from suffering? To bring ourselves out of the lull of our average everydayness to be fully present with what is.
But what about when we are our at our most vulnerable times? Can we remain open-hearted, set that welcome mat out to our suffering and say, “enter if you will”?
One of the key elements of mindfulness that we don’t practice in our average every day life is gentleness.
There is a compassionate gentleness and kindness that is cultivated with mindfulness so that we don’t bully or bulldoze into that pain, suffering, or fear.
We lightly entertain these thoughts, feelings, and sensations as we start to become familiar with them.
We learn not to get hooked into beating ourselves us for what’s there when we sit long enough to be present to our thoughts or feelings.
We allow them to be, but we are no longer ignorant of them.
We have a conscious awareness of them and with practice, we can offer ourselves lovingkindness and equanimity and welcome those sore spots into the totality of our experience.
Remember back to one of my really early posts… Frank Ostaseski teaches “Welcome everything, push away nothing” in his trainings on being a compassionate companion to the dying. These are truly wise words to live by and to cultivate in our hectic, chaotic lives.
