Put Out Your Welcome Mat
February 23, 2012 by Namaste Consulting Inc
“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.
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I totally agree; like they always say, leave your problems at home. If we follow that thinking, then we will be well on our way:) Great post and I look forward to sharing more with you:)
Thanks so much! I am glad that we are here and have the ability to share what’s worked with us on our own journey. I also look forward to checking out your blog and learning more about you!
Peace, Jen
I live with chronic pain from a triple rollover and a professional baseball career.
Pain has many components to it. I named my pain MR. P after Happy Days and MR. C so I could compete against. Pain is like air, you do not see it but it has power.
Being in a chronic Pain group for a year was an education what pain can do to you. If you fear your pain trouble is brewing for you. Watch how you describe your pain, remember the left brain is a computer, so watch what power you give your pain through your words.
Pain can be dealt with and compressed over time with an athletes mindset and work ethic. Now if pain reaches that certain level of intensity then all bets are off.
The mind reads pain and has alot of lattitude is what it senses.
Now, I threw my meds away and handle my pain, paying little atention to it as possible.
I have learned not to judge pain or focus on it. Our mind and words can make it much worse.
Pain itself can do no damage unless it is at an u nbearable level.
The only side effect from this that it takes energy to do this. My pain does not influence my life much at all now. It takes time.
I can appreciate that Marty. I’ve lived with a few years of chronic profound pain and am feeling very blessed that I seem to be on the other side of it but it’s been a tough 6 years of almost daily migraines.
I, too, have found that changing things, rather than meds, has helped a lot. I’ve made a lot of changes to my diet, to who I have in my life, how I schedule my time, what I focus on… the use of biofeedback, shifting how I meditate, etc.
Chronic pain takes so much out of us. I realize now how many things I should not have been doing as exhausted as I was. I closed a lot of doors to non-essential things in my life just so I could get through each day. And it makes me so mindful of the good days/weeks now. Thanks for the comments!
I find the idea of separating pain from suffering appealing. So often, we repress pain, or judge ourselves for feeling and responding to it, to our detriment. What’s the best thing a friend can do for us when we feel pain? Empathize, soothe us, give us the space to acknowledge it. As I attempt to be a better friend to myself, I find nonjudgmental acceptance offering me more than an attempt to escape, avoid or judge the pain I’m in.
In also seems that by acknowledging and “welcoming” pain, we become by nature, less fearful. If we don’t presume disaster or our own inability to cope, pain becomes a little more transcendent and a little less catastrophic (at least for me). There becomes inherently less to fear.
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