The pain of pain, and stepping out of the prescribed loops of suffering.
To see and participate in our evolution with meaningful actions, we must look past approved sources and the cacophanous rage and division.
The Pain of Pain: The Second Arrow
When touched with a feeling of pain,
the ordinary uninstructed person
sorrows, grieves,
and laments, beats his breast,
becomes distraught.
So he feels two pains,
physical and mental.
Just as if they were to shoot a man
with an arrow and,
right afterward,
were to shoot him with another one,
so that he would feel
the pains of two arrows…
(shared by Jill Satterfield)
There is so much suffering in our world. We suffer in our body, mind and soul. We carry the unhealed suffering of a long history of humans. And on the world stage, scene after scene features an endless parade of pain and suffering.
Denial, anger, rage, overwhelm, sadness, and depression are among the natural emotional responses to personal and collective suffering. Our society has shown us how it expects us to manage those symptoms. In times past and in various cultures, there were certain ways for healing the body, mind and soul that we aren’t typically exposed to now. In this current state of the world, we’re expected to, first and foremost, deem pain to be wrong and unacceptable — and to relieve it as soon as humanly possible.
We’re taught that painful experiences that involve our body or emotions indicate something is wrong inside of us, probably a genetic thing, or a chemical imbalance. We’re expected to go to a “professional” that we may never have even met before, and listen to them tell us if, indeed, we are even in pain or if we are making it up, or if they’re “baffled” by what could possibly cause this array of symptoms.
We may answer some routine questions, but it’s expected the real knowledge about our body and mind will come from the outside “authority” — one who consults a protocol, an algorithm that they were taught by a verifiably corrupt system that granted them the power to name our sickness and to instruct us to take a pill for it.
Different from the personal cause of pain that we feel in our body or emotions, society infers that pain in our mind or soul indicates that something is wrong outside of us, in the world — something beyond our control, leaving us helpless and in need of authority systems to help sort it out.
To deal with our pain, the norm may be to express words of anger or words of grief or words of spiritual bypassing. While some types of people normalize words kept within a personal context, others normalize expressions of vehement blame. And of course, in American media and social media, it’s expected that people will blame not the ruling class or the collective trauma that it has inflicted, but rather to project disdain onto a group of their peers. They will rage-bait, spat out disparaging labels, and deepen lines of division.
It's extremely difficult to experience personal and collective suffering. It can be equally difficult to see never-ending loops of suffering being catalyzed around us, again and again and again. The pain and suffering and rage and grief is very loud and the cacophony nearly unbearable at times.
But the fact is, more people than ever are stopping themselves from going back into unhealthy cultural patterns and suffering loops. In fact, our awakening is obviously in full swing, and every day, fewer choose to engage in those strategies.
There are many who are healing themselves and their communities, and with each success, they naturally want to share their experience with others. But they don’t get the same airplay, and they tend to be naturally quieter, and to prioritize a physical, localized presence.
In the early 2000’s, I attended a small gentle yoga class every week on Tuesday nights. My teacher, Roy, was a deeply spiritual man who would later become an ordained minister and write a book merging the subjects of prayer and mindful movement.
September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday. I remember where I was when I first saw the traumatic video that would be played over and over and over, but I don’t remember driving to class that evening. I sighed a quiet thank you when I arrived to find that class hadn’t been canceled. It was a particularly small class that night, but perhaps that made it easier for Roy to bring us together into a tightly-knit circle, arms around each other’s shoulders, heads bowed, and to lead us in an intimate prayer of peace and love for all those killed and harmed, and for all those who caused killing and harm. I recall a sense of black, velvety energy and a peace that I felt as deep, cellular, infinite. That shared experience of mindful, loving action is seared into my mind and gave me an unusually strong foundation from which to process the events and revelations that would continue to unfold.
We’ve been forced to endure state-led murder using false flags, endless wars, and genocide. The entire world population has routinely viewed multiple replays of public executions of peaceful leaders and innocents on the street, in schools, at concerts and public squares and churches.
We can grieve, we can heal, and we can create a just and loving society. But we can’t do it using the same old strategies and suffering loops that were designed by the authority systems we find ourselves in. These are the forces that do the same thing every time: funnel pain and suffering and compassion into the same old systems of division and control.
I am writing to remind myself and you that while the public sphere is, as always, being inundated with traumatic triggers, there are many in our world who we don’t see who are going inward and taking the small steps that need to be done consistently to enable them to bring forth what is in them that the world needs.
Those people are not allowing themselves to suppress their pain nor to ignore the world in favor of superficiality or of monasticism.
In contrast, they’re surrendering to the pain, denying the systems the ability to highjack their feelings for its purposes. They’re allowing their feelings to carry them to their calling and listening for clues on what meaningful actions they know they must do.
I’m quite sure the actions won’t be pill-popping, rage-baiting, or partisan calls for yet another round of governmental “solutions.”
And you and I? What will we choose to do?