“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in…tranquility.”
― Kahlil Gibran
I admit that I have had an easy life. Not all that much pain of either kind. But I’m still here, human in a sometimes crappy world. And I’ve noticed that when I pay attention to the pain in my life, when I listen to it, it helps me to change or leads me through change.
I know a man in remission from cancer who said, “I just hope I learned what I was supposed to learn from the experience because I’d rather not go through it again.”
It’s the difficult bits that make the biggest difference in our lives, isn’t it?
Steven Levine said, “Pity is the experience of meeting pain with fear. It makes one want to change the givens of the moment…But when we touch the same pain with love, letting it be as it is, meeting it with mercy instead of fear and hatred, then that is compassion.”
Unlike pity, compassion with ourselves and others has within it the power to change.
Your pain is talking. Listen to it and change. In childbirth and in life, pain has a purpose. Don’t just suffer through it. Transcend it.
