Pain is the price we pay to play. The play of life. In Hindu philosophy, the word māyā refers to life’s play, the force that creates the illusion that the phenomenal world is real.
If you allow yourself to become quiet enough, you become aware that the outside world is created by your internal relationship with it. It is as we dream it to be. Our suffering is an entanglement of memory, nostalgia, trauma, grief, regrets of the past and fears of the future.
It plays like a movie on a screen, it all passes by, bringing with it all kinds of feelings, sense perceptions and emotions.
Like a movie thriller, the intensity of the feelings hook us into the story line. This is where the opportunity lies.
If we can make the pain our teacher then it becomes much more than a byproduct of our suffering and the story that we believe creates it. If we can’t allow the pain emotionally or physically, then we become somewhat of a blocked drain.
The opportunity that the pain brings forth for growth and healing goes begging. Yes, you have to allow it to free yourself. We only think we get over things.
There’s no way over it. You have to go through it! Our roadblock is this; we see the pain and suffering as pointless. Far from that, the pain is the point. If you are able to ride that point you can begin to vent the pain as fast as it builds up. Nothing brings personal growth like suffering.
It brings an inner stillness and spaciousness that pervades the space where all the inner and outer defensive speak used to hide. It freaks people out. People often ask me if I am OK, because I’m quiet.
Defensive Gilesy is slowly but surely being replaced by undefended Gilesy.
If I’ve got nothing useful to say, nothing is said. I’d rather listen and observe. Give you my attention, the most valuable gift I can give to another human, in my opinion.
These days when I suffer, I know full well there is a deeper lesson there for me, in terms of healing, growth, or something that I need to pay attention to. Is it possible that pain could actually have some value or even be meaningful?
Absolutely!
We need to learn how to engage with our own pain and suffering and stop hiding under the bed like little children every time it draws near, and relax into it, allow it, even invite it to your table. I
’m a very nostalgic person, my history tears at my emotional pain-body like a lion ripping apart a carcass, and perhaps it is. My lesson or learning is to keep allowing that lion to eat its meal, and to not resist the inevitable.
We can’t avoid pain in this physical play, anymore than we can avoid our emotional pain.
They are essentially the same thing and part of the great play of māyā.So for you, my friend, having read this far, in sport as in life, the pain is your growth, don’t resist it.
Much love,
Gilesy