Rumi, one of my favorite poets, wrote in the 13th century that "the wound is the place where light enters you." Take a moment to read this line again and let it sink in.
Where it hurts is where the healing will happen, but healing will only take place if we shine a metaphorical light on where it hurts. We tend to go through life ignoring pain. I know that we complain about our headaches, our back aches, our carpal tunnel pain and so on, but there is other pain we go through that we do not listen to. It is the pain the tells us where our life needs attention, where we need to change. We can't heal it until we acknowledge it.
Just as we take care to remedy whatever causes our heads to ache, our stomachs to hurt and our feet to swell, we need to take care of what causes us emotional, mental and spiritual pain. Not only do these types of pain cause us dysfunction in our lives, they cause us physical pain as well. So tending to the pain of our hearts, our minds and our souls nurses our bodies of many physical ailments. Thought + Feeling = Emotion. And it is emotion we feel in our bodies–fever, shivers, crying, tightness in our chest, lower back pain, migraines, low energy, lack of sleep, and so on.
What Rumi alerts us to is that until we deal with what hurts us, we will continue to suffer for it. For until we recognize and deal with what causes us pain, the pain will surface over and over.
Where does it hurt? The pain may not be obvious just as what is causing pain may not be obvious, but a good sign is recurring pain, illness and distress. What pain keeps showing up in your body, in your life? Listen to the pain. It's trying to tell you something.
How about when that pain is in the soul, and you where born with it?
ReplyDeleteYou were not born with that pain. You like the pain, it makes other vulnerable to you.
ReplyDeleteIt's true. We are not born with the pain. Our life experiences, our choices, our beliefs and thoughts contribute to the pain we develop.
ReplyDeleteWhat the first Anonymous may be dependent on is the attention received for this pain. But healing will not come from the outside. It comes from within.