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A Day in the Heart of Pain
 By
Stephen Levine
 
Excerpt from
Unattended Sorrow: Recovering from Loss and Reviving the Heart 
(Rodale Press, Emmaus, PA, 2005)What would it be like to awaken to a day with our hearts open to our pain?What would it be like to approach the mean habit of rejecting our pain, which turns itinto suffering, with mercy and awareness? When we are no longer mesmerized byour wounds or making a religion of the pain by which we so often define ourselves,we stop running for our lives.Some years ago, sitting next to a fifteen-month-old child whose cancer had begun inher mother's womb, as I prayed for her life, some- thing very deep inside told me tostop, that I didn't know enough to make such a prayer. It said that I was justsecond-guessing God. That I could not really comprehend what her spirit might haveneeded next, that only this pain in this fleeting body, which was being torn from thehearts of her loved ones, might teach her as she evolved toward her ceaselesspotential. That she, like us all, was in the lap of the mystery, and that the onlyappropriate prayer was, "May you get the most out of this possible!"Sharing our healing, we send wishes for the well-being of all those who, likeourselves, find themselves in a difficult moment, as the heart whispers, "May we allget the most out of this possible."And we can say to ourselves, in appreciation of the healing potential of approachingwith mercy and awareness that which so recently may have been an aversion to oursituation, "May I get the most out of this possible."It is said that nothing is true until we have experienced it, so as an experiment insending love where the fear is, we can use the presence of mild pain to test the truthof softening and sending mercy into an area of our body that is perhaps captured inthe constriction of fear. Knowing that working with physical pain demonstrates ameans of working with mental pain as well, we can let go of the tension aroundphysical discomfort.If you watch closely, you'll notice that when you experience physical pain, youostracize and isolate that part of yourself. You close off what is calling out for yourhelp. We do the same thing with our grief.When you stub your toe, more than physical pain is generated; grief is released intothe wound, followed by a litany of dissatisfactions and "poor me's," a damning of God sent heavenward. When we trip and fall in the darkness we are all too ready tocurse ourselves for being so clumsy, as well as for not being able to hold our bladderuntil dawn, for not counting the hours in our just-expended 1,000-hour light bulb,and the bruise is suffused with self-judgment and an irrational sense of responsibility.
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