The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to
be loved proved much longer than I realized.
—HENRI NOUWEN
During a workshop in the rural Northwest, I was speaking on the possibilities that arise when we stop running away from what is difficult. One of the attendees, a burly middle-aged man with broad shoulders and an even wider smile, spoke up. “That reminds me of telephone poles.”
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. “Telephone poles? What do you mean?” I asked.
He explained that he once had a job installing telephone poles. “They’re hard and heavy, standing up to forty feet high.” There was a critical moment after you placed a pole in the ground, he said, when a pole was unstable and might topple over. “If it hit you, it could break your back.”
His first day on the job, the man turned to his partner and said, “If this pole starts to fall, I’m running like hell.”
But the old-timer replied, “Nope, you don’t want to do that. If that pole starts to fall, you want to go right up to it. You want to get real close and put your hands on the pole. It’s the only safe place to be.”
When confronted by harsh realities in life, or even some small discomfort or inconvenience, our instinctive reaction is to run in the opposite direction. But we can’t escape suffering. It’ll just take us by surprise and whack us in the back of the head. The wiser response is to move toward what hurts, to put our hands and attention gently and mercifully on what we might otherwise want to avoid.
Especially in Western culture, we are taught that if suffering exists, something is wrong. It is a mistake. I had a boss years ago who, when something didn’t work out, demanded, “Whose fault is this? Who is to blame?” When I would explain that sometimes things just don’t go according to plan, he would yell, “Don’t be ridiculous! This is somebody’s fault.”
When we believe that suffering is a mistake, it’s no wonder we do everything in our power to steer clear of it. Our avoidance instinct is also due to the fact that our culture has decided that suffering has no value. “Why suffer?” we have been trained to say to ourselves. “You’re better off escaping this pain by any means possible!”
As a result, we have become masters of distraction. To a great extent, this is our primary human practice. A large portion of our day is consumed with activities that are attempts to protect ourselves from discomfort: surfing the Internet, watching TV, working long hours, drinking, eating. Our approach naturally leads to epidemics of alcoholism and drug abuse; compulsive overeating, gambling, and shopping; and an insecure attachment to our technological devices. We have become a society riddled with unhealthy addictions.
Do any of these strategies really work? Sure, we get some temporary relief by ignoring problems or substituting a more pleasant experience for an unpleasant one. But when I look closely at my life, I see that such benefits are short-lived. What sticks around for the long run is the habit of self-deception and its negative consequences.
Suffering is exacerbated by avoidance. The body carries with it any undigested pain. Our attempts at self-protection cause us to live in a small, dark, cramped corner of our lives. We accept a limited perspective of the situation and a restricted view of ourselves. We cling to what is familiar simply in order to reassert control, thinking we can fend off what we fear will be intolerable. When we push back, hoping to get rid of a difficult experience, we are actually encapsulating it. In short, what we resist persists.
My mom wasn’t the ideal mother. She could turn her love on and off in an instant. Yet one afternoon when I was about five years old, she taught me an invaluable lesson. I cut my hand while playing with a pocketknife. I was terrified because there was blood everywhere. My mother took one look at the wound and calmly said, “Oh, I think we need the magic towel for this one.” Then she pulled me up onto her lap, wrapped my hand in a towel hanging from the stove, and held me until I began to calm down.
After a while, I caught my breath, and she said, “Let’s take a look.” I didn’t want to; it was too frightening. But accompanied by her kindness and reassurance, I was willing to try. Slowly, she unwrapped the towel, and together we looked into the wound. I realized that I would be okay. In that moment, I saw that it is possible and even helpful to turn toward our pain and that there is always the possibility of healing.
That insight planted the seed for much of the work I have done in my adult life. The secret of healing lies in exploring our wounds in order to discover what is really there. When we allow the experience—creating space and acceptance for it—we find that our suffering is not a static, monolithic thing, but rather it is composed of many elements, including our attitudes toward it. Understanding this, we can work skillfully to alleviate the underlying reactions that exacerbate our problems so that we might ease our suffering.
Suffering will only be removed by wisdom, not by drenching it in sunshine or attempting to bury it in a dark basement.
* * *
Suffering is a pretty dramatic word. Most people don’t think the term applies to them. “I’m not suffering,” they say. They imagine children starving in a famine-struck African country or refugees fleeing war in the Middle East or people afflicted with devastating illnesses. We imagine that if we are good and careful, stay positive, play by the rules, and ignore what’s on the news every night, then it won’t happen to us. We think suffering is somewhere else.
But suffering is everywhere. This is one of the most difficult truths of existence.
Suffering is falling in love and then becoming complacent. Suffering is not being able to connect with our children. It’s our anxiety about what will happen at work tomorrow. Suffering is knowing your roof will leak in the next rainstorm. It’s finally buying that shiny new smartphone, then seeing an advertisement for an even newer device with incremental improvements. Hoping your company will get rid of your grumpy boss who still has a year to go before his retirement. Thinking that life is moving by too fast or too slow. Not getting what you want, getting what you don’t want, or getting what you want but fearing you will lose it—all of this is suffering. Sickness is suffering, old age is suffering, and so is dying.
In Buddhism, the old Pali word for suffering is dukkha, which is sometimes translated as “anguish” or more simply as “unsatisfactoriness” or even “stress.” Dukkha arises from ignorance, from not understanding that everything is impermanent, unreliable, and ungraspable—and wanting it to be otherwise. We wish to claim our possessions, our relationships, and even our identities as unchanging, but we can’t. All are constantly transforming and slipping right through our fingers.
We think we need the conditions of our lives to reliably give us what we want. We want to construct an ideal future or nostalgically relive a perfect past. We mistakenly believe this will make us happy. But we all can see that even those people who realize extraordinary conditions in life still suffer. Even if we are rich, beautiful, smart, in perfect health, and blessed with wonderful families and friendships, in time these will break down, be destroyed, and change … or we will simply lose interest. On some level, we know this is the case, yet we can’t seem to stop grasping for those “perfect” conditions.
Originally, the word dukkha referred to an axle that didn’t fit quite right into the hub of a wheel on an oxcart. I’ve ridden in those wooden oxcarts in India. Bouncing up and down on dirt roads full of potholes made for a pretty rough journey. When the axle and hub weren’t properly aligned, the ride was extra bumpy.
Let’s say you get fired from your job. That is undoubtedly a stressful event. But the suffering is greatly exaggerated if you refuse to accept what has happened as the current reality. Under such difficult circumstances, we tend to say things to ourselves like, “This isn’t fair. This can’t be true. This isn’t the way it should be,” which only causes us to suffer more. A critical point here is that acceptance doesn’t require agreement. We may still want to work to change our life circumstances. But you can’t make a change until you first accept the truth of what is right in front of you, eyes wide open.
Dukkha comes from the mental and emotional confusion of not seeing and accepting the conditions of life as they actually exist. We always want something. What we have never seems to be enough. We want to ignore the temporality of permanence. And that creates an unsatisfactoriness, a dread, that rumbles beneath our awareness and drives us to behave in ways that exacerbate rather than ease our pain.
What is an alternative way to handle life’s inevitable dukkha?
The first step is to realize that pain and suffering actually are two intimately related yet different experiences. The familiar adage says, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” That about sums it up.
If you are alive, you will experience pain. Everyone has a different pain threshold, and yet we all experience it throughout our lives. Physical pain is the nervous system’s internal alarm, your body reacting to a potentially damaging stimulus. It creates an unpleasant sensory experience, such as hunger, exhaustion, an upset tummy, a pounding headache, or the aches of arthritis. Pain also can take emotional form, such as the crush of heartbreak or the sadness of loss.
So there is pain, from which there is no escaping. And then there is suffering, which we can do something about. Suffering generally occurs as a chain reaction: stimulus-thought-reaction. Many times, we have no control over the stimulus that causes us pain. But we can shift our relationship to the thoughts about and emotional reactions to the pain, which frequently intensify our suffering.
Suffering is about perception and interpretation. It is our mental and emotional relationship to what is first perceived as an unpleasant or undesirable experience. Our stories and beliefs about what is happening or did happen shape our interpretation of it. When things don’t go according to plan, some people believe that they are helpless victims or that they “got what they deserved.” This leads to resignation and apathy. When we get caught in anxiety and worry about what might happen in the future, it can quickly proliferate into a web of fear that is not easily corralled.
Opening to pain in the present moment, we may be able to do something to improve the situation, maybe not, but we can certainly notice how our attitudes toward the experience are impacting what is happening. My reaction to pain, even to the thought of pain, changes everything. It can increase or decrease my suffering. I have always liked the formula:
Pain + Resistance = Suffering
If we attempt to push away our pain, whether it is physical or emotional, we almost always find ourselves suffering even more. When we open to suffering, inquiring into it instead of trying to deny it, we see how we might make use of it in our lives.
* * *
After my heart attack and a triple bypass surgery a few years ago, a famous Tibetan Buddhist teacher kindly called to wish me well. I knew he had heart problems himself, so I asked him how he dealt with it all—the drama, the confusion, the precariousness, and the beauty. I half expected him to offer me some esoteric meditation practice.
Instead there was a pause, after which he said, “Well, I thought to myself, it’s good to have a heart. And if we have one, then we should expect it will have problems!” The teacher giggled in his very Tibetan way, reminded me to get plenty of rest, and hung up the phone.
I realized he was right. It was true. All humans have problems. All beings feel pain. Once I was able to accept that I had a fragile human heart and that it would take some time to heal, I could relax into acceptance of this temporarily painful situation. In so doing, my suffering also relaxed.
After some time, I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t trade in my heart or its suffering even if I had the option to do so. Without my heart, how would I know all the love that was surrounding me during my illness? Without suffering, how would I feel empathy for others or meet their suffering with a compassionate response?
We can shift our relationship to pain by the way we give our attention to it—by turning toward it rather than trying to bury it or run in the opposite direction. One teacher of mine suggested that we begin by “putting out the welcome mat.” We invite in what hurts; we sit down with it and get to know it really well. In this way, we come to understand the nature of the experience and the deeper causes not always evident at first glance. In the end, the only way through suffering is for us to allow what is happening, welcoming the experience and introducing awareness and compassion where denial was predominant.
We sometimes fail to remember that pain has an essential role in our lives. If we didn’t feel the discomfort from the heat of a fire, we would burn our fingers. The painful emotions of shame, loneliness, and guilt highlight deeper troubles in our relationships. Pain can motivate us to take action, to identify and address its causes, and even to seek happiness.
The journey through life is already pretty difficult. There’s plenty of unavoidable pain. But when we are not aligned with the way life actually works, we add a great deal of unnecessary suffering to the mix. In such moments, it seems useful to stop fighting circumstances, come back to reality, and get ourselves centered again. There can be no suffering without suffering. Suffering can open us to freedom, to compassion, to love.
This concept is so important. It is the medicine many of us crave when we realize that suffering is an attitude of mind. We have a choice to break the momentum of habit. We can release old attitudes and turn toward the difficulty to see what it has to teach us. Instead of trying to avoid it, deny it, endure it, or become resentful of it, we can discover another way.
* * *
One day, in the middle of writing a foundation grant report, I got a call from a man I didn’t know. He explained that he was the father of a seven-year-old boy who had been very ill with cancer. Some people had told him that I might be able to help him out.
I said certainly, I would be willing to help the family through their grieving process. I made some suggestions about how I might be able to support when the time was right.
The man paused. It was clear that I didn’t understand yet what was happening. He practically whispered, “No, Jamie died a half hour ago. We’d like to keep our boy at home in his bed for a little while. Can you come over now?”
Suddenly, the situation wasn’t hypothetical; it was real and staring me in the face. I had never done anything like this before. Sure, I had sat at the bedsides of people who were dying, but I had not attended the death of a young child with two grieving parents in unimaginable pain. I honestly had no idea what to do, so I let my fear and confusion arise. How could I possibly know in advance what was needed?
I arrived at the house a short while later, where the dispirited parents greeted me. They showed me to the boy’s room. Walking in, I followed my natural inclination: I went over to Jamie’s bed, leaned down, and kissed him on the forehead to say hello. The parents broke into tears because, while they had cared for him with great love and attention, nobody had touched the boy since he had died. It wasn’t their fear of his corpse that kept them away; it was their fear of the grief that touching him might unleash.
I suggested that the parents begin washing the boy’s body—something we often did at Zen Hospice Project. Bathing the dead is an ancient ritual that crosses cultures and religions. Humans have been doing it for millennia. It demonstrates our respect for those who have passed, and it is an act that helps loved ones come to terms with the reality of their loss. I felt my role in this ritual was simple: to act with minimal interference and to bear witness.
The parents gathered sage, rosemary, lavender, and sweet rose petals from their garden. They moved very slowly as they put the herbs in warm water, then collected towels and washcloths. After a few moments of silence, the mother and father began to wash their little boy. They started at the back of Jamie’s head and then moved down his back. Sometimes they would stop and tell one another a story about their son. At other times, it all became too much for the father. He would go stare out the window to gather himself. The grief filling the room felt enormous, like an entire ocean crashing upon a single shore.
The mother examined and lovingly cared for each little scratch or bruise on her son’s body. When she got to Jamie’s toes, she counted them, as she had done on the day he was born. It was both gut-wrenching and extraordinarily beautiful to watch.
From time to time, she would look over at me as I sat quietly in the corner of the room, a beseeching question filling her eyes: “Will I be able to survive? Can I do this? Can any mother live through such loss?” I would nod in encouragement for her to continue at her own pace and hand her another washcloth, trusting the process. I felt confident that she would find healing by allowing herself to be in the midst of her suffering.
It took hours for the parents to wash their son. When the mother finally got to the face of her child, which she had saved for last, she embraced him with incredible tenderness, her eyes pure reflections of her love and sorrow. She had not only turned toward her suffering; she had entered into it completely. As she did, the fierce fire of her love began to melt the contraction of fear around her heart. It was such an intimate moment. There was no separation between mother and child. Perhaps it was like his birth, when they had the experience of being psychologically one.
After the bathing ritual was complete, the parents dressed Jamie in his favorite Mickey Mouse pajamas. His brothers and sister came into the room, making a mobile out of the model planes and other flying objects he had collected, and they hung it over his bed.
Each one of them had faced unbelievable pain. There was no more pretense or denial. They had been able to find some healing in each other’s care and perhaps in opening to the essential truth that death is an integral, natural part of life.
Can you imagine yourself living through what these parents did? “No,” many of you will say, “I cannot.” Losing a child is most people’s worst nightmare. I couldn’t endure it. I couldn’t bear it, you may think. But the hard truth is, terrible things happen in life that we can’t control, and somehow we do bear them. We bear witness to them. When we do so with the fullness of our bodies, minds, and hearts, often a loving action emerges.
Humans are amazing. I find our courage astounding. People everywhere experience unbelievable hardships—wars, unanticipated catastrophes, financial upheaval, the loss of their homelands, the deaths of their children—and yet they go on, they turn toward, they recover, they live. And sometimes they act with enormous compassion toward others who have suffered similarly or who may yet in times to come.
One of the most stunning images of this that I can recall came after the major earthquake and tsunami disabled the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. A photo in the newspaper revealed a dozen elderly Japanese men gathered humbly, lunch baskets in hand, standing in a line outside the plant’s gates. The reporter explained that they were offering to take the place of younger workers inside who were attempting to contain the radiation-contaminated plant. In total, more than five hundred seniors volunteered.
One of the group’s organizers said, “My generation, the old generation, promoted the nuclear plants. If we don’t take responsibility, who will? When we were younger, we never thought of death. But death becomes familiar as we get older. We have a feeling that death is waiting for us. This doesn’t mean I want to die. But we become less afraid of death as we get older.”
Suffering is our common ground. Trying to evade suffering by pretending that things are solid and permanent may give us a temporary sense of control. But this is a painful illusion because life’s conditions are fleeting and impermanent.
We can make a different choice. We can interrupt our habits of resistance that harden us and leave us resentful and afraid. We can soften around our aversion.
We can see the way things actually are and act accordingly, with wise discernment and love.
The Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah once motioned to a glass at his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”
After being with Jamie’s parents as they bathed their son, I returned home, and I held my own child very close. Gabe was also seven years old at the time. I saw clearly how precious he is to me, what a joy he is to have in my life. While I felt devastated by what I had witnessed, I also was able to appreciate the beauty in it.
* * *
The experience clarified for me the value of suffering. Facing suffering head-on helps me to see the true nature of life, which is that it is unpossessable. Furthermore, it deepens the empathy I feel for others, making me more aware of our common humanity. When I reflect on suffering, I can see where I’m getting caught up in my own pain, and that keeps me from generating unnecessary suffering for myself. Finally, it shows me the possibility of taking a more balanced view of life, how it is possible to live in a world of constant change with more ease.
When we welcome our suffering, it shakes us out of our complacency. It can bring clarity and help us find meaning, without which the pain might be too much to bear. It tenderizes and opens us to vulnerability that gives us the capacity to sense, make contact with, and experience more of life. We access our courage to be with what otherwise would be intolerable.
Furthermore, when we bear witness to our own suffering, we stop separating ourselves from it. We realize that it is an integral part of the human condition; it’s not personal to us. Then we can say to ourselves, “Hey, this suffering may be moving through me in a unique way, but it is not just mine. It has been going on since the dawn of time.”
That perspective, in turn, gives rise to compassion and action. When we take off our armor, our hearts are more available to love, and the mind is free to see the fundamental causes of suffering. We not only come to terms with our deepest fears, but also connect with others who have similar wounds. We are motivated to find ways to reduce suffering—our own and other people’s. “A good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor’s examining himself,” wrote Carl Jung. “It is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal.”
Turning toward our suffering may plunge us into the very sadness, fear, and pain that we usually try so hard to avoid. But if we are willing to brave the darkness by welcoming everything and pushing away nothing, the energy that had been consumed by our resistance to life’s unwelcome events will now be available to contribute to healing, building resilience, and acting with love.
* * *
An integral part of healing is letting go. But there is no letting go until there is letting in. I learned this the hard way.
When I was thirteen, an experience shattered my innocence. My family lived in a house on land given to my grandfather by the Catholic Church. It was across the street from the parochial grade school that my brothers and I attended and that my grandfather, a bricklayer, had helped to build. A block away was our parish church, where my grandfather had served as sexton, my father attended early Sunday Mass, and my mother prayed devoutly.
Like all my family members, I was a practicing Catholic. I loved being an altar boy, taking part in the rituals, and being that close to God. I was happy when I got a job in the rectory where the priest lived, answering phones and doing odd jobs on Sunday nights.
My dream job became a nightmare when one of the priests, a portly man in his fifties who had clearly had too much to drink, called me up to his room one night and started asking me questions about school. He seemed friendly enough at first, but when I told him what my grades were, he pulled out a paddle and said that I needed to be punished. He demanded that I pull down my pants and lie half-naked across his knees. I felt frightened, vulnerable, and weak. He was the one with all the power, and he used it to molest me.
Tragically, this became a regular event. Over time, the abuse became more twisted and violent, the betrayal more devious, and the confusion over my own sexuality more unmistakable.
I felt trapped. I tried to quit my job at the rectory, but my parents wouldn’t allow it. I was too ashamed to tell them the real story. In fact, I couldn’t tell anyone about what was happening because the priest was “a man of God,” a protected authority, revered in the community. I was just a kid. Why would anyone believe me? There was no one I could turn to. I couldn’t even go to confession.
One Christmas Eve when I was fifteen, my mother and I celebrated by attending midnight Mass together. My oldest brother was in Vietnam at the time. After the service, my mother brought me into the chapel with this priest who was abusing me and sobbed to him about the danger her older son was facing. She asked the priest to pray for him.
I wanted to scream, “Are you kidding me? This man is a fraud! A monster! He can’t help your son survive; he is practically killing me!” But I could only stand there, frozen, as my abuser consoled my mother in his priestly role. I was overwhelmed by the duplicity of it all, but unable at that young age to take any action on my behalf.
We altar boys alluded to what was happening, but none of us spoke honestly about it. I later learned that the priest had regularly molested other boys who trusted him, as well. All of us were afraid of his power and had troubles elsewhere in our lives that left us feeling weak and isolated. He was trolling for innocents.
The sexual abuse continued for the next few years. I dreaded Sundays. Like other victims of abuse, I learned how to live a lie. I buried the secret deep inside and pretended it didn’t exist. I carried the shame. I became adept at keeping the shadowy parts of myself pushed far below consciousness. Increasingly, I felt disassociated from my body, in an almost constant state of disorientation. I walked through life numb, emotionless. At other times, I wanted to kill him. I hated him, and sometimes I projected that hatred onto everyone and everything that crossed my path. I felt dirty, like there was something wrong with me. I was broken, unrepairable. I tried to suppress my memories, to deny what had happened. I didn’t want it to define me.
For years, I had horrible nightmares and flashbacks, which I never spoke about out loud. This habit of not facing my wounds may have made me susceptible to still more sexual abuse by others as I became a teenager. This led to further distortions in my own mind. Unconsciously and ignorantly, I began to conflate pedophilia, homosexuality, and child molestation. Of course, we now know that child molestation and child sexual abuse don’t imply a particular psychological makeup or motive on the part of the perpetrator. Not all incidents of child sexual abuse are committed by pedophiles. And people who sexually abuse boys are not necessarily homosexuals. There is, in fact, no reputable data showing a linkage between homosexuality and child molestation.
Yet none of this made sense to my hurt adolescent mind. I was scared, confused, and just wanted to be loved. I became estranged from formal religion. I saw all religious clergy as hypocrites and didn’t trust any spiritual teachers, regardless of tradition.
When I was in my late twenties, after having been exposed to Buddhism and meditation while traveling in Asia, I returned to Northern California and started studying with Stephen Levine, a pioneer in the field of conscious dying. Stephen was the first spiritual teacher I ever confided in. It was my trust in him that allowed me to share my history of abuse. Stephen listened intently without judgment or comment. It took time for the full story to unfold. When there is shame, our telling the details of the story makes it more real. This starts to heal the sense of disconnection with our experience and supports integration of the wounds.
Stephen, who was very intuitive, knew my deep commitment to seeing the truth and my heart’s wish to heal no matter what was required. He said, “I think you should start working with people with AIDS.” The illness had just appeared on the scene and at that time was primarily infecting gay men. Stephen said, “You should serve this population. I’ll help you.”
I grabbed him by his shirt, threw him up against the wall, and yelled, “Are you crazy?” My inner hurt adolescent was exploding. In that moment, all I could experience were prohibitions against this idea and a great deal of pent-up anger. What a ridiculous notion, how absurd, I thought, that I should serve the very type of person who, in my confused mind, had caused me so much harm.
But even as the word No! left my mouth, I knew that Stephen was right. It was a moment of sudden awareness, a recognition of the meaning that was to be found in my suffering. I had to do it. Stephen was sending me straight into hell to face my demons. In a flash, it became clear that the victim, rescuer, and perpetrator all lived within me. I certainly knew the experience of being identified as a victim. And I had developed a distorted sense of the wholesome rescuer. But in that moment, the perpetrator was also present. I was now the one allowing my views to cut me off from others who had nothing to do with my wounds. It was evident to me that all three needed to be welcomed, known, and held in love. I had avoided this hurt for a dozen years, turning away from my past experiences, righteous in my aversion. Clean, transparent, compassionate service was the necessary antidote.
Not long after that, I signed on to be a home health aide serving gay men with AIDS. I worked the graveyard shift, caring for men during the lonely hours between midnight and dawn, when my deep, dark, shameful experiences often surfaced. Caring for others became a way of nurturing myself. It wasn’t a sudden fix. It was what Stephen would call a “gradual awakening.” It was a path of healing that I would walk for another twenty years.
Along the way, I found that, as with the cut on my hand as a child, I could summon the courage to look right at the damage, horrifying as it was. Becoming mindful of our wounds and the associated beliefs we have about them is not a passive process. This turning toward, with full acceptance, allows us to take action. We gain insight, and then we can do something about it. In time, once the hidden pain and shame had seen the light of day, the broken child was mended and the wounded healer began to emerge.
I know what it is like to have pain. To run away from it, to hide. And I know what it is like to have wounds that we feel can never be healed. While those painful experiences left scars, challenged my faith in God and my trust in fellow humans, something basic in me didn’t get destroyed. I was fortunate. Not everyone has the support of wise friends who can help remind us that we are more than our suffering.
The childlike belief in a personalized God and a church that would protect me no longer served me. I found a deeper faith in an essential love that manifests through our fellow human beings, through our own bodies, hearts, and minds—in our human ability to embrace what seems impossible to embrace.
The willingness to be with our suffering gives rise to an internal resourcefulness that we can carry forward into all areas of our lives. We learn that whatever we give space to can move. Our feelings of discomfort or anxiety, frustration or anger are free to open, unfold, and reveal their true causes. Often in allowing our pain to arise, we discover a point of stillness, even peacefulness—right in the middle of the suffering.
Turning toward our suffering is a critical part of welcoming everything and pushing away nothing. This invitation means that no part of ourselves or our experience can be left out: not the joy and wonder, nor the pain and anguish. All are woven throughout the very fabric of our lives. When we embrace that truth, we step more fully into life.