To move towards our pain and illness may seem like a strange thing to do. To open to the grief, the anger and the fear may appear to be unlikely thing one would want. Developing loving awareness to receive our challenges is an unusual path to tread. In fact, going deeper into our suffering, may not just seem unconventional, but actually unworkable.
But if we get in touch with our heart, it will draw us to the pain and the suffering. The heart opens us to the possibility that this suffering can be a teaching that leads us to a deeper level of wisdom, love and healing.
There have been many examples of people who have used loving awareness to embrace their physical and mental illness. Often that has led to significant changes in their outcomes. This has been found true for people with cancer, ALS, chronic pain, and many other illnesses. Whether these people experienced physical healing or not, their real healing came at the deepest level, at the level of the heart.
Their relationship to mental and physical illness shifted. This shift was signified by an opening to allowing whatever to arise and being OK with that. Their illness, pain and difficulties became a path rather than a problem.
If you pay attention, it’s not difficult to see how hard we are on ourselves. We are hardwired and conditioned to resist, to escape. Our immediate reaction to pain is often anger, fear and most certainly aversion. We don’t like it. We try to escape, to mask it, to somehow get rid of it. We hate ourselves for being sick, weak. Basically we close down.
We miss the opportunity in the pain to soften and open our hearts. More often we become hard and closed.
Once I was at a retreat with Adyashanti, a Zen master and author. A woman got up and emotionally asked Adya how to deal with her chronic pain. It was easy to see genuine suffering on her face.
Adya’s answer was “You are already know. What do you do if you walk into a room and you see a baby crying, what’s the first thing you do?”
She said, “I would pick it up.”
“Yes” he said, “You would pick it up and hold it. That’s what you need to do with your pain.” He was talking about holding pain in loving awareness like a mother holds a suffering child.
Imagine, just holding your illness, your suffering in loving awareness. What would it be like to be fully present to what you’re feeling, physically, emotionally and mentally. Imagine all these things resting in an embrace of compassion. Imagine meeting these difficulties with kindness and openness, accepting them as they arise in the moment. Imagine how this attitude of openness, of loving awareness might affect your day to day life, your whole life.
Instead of getting lost in shame, anger, frustration, or fear; imagine, holding these feelings in a gentler and kinder way. You don’t have to feel a failure for being ill. You don’t have to indulge your self-pity, or get lost in feeling like you deserve it. You could instead, see these things, be aware of these things and hold them in loving awareness.
Of course there will be resistance and judgement coming up. We have practiced this “not wanting” for too long to just give it up. But we can be kinder and gentler on our resistance too. We can hold that in loving awareness too.
When we identify with our self-hatred; getting entangled in the judgement and resistance, we tighten around our illness. We add an extra layer of pain. If we step back and look with awareness we can see that.
The fear, anger, judgement and resistance surrounds our pain and deepens it. It creates blockages to healing, it impedes healing.
But there is always the possibility to open to genuine healing. The path of using illness to awaken is to notice when we close, accept our difficulties and open our heart. Become aware and then embrace our pain in kindness. As soon as we do this, true healing can begin.
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