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| The Kripalu Center |
One
of our instructors this week mentioned the basic Buddhist teaching that pain is
inevitable but suffering is optional, and it suddenly summarized, for me, so
many of the things I’ve been thinking about over the last twenty years or so. It
said, so succinctly, that there will always be problems in my life, but the
problems can be useful instead of destructive, friends instead of enemies.
Whatever pain I might feel in the future, whether physical or emotional, will
surely be pain, but it doesn’t have to be misery. It’s possible to face pain
the way sailors face a fierce wind at sea – by accepting its inescapability,
and then welcoming its potential as a teacher, maybe even as a friend who can
find me new ways to be fully alive. Pain can prepare me to push up to the next
level of living, where pain itself becomes a little less frightening and a
little more enlightening. If I accept it and ask it to show me the way, pain
can make me wiser rather than sadder, a learner instead of a sufferer.
Written at The Kripalu
Center for Yoga and Health,
with Delycia for R+R
July 5, 2013
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