Why Pain Doesn't Have to Feel So Painful
Last weekend I got to visit the 9/11 Museum in New York. And about 15 steps into the building, huge wet tears started rolling down my cheeks.
I was hit with this visceral sadness of "Oh my God, this is humanity."
And as I wandered through the halls, tears would periodically well up and roll down.
It struck me that years ago I wouldn't have had nearly as emotional a response. I was in the habit — as so many of us are trained to be — of stuffing down. Glossing over. Numbing out.
But as we walk this mindful path, we start to open to life. We become more willing to experience everything.
On the one hand, this makes things feel more complicated — now you have to actually feel!
But on the other, it simplifies things immensely. Now you're feeling experiences directly, rather than through the filter of mental narrative or memory or worry or guilt or shame or fear.
My museum tears felt sweet and spacious at the same time they felt incredibly sad. It felt so tender to feel not just for the victims of this one attack, but for how we humans attack one another all the time, just in some forms more dramatic than others.
And to feel how we all suffer in our own ways, and that if we didn't, the attacking would naturally die out.
This is how the unfurling process tends to go. The more we open to it all, the less painful the painful things start to feel.
If we want to experience the greatest joys, we have to be willing to experience the rawest grief.
Whichever end of the spectrum, the process is really about a tenderizing of the heart.
It's about opening to life as it is.
One great way to practice opening to life is to let your tears flow when you feel them coming. Let yourself practice feeling what you feel without bypass or excuse or apology.
The heart has a mind-blowing capacity to open. All we really have to do is practice letting it.
To you and your unfurling heart,