Our lives should be filled with joy, right? It’s our spiritual heritage, right? So why then is there so much pain and suffering in the world? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Are we just supposed to suffer, or can we heal our own pain and that of others? If so, how? Is there a purpose to pain? Why does it feel so deep?
Certainly, we do not have all the answers, but perhaps one of the suggestions following will give you answers without negating the pain and suffering of grief and loss, of lack or illness, or the heartbreak of every evening’s news headlines.
Never do we want to stuff pain, thinking it will go away if we refuse to acknowledge it. When we refuse to deal with our pain in a healthy way, it only hurts us more. When we close our hearts to allow the pain to pass through, we also close our hearts to love and joy.
Neither do we want to negate our pain or that of others. Pain is part of the human experience that none of us are immune to. What we do need though are ways to deal with our pain when it seems to overwhelm us. These following seven suggestions are to help you work through pain, grief, anxiety, anger, depression, fear – any suffering that takes you away from love and the joy of life.
Breathe: Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us to use the breath to relax by thinking “relax” when we breathe in and “let go” when we breathe out. We can modify this by thinking, “I breathe in “love,” I breathe out depression/anger/grief/anxiety/fear and so on. Soon our consciousness mind relaxes, and we hear ourselves saying, “I breathe in love, and I breathe out love.” Then we just relax and thinking ceases.
Guided Meditations: Keep a favorite guided meditation near, so when you feel overwhelmed, you can relax into its calmness. There are several on the market or YouTube, including mine. Below are the links to a couple of my meditations on YouTube.
Journaling: Begin with writing down why you are in pain. Go ahead and blame everyone you want, including yourself, and then move past the blame and start mining the gifts, which are often hidden in the lessons we must learn in life. Write about why you are in this situation and what it brings to your life. Write about what pattern, if any, is at play here and what you need to do to change the pattern. Write until you have reached a place of calm understanding. Write about your hurt until you go beyond the pain and reach a place of gratitude for that which caused you pain.
Call a friend: Especially when we are experiencing grief, we must have a support group to which we can turn during those awful times of our deepest grieving. We don’t need a friend to fix it. Grief cannot be fixed. We do need a friend to just be there, because the human heart, when broken, must be tenderly held in love until we can mend it back together.
Prayer: The words spoken silently or aloud are never as important as the emotion of the prayer. We may simply say, “help.” That is enough. Once you say a prayer, become the high witness and watch yourself as you go through the experience. Keep in mind that you are the one having the experience; you are not the experience. If you are the one having the experience (and not the experience itself), you can at any time choose a different experience.
A prayer of forgiveness is essential in easing your pain, and please start with yourself, then move out to any others who may have caused you pain.
Sob: Sometimes we need to just let the tears flow without reservation until we are spent. Rest and sleep are helpful at this point.
Primal scream: This scream is one long from the toes up to the top of the head and beyond scream that shakes and shatters every cell of our body. It begins from the deepest pain in our heart and moves in and through our entire being until we are spent. This releases the pain from our bodies, which begins the healing process. Laughter or tears of release often follow this scream.
This scream should not be done by people with high blood pressure or other medical conditions. You should never, ever scream until you feel dizzy or faint. That is not the purpose of the primal scream. Do not practice primal screams in the near proximately of people unless you first let them know what you are doing. This scream is so powerful that you will scare others into thinking you are in danger.
Your pain may not leave immediately, or it may leave temporarily and return. The greater the pain, the more you need to be patient with yourself and with your healing. Be kind to yourself during your healing process and remember to breathe until the pain eases.