Caring for Our Pain

It is easy to see that a homeless person has been wounded by life but it’s much harder to see when we come across a man driving a top-of-the-line Porsche or the woman who is slender, with what is perceived as perfect hair and makeup.

The truth is ……..we are all wounded.

When we showed up as our infant selves, wide-eyed and bushy tailed, most of us were at times roughly handled as we grew up. Our parents may have loved us, but they wounded us in ways that they didn’t even know. But it isn’t only our parents who are the delivery system of our wounds. It is our siblings, our school, our church – all places where our hearts were hurt.

We all recognize the big wounds like the death of a parent, mental, physical, sexual and verbal abuse, a major illness, or the heartache of drug addiction. But we miss the everyday wounds that accumulate over time, putting an armor around our hearts.

Some of the so called ordinary wounds you could have incurred were a sibling taking your toys and taunting you with them, the death of your beloved dog, being judged by a parent, the ending of your first relationship in high school, not making the sports team, being unable to zip up your jeans, your best friend deciding they liked somebody else better than you, flubbing your lines in the school play, being compared to another sibling and coming up short, the final loss of your innocence as you were taught in your church that you were a sinner.

These may not have been the wounds you experienced, for they are just a tiny fraction of the wounds we all incurred. The more wounds you experienced, the more challenging life became. Now, even little challenges can make life difficult like an un-returned telephone, the cancellation of an important appointment, your favorite food causes indigestion, limited sleep, a stoplight that is way too long.

Life opens and closes, and it always will. It gets easy and then it gets difficult. It is joyous and then it is sorrowful. And sometimes, it really, really hurts to be alive. Because we try to get rid of the difficult and hold on to the wonderful, we all accumulate a deep reservoir of pain inside of us, the place where hidden despairs and painful longings reside.

What do most of us do with this reservoir inside of us? We try to run away from it through busyness, and, when that doesn’t work to keep the pain at bay, we self-medicate with food, alcohol, drugs, screen time, shopping, etc.

And yet what our pain needs is the opposite. Just like when you are hurting and it is healing when somebody is kind and understanding with you, the same is true for your pain. To learn how to bring acceptance, warmth and care into your mind when it is on fire or your emotions when they are turbulent, or your body when it is in distress is life-changing. If somebody said they would give me a billion dollars but in return they would take away my capacity to meet my pain in my heart, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to tell them to keep their money.

Because it is such a radically new message to meet your pain with empathy, it can help to first practice this with others. I invite you the next time you are with people, whether it’s driving down the freeway, waiting at the bus stop, shopping in the store, riding the elevator at , to know, no matter what they look like, all the people around you carry their own reservoir of deep pain. This will help you keep your heart open to them.  It will also help you to remember you are not alone in your pain! There is one heart that beats in all of us and there is a common reservoir of pain that we all carry.

To realize that you are not alone in your pain is one of the deepest healing a human being can know.  It allows you to not be so overwhelmed by your pain for it is not just yours, it is ours. So, the next time you are afraid, or angry, or feeling alone, or are experiencing intense physical pain, or feeling like an outsider, or not sure you want to continue living, know there are at least a million people on this planet that are experiencing the same thing at the same time you are. And if that doesn’t open your heart, know that there are hundreds of thousands of homeless children all over the world that are experiencing the same thing.

Can this truth soften your resistance to your pain? And if you can’t yet meet your pain in your heart, can you meet it for the children? For every time pain is met with kindness, whether it’s inside of us or outside of us, it lessens the reservoir of pain for all of us.