Your pain is the breaking of the shell
that encloses your understanding.
- Kahlil Gibran
loser37: i feel life is not worth it anymore the stuggling and the pain
You'll have to forgive me -- I don't know much about cutting. It wasn't something I ever felt a need to do so I may be wrong if I sometimes imagine that cutting is a way of bringing the inside wounds to the outside where they can actually be seen and validated.
Meantime, I remember commenting to a friend one day, "
I've found a way to end all pain in my life!"
"
What's the trick?" he asked.
"
Call it something else," I said.
Unfortunately, it wasn't quite that easy even if that answer at that time in my life, made us both laugh just a bit. The truth is a bit harder to swallow because no one gets to avoid pain, but we can change the way we approach it and how we deal with it. Two things I learned that did help me to better cope with the reality of pain were:
- Treat pain like a respected teacher.
- Do Tonglen practice.
Quote:
During this session I'm going to teach tonglen practice. And I'd like to talk first about different styles of tonglen.
The very simplest style... which I think would be helpful for every single one of us, and something well worth cultivating in one's life, is taking a tonglen attitude towards pleasure and pain whenever it arises in your life.
I've gotten into the habit of doing this, and I don't always remember to do it. But more and more, it becomes spontaneous and natural. When things are painful -- in any form -- when things are difficult, usually that in itself will remind me, just the quality of difficulty, the quality of struggle, or pain, or dissatisfaction, or unpleasantness. That itself will remind me to just have the simple thought: "Other people feel this."
Now that sounds so simplistic, maybe not all that important. But, believe me, it makes a big difference because what happens with pain is the sense of isolation get so strong, and the sense of our particular personal burden, and the loneliness of that, and the desperation of that. So this simple thought, which sometimes is quite challenging to people -- you say it but you don't quite believe it -- you think ... you're the only one. And I've had people, many times, say to me, "This pain that I feel, I think no one else in the world feels this." And then I can say to them with tremendous confidence: "Wrong."
But what is not wrong is that we do have that feeling often, that I am the only one that has this particular pain. So maybe it will be quite a challenge to you to say this and it might not seem genuine. But even that is beginning to shake up your complacency about pain being just your individual burden. It somehow shakes it up just to even contemplate that other people feel this...
Read the full article here: The Spirit of Tonglen
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Doing tonglen practice took me out of my sense of aloneness which had a great deal to do with my ability to cope with whatever pain I was attempting to deal with. This article may have some ideas for you as well: Turning Toward Pain
I hope this period of painfulness passes soon for you.
~ Namaste
.