Can You Feel the Pain?
If you approached a dog and the dog snapped at you, tried to bite you, but your eyes then laid on the fact that the dog was caught in a trap, your initial reaction of anger would change immediately to one of compassion, for you would be able to see that the dog was acting from pain and vulnerability.
Why don’t we do the same for our children or for our fellow man? It is because something answers the moment for us. It’s just this instantaneous prompting to meet pain with pain. It has become so automatic, and that itself is a great clue. How can an automatic response ever be a new response? It can’t.
What if we were to understand that no matter the outward appearance, everyone is in pain. Everyone. Every negative word or action spoken or taken, is taken from pain. I believe we all know deep down within ourselves that we wouldn’t consciously choose to harm another, we just wouldn’t. It is pain that chooses to harm another. It is pain that chooses to fight as Guy Finley (a truth teacher) so eloquently puts it. It is pain that continually seeks a host to feed upon.
One would have to be blind not to see that the collective pain has reached such a pitch in this world. That pitch will only continue to rise until we all, as brothers and sisters here, understand that there is a shared pain by one and all. Without compassion, there can only be conflict. I’m not saying that violence should ever be condoned. What I’m saying is that perhaps we should get to know of another’s pain before we want to punish them for their words and actions.
To get to know another’s pain, we must know our own, stand in our own. What I mean by that is when someone says or does something negative that we don’t like, instead of allowing the pain to reload itself by responding in kind (from pain), stand there and just let things be as they are without a response. Work to feel the pain that is moving through us and trying to push us to reload itself back onto the other person.
In doing that, in suffering ourselves that way, we come to understand that the pain that arose in us is the same pain that the other spoke or took action from. One pain.
When a person lashes out, whether verbally or physically, they don’t know that they are acting from pain. They aren’t aware that there is a way through that pain by the suffering of it. How can anyone be blamed for something they aren’t even aware of? What if the very unawareness of that fact is its own punishment?
Compassion is born when we suffer our pain, and only in living from a compassionate nature will we ever take consideration of others and not just ourselves.
Everyone wants a better world, yet most of us are unwilling to pay the price for it. The price we must pay is suffering our part in the collective pain, for only through that can we bring into this world the change it so desperately needs.
Image Courtesy of: Pixabay free photos
Exercise for the week: When an unkind or harsh comment is made to you, work the best you are able to and stand in the pain of that, accept it fully into your being, instead of doing the same old thing by returning it in kind.
