The Original Moment
Good Monday Morning!
It has been three weeks since I’ve been here but it feels like a year. It has been a very full few weeks, full of all kinds of pain, truth be told. Sometimes time for me is quite elastic and strange, still, I think of this forum and the space it holds as a place I yearn to stay connected with, a place to share truth whatever that is, call in our collective knowing and aspiration and to give voice to things that might otherwise not find a space. Pain is, in my mind, one of those things, things we marginalize, diminish or embellish, minimize or dramatize, one of those things that might have a hard time finding its own voice.
Giving pain a voice might seem like a strange idea, even a repugnant one to some. But, I will suggest to you that pain without a voice is a source of illness, disease, discomfort and unhappiness. I suggest that pain with a voice can even make you happy, healthy, strong and confident. I am NOT suggesting, however, that we all complain ever more loudly. Complaint is the voice of shoving pain aside, not the voice of pain itself. The voice of pain itself is more often much harder to hear.
Pain, the language of the body, has no words. Pain is full of nuance something you could call sensation. It is simply an experience. Complaint, on the other hand, is often without nuance, tending to focus on fixed ideas. Fixed ideas lead to fixed pain or at least the experience of pain that seems like it won’t go away.
There is a wonderful discussion from one of the four great masters of Chinese medicine, Sun Si-Miao, that speaks directly to this idea:
Pain is not a static or fixed "thing," but is constantly amplified or dampened by the psycho-spiritual components of being… increas[ing] the body's awareness of the singularity of each moment of time so that pain can be experienced not as a frozen immovable entity, but rather as a constantly rising and falling sensation.
In these last weeks, as I have experienced physical pain, emotional pain, spiritual pain and the anguish, sorrow, anger and frustration that such pains can provoke, and I have contemplated what might be the best way to honor the voice of my own pain. I am Jewish, 98% Ashkenazi to be precise, the designation for the Jews who have come from Central and Eastern Europe, a people who have experienced discrimination and displacement many times over the course of their history.
In ways that are not hospitable to language this history lives on in me, my body has been made through generations. And this year my body has suffered physically in ways that I have never known before, showing me new layers of both pain and presence, offering me the opportunity to learn through sensation rather than reason, through intuition rather than information.
I have born witness to much physical pain, my own and others.
I have experienced a spiritual anguish for which there is no cure.
And I am determined to allow such pain a voice, a place, a hearing in the world.
In a wonderful class called Finding Your Voice with Scott Branson I wrote this poem, The Original Moment:
What remains in this most painful moment is will we allow ourselves choice? Will we choose presence over dominance? Will we prevent the violence from becoming evil in our own time or in our own hearts?
As always, I welcome your comments, your thoughts, your pain, and your questions right here or right in my inbox.