What Are You Still Fighting?

There's an old line I come back to more than almost any other in this work: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.  I used to think that was a little unfair to people in real pain — until I understood what it's actually pointing at.  It's not the pain that wrecks us.  It's the fight we put up against it.

We are, culturally, a people at war with our own pain.  We fight it.  Overcome it.  Push through it.  Stand up to it.  Shove it down and call the shoving strength.  And Carl Jung named the cost of that plainly: what you resist, persists.  Not disappears.  Persists — often louder, often somewhere new in the body, often for far longer than the original thing that caused it.

I think about the storms that roll through here in Colorado.  You cannot out-muscle a mountain storm.  You cannot fight the sky into stillness through sheer will.  The only thing that actually works is what Eckhart Tolle described: do not resist your pain — witness it, allow it to be there, and see how the circle of surrender transmutes deep suffering into deep peace.  Not because surrender is passive.  Because surrender is the only posture that actually lets the storm move through and finish, instead of circling back around you forever.

Pain, physical or otherwise, is your body's alert system — a way of saying this needs you, right now.  That's it.  That's the whole message, underneath all our resistance to hearing it.  Brene Brown calls pain a powerful teacher, one that reveals real lessons about who we are, if we're willing to actually listen instead of white-knuckling past it.

So here's the question for this week, the same one I ask myself when I notice I'm bracing against something instead of breathing into it: what am I still fighting, that might actually just be asking to be felt?

You don't need an answer today.  You just need to stop, for a moment, and let the question land somewhere real in your body instead of only your head.

If you want a place to actually practice that — not think about it, practice it — we're doing exactly this on Palmer Trail this Saturday, August 22, at 7:00 AM.  It's the last call before we go: $15 for non-members, free for the Circle, and there's still room on the trail.

Reserve your spot

With you, Angelique