PAIN: A RELENTLESS TEACHER OF PRESENCE
Pain is either your enemy, or it is your greatest teacher.
The mind calls pain ‘wrong’. It calls it an enemy, dangerous, a terrorist in the body, a threat. An aberration. A block to life. A sign that you are weak, stupid, ignorant, far from enlightenment.
The mind says ‘there’s something wrong with me’. ‘I screwed up’. Even ‘I created this pain’, if it really wants to mock you.
The mind shames and blames and guilt-trips you, God, and everything and everyone in-between.
Let the mind be the mind, but don’t let the mind be your master, or your authority, or the Truth.
Come out of the mind... and come into the newness of the present moment. Drop beneath the complex storyline called ‘Me and My Pain’.
Bring loving attention to the pain itself, the raw present-moment sensations in the body, which is all you are ever really facing! Stop thinking about the sensations, and attend to them instead. Breathe into them, send a loving awareness deep into them.
You are only given a moment of pain. You are only given a moment of life. You are only given a moment, to love or run from love.
Pain is not your enemy, when you stop resisting it, stop running from it, and come out of your mind-made victim narrative, and let kindly attention drench this new moment, saturate this present scene, flood into the cracks.
An old moment dies. A birth. You have not been defeated.
Your victory lies here, in Presence.
- Jeff Foster
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