Pain Without Suffering
I recently started a new relationship. This time I thought I would try something new. No walls, no running away. Total engagement. Be totally open and accept whatever comes my way. This, I decided, was the path to intimacy.
In the past I frequently tried to avoid conflict. If I fought with a significant other, I would rarely stay engaged. While I relish discussion and debate, when it moved toward conflict, I walked away. And when you walk away and don’t deal with the real issues, you end up with wounds. They fester, and eventually undermine the relationships until you deal with them. It is not enough to put up an emotional wall to try to protect yourself from the pain. You need to engage it and work through it.
So this time I decided I would stay engaged no matter what came my way. And from the beginning of this relationship there was pain and some disagreement. And the deeper we go, the more pain and disagreement there is. And as we work through those issues, we are creating an intimacy I didn’t know existed. A deep understanding of what makes the other human and a reflection of the Divine.
All too often we associate pain with suffering. But it need not be that way. We can be in pain, yet not suffer. For there is no life without pain, but there can be life without suffering. We can learn to accept the pain, to feel the pain, to be open to the pain, and in so doing keep the pain from controlling us. When we let our pain become suffering, we cede control of our emotions and let them take us where they might.
Emotions are powerful aspects of our personality. They can serve us or destroy us. One of the challenges in life is to harness our emotions and to have them serve us and help us become what we were meant to be, all that we are meant to be.
For those of you who don’t think you can control emotions, imagine having a blowout fight with your significant other and then there is a knock at the door. You notice it is your boss who is just stopping by to drop something off and have a very short chat with you. Do you control your anger, hurt, pain, frustration for the few minutes you visit with your boss? Of course you do. So now that we know we can, the challenge is to do it.
My brother and sister recently visited Mom’s grave for the first time since the funeral. I will be doing so tomorrow. It is Jewish tradition to visit the graves of loved ones during the days of awe, the time between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. On Rosh Hashanna we are inscribed in the book of life for the coming year, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. Tradition teaches us that we can affect the outcome by our deeds, and with such high stakes, we don’t want to leave out using all our connections either. What if our loved ones who have passed can influence that decree, our lives? Sounds like its worth a visit to me.
So my sister had a very difficult time visiting the grave and dealing with her grief, which she has been struggling with again after a few months of acceptance. And while she was openly grieving and in pain, my sister-in-law noted, in my words, that perhaps she needed a little tzim tzum. Tzim Tzum is the Kabbalistic notion that God needed to shrink Godself in order to make room for creation. Sometimes you need to make room for others, and with my sister grieving so openly and expressing her raw emotions, there was no room for my brother to express or even feel his.
So how do we feel the pain and yet not suffer. I’ve found that Kaddish goes a long way. Standing before the community each morning or each day forces me to confront the pain of the loss of my mother. It is now six months since she passed, and everyday but one, I have stood before a minyan, representatives of the entire community, and praised God even though he took from me one of the things most dear to me. And as I stand before the community, and I feel the loss, and the community acknowledges and also feels the loss of one of us, we all feel the pain. In doing so each day, in acknowledging our pain, and living with our pain, we prevent suffering.
