“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” – Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss.

Beyond every beautiful thing, said Bob Dylan, there is some pain. Pain is not the opposite of life; it is life in my mind.  Pain makes happiness possible.

Life depends not on living painless life but on seeing pain as the gift that it is.

Healing from my pain depends on taking responsibility for the pain in my life, to stop blaming it on others.

Pain has hurt me, and you too, I’m sure. Pain has also helped me more than any other human being or event.

For me, the spiritual life is turning out to be the best and most meaningful choice of a way to life. Pain inspired me to look at myself and see the truth. And in that truth was a way to happiness.

The other life, the one most of us lead, seemed barren, full of struggles, distractions, loneliness, rage, and yearnings that never brought fullness or happiness.

Like everyone reading this, I have experienced pain in my life – every person does or will –  much less than some people and more than others.

I often blamed this on life, the fates, the government, doctors, parents, politicians, insurance companies, lawyers, greed, and domination: everyone and everything but me.

The spiritual life taught me that pain was a gift, an essential learning tool in the evolution of life. Without pain, there would be no such thing as happiness or joy.

Pain introduced me to the most meaningful things in life, led me to love and acceptance, softened my anger, and gave my life meaning.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” wrote author James Baldwin, “but then you read. Books taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all of the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

Scientists say that most pain we feel is a construct of the mind, not the body. They say the same thing about fear – mostly, it is a geography, a space to cross.

I have come to see pain as a wise and humorless friend. Pain wakes me up and forces me to consider the strong; it inspires self-awareness, change, and courage.

The pain and happiness inside a human being wrote philosopher Blaise Pascal, “resides in one thing, to be unable to remain peacefully in a room by yourself.”

That statement has so much wisdom that it’s easy to skim right over it. Learning to be in a room by myself has made it possible to live the life I want to live.

Silence is the last art of this society. Chaos. turmoil and anger have replaced it. Silence was once a given in people’s lives; it is now almost impossible to find.

For me, silence and pain are inextricably linked.

I had to go up to a mountain and stay there for a year with two dogs before I could see how much pain could teach me and provoke and stimulate me to change, grow, and learn.

Up on the mountain, I learned that the pain was my alarm,  the body’s built-in warning system that something was wrong and needed to be fixed.  That I was broken and needed to be fixed.

The pain led to my divorce, moving to the country,  starting my blog,  accepting love, and taking pictures.

There are many kinds of pain – cancer, getting hit by a car breaking a limb, the loss of a loved one – that we can’t avoid. But the pain inside of me was something else.

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say, “My tooth is aching” than “My heart is broken,” wrote C.S. Lewis in The Problem Of Pain.

When I feel pain, I stopped blaming it on fate, a God,  my family, the government, or a politician and set out to understand the lesson of it. What did it teach me? What’s the lesson?

Pain teaches us courage.

For me, love is the one word that frees me of pain and the heavy weight of life. And it is the one thing many of our fellow humans cannot find.

Our way of life trivializes it, disturbs us, and makes real love hard to find. In the whirlwind, we forget what is truly important, which has no red or blue label. Happiness is neither woke or asleep.

Love is everything, in one way or form or another.

The problem of pain is where silence and meditation – the spirituality of life, if you will – come in. Only in silence did I understand my pain and learn what I could do about it.

Many of my readers struggle to understand that the very thing that makes them uncomfortable about me – my vulnerability, pain, and anger brought into the open and shared – are the same things that help me to understand pain and heal from it.

That process made it possible to change, not fester.

It is never good to judge strangers or tell them what they should feel, think, or say out loud. It never works. It is the right of all of us to ease our pain in the best way we can find.

For all of my flaws,  I blessedly do not have the impulse to tell others what to say or do. I mind my own business.  When that idea of intrusiveness gets into one’s head, they are done.

That is never the way for me to help anyone.

It’s only in truth that my pain began to ease and become a much smaller part of me. Pain let into the light washes anger away.

People have to process pain in their way and time.

He who learns must suffer is a quote I still remember, even if I can’t recall who said it. It’s a small price to pay.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. — Khalil Gibran.